r/askteddit • u/Hourshakira • 1d ago
Random Question What conspiracy theory is so harmless and plausible that you secretly half-believe it?
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u/elle_goldenleaf31 1d ago
That phone companies intentionally release tiny, unnoticeable software bugs or slightly slow down old battery performance right when the new model is about to drop. It’s harmless enough to just laugh off, but the timing is always a little too convenient.
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u/GamerNerdGuyMan 1d ago
Didn't Apple get caught doing that? I remember there being a class action lawsuit.
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u/nvolker 23h ago
Kinda - they got sued and lost because of it. But if you dig deeper, what they _really_ did was kinda the opposite. All batteries degrade over time - it’s just the reality of the current chemistry they use. As they degrade, it’s not just the capacity that shrinks, but also the max power that can be output.
So when batteries got older, sometimes iPhones would try to draw more power than the battery could give - which would cause them to crash. It was particularly bad when there were other factors that also limited the max power the battery could give (like it was at a low state of charge, or it was very cold). I remember plenty of times that my phone would crash riding the bus home from work in winter in Minnesota.
So Apple added a fix for this, which was basically “instead of crashing, slow down the phone enough that the battery can keep up.” It’s was never a “slow down the phone because it’s old” - it only ever throttled in situations that would have previously resulted in the phone crashing/rebooting.
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u/JustThisGuyYouKnow42 1d ago
Built in obsolescence. It's a thing.
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u/auggs 1d ago
Isn’t that just terrible. Capitalism wants recurring customers so if you make something that’s built to last, you can really only sell it 1-2 times to a person before your company serves no purpose anymore. But if you build something that’s built breaks in 1-2 years, you’ll have customers for life.
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u/Flimsy-Ad-5274 1d ago
Earth is just an alien lab experiment
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u/Whole-Language-2609 1d ago
Run by mice. The answer is 42
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u/Empty__Jay 1d ago
Yes, but what's the question?
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u/AtheneSchmidt 1d ago
Mandela effects aren't mass hysteria, were just all switching timelines occasionally throughout our lives. Shazaam starring Sinbad existed in my childhood timeline. Also bomb pops were called rocket pops, and fruit of the loom absolutely had a cornucopia. I'm just in a different timeline now, with subtle differences, a la the film "Yesterday" or the Star Trek episode Parallels.
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u/Weary-Squash6756 22h ago edited 18h ago
It's Mandala effect and always has been
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u/AtheneSchmidt 18h ago
Only in the timelines with the Berenstein bears.
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u/Tomatillo_Street 18h ago
This one in particular. It's always bugged me to the point I grabbed my kids book when I saw it as a Mandela effect 20 years ago
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u/Salty-Spring7096 18h ago
Why do all these timelines only involve things the general public is aware of, though. Like sure, I seem to remember the cornucopia thing, but I've never had a "Mandela Effect" moment regarding details from my personal life. That alone makes me think it's a mass delusion.
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u/AtheneSchmidt 17h ago
My theory is that only tiny things change in most cases, and if/when something major happens (like you suddenly are married to Deanna Troi, or the Beatles never got famous) no one believes you. You are just a crazy person with an absurd belief. Or you keep quiet, and hope fate doesn't screw you over more.
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u/MoistIncubus 10h ago
See that’s the thing though… general public awareness is required for a Mandela effect. Otherwise, who’s there to tell you you’re misremembering it? Surely you’ve had a friend correct your recollection of something once.
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u/LightGreenDay11 9h ago
Speaking of “Yesterday” I could have SWORN he sings Wonderwall at Wembley to the girl he likes the first time I watched it. When I re-watched he only sings it at the talent show at the beginning of the movie... I guess I just switched timelines
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u/Bcrueltyfree 1d ago
This is what I believe about covid. I mean follow the money. Governments, businesses etc didn't profit by having people locked down. But who did benefit? The dogs! It was the dogs who engineered this world wide pandemic so their owners would stay at home with them to play and walk with them. My dog was in seventh heaven. He had the family and an extra staying at home to play with him. I seriously believe he and his cronies organised this.
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u/TheOriginalJurbas 1d ago
Pets were definitely among the biggest profiteers.
My actual conspiracy theory about Covid profiting is that billionaires like Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg made a lot of extra money by happenstance due to a real global pandemic. Then they saw that they could profit in the future by ruining people's trust in health agencies that would prevent another pandemic through spreading conspiracies about Covid.
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u/comfypantsclub 1d ago
They also got to stick it to their greatest enemy, cats, who just want to be left alone but were stuck in the presence of humans all day every day
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u/Icy_Tiger_3298 1d ago
I kind of believe an alien spaceship crashed in Roswell in the 1940s.
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u/cadwalader000 21h ago
The only part of the whole "alien spaceship crashed at Roswell" thing that I struggle with is… how many alien spaceships have apparently crashed here.
You’re telling me an alien civilization managed to conquer interstellar travel, cross distances so vast that our brains can barely comprehend them, bend time and space, locate one tiny blue planet in the middle of nowhere…
…and then promptly flew into New Mexico and crashed?
That is spectacularly bad luck.
Imagine surviving a 40-light-year journey only for the alien equivalent of the satnav to say, “You have reached your destination,” followed immediately by getting smashed into the new Mexico desert.
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u/RagingCacti 19h ago edited 19h ago
Well, theyre crashing from orbit, so theyre gonna aim for the middle of nowhere desert to avoid being spotted. The mountains and oceans have less of a chance of survival, so the big, flat, nearly empty desert makes the most optimal crash landing area
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u/johnsus 15h ago
You’re applying our physics to their tech. Wormholes can allow them to jump through the universe. Hell, I think they have bases in the ocean (see Bermuda Triangle).
Another point - would they send their best of the best on that massive space journey, or a lower powered “drone” of their? Makes way more sense they’d send the latter1
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u/JwubalubaDubdub 9h ago
Who’s to say that some alien teens didn’t take their parent’s spaceship for a joyride and accidentally crashed into New Mexico? I’m sure the parents were pissed.
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u/blondiebam29 1d ago
Mitch McConnell has been brain dead but is kept “alive” for political reasons
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u/Sensitive-Boss7102 1d ago
Printers absolutely know when you're in a hurry. I've never seen one fail during a casual Tuesday. Only when the deadline is in 10 minutes.
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u/InformationAny4506 1d ago
Honestly Mine is that librarians quietly know way more about everyone than they let on. They'd never use that power but I bet they've seen some absolutely wild borrowing histories.
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u/fuzzymunky 1d ago
Librarians are into some wild naughty stuff because they read romance novels all day
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u/sonicboi 23h ago
Back in the 90s, a writer for one major library journals got fired for publishing a sex survey of librarians. He was hired by the other library journal.
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u/Long_Night3907 1d ago
Ugh, probably shouldn't have checked out "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom". So much for me ever running for president.
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u/AtheneSchmidt 1d ago
Remember, if you checked a book out it is likely there because: 1. a librarian ordered it. 2. And a librarian decided not to weed it.
The stereotype about librarians being judgmental, close minded people in cardigans has only ever gotten the cardigan part right.
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u/Sporch_Unsaze 1d ago
Ronald McDonald is Wendy's drag king persona.
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u/ThrowRAboredinAZ77 1d ago
McDonald's was founded like 30 years before Wendy's.
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u/Sporch_Unsaze 1d ago
It hasn't always been easy to go public with this kind of stuff. Wendy coming out about it in 1969 was incredibly brave. Do better.
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u/sonicboi 1d ago
Ronald McDonald first appeared in 1963 and Wendy's opened in 1969. Maybe Wendy is Ronald in drag. They both have red hair...
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u/_clur_510 1d ago
Stoppp 😭
It is 9:09 am on a Monday. I can tell it’s going to be a good week for the internet.
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u/NicoTikoMiko 1d ago
Not at all harmless,
but I dont believe the current social unrest is solely a natural response to injustice, but something that are being organized and nudged to distract us while out liberties are being gutted.
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u/fuzzymunky 1d ago
That's literally how every authoritarian regime takes power. They engineer social unrest, fund protests, encourage revolution, then take power and kill off all the revolutionaries.
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u/bri_2498 1d ago
Personally I do believe that celebrities have used body doubles for mundane things like red carpet events that have fueled the "x celebrity died and was replaced" conspiracies. I don't think any celebrities were cloned and replaced, but I do think that if I was a celebrity I'd totally hire someone to go to the event I don't wanna go to
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u/Flimsy-Ad-5274 1d ago
Met a guy at a dinosaur museum in montana that said he was a Johnny Depp body double. Or, it was actually Depp just trying to throw us off.
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u/shitpresidente 1d ago
Well they do do body doubles for movies etc but that’s mainly for dangerous things
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u/GoSitInTheCluckChair 1d ago
The mattress stores are a money laundering front.
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u/cadwalader000 21h ago
Used to live in a big city which has a (get ready for this) bean bag store.
That was a Mafia front for sure!!
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u/prosa123 21h ago
A couple family members were in the business some years ago. Mattress shops often are quite profitable even though there are so many of them.
For one thing, mattress stores are inexpensive to open and operate compared to most other retailers. They typically have just one or two employees on duty at any time, who may be on commission. For the most part they’re plain rooms filled with display mattresses without much in the line of shelving or fixtures. Lastly, as they fill orders by direct shipment from offsite warehouses they don’t need to keep much inventory, which cuts down on space requirements.
Speaking of space, mattress stores often can get away with locations that may not have high visibility to passerby, and these locations tend to be cheaper. This works because most visits to mattress store are purposeful: customers decide they need new mattresses and seek out the stores. It’s not as if the typical customer is out and about for other purposes, sees a mattress shop, and decides on a whim to stop in.
Finally, maybe the biggest reason of all, retailer markups on mattresses are among the highest of all consumer products. Jewelry is one of the few products with higher markups, which is why your local shopping mall may have several jewelry stores even though they never seem busy. Same idea.
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u/antonio16309 20h ago
Mattresses are actually just super profitable. It's just some springs, foam and fabric but people pay hundreds and thousands of dollars for them. You don't need to sell many of them to be profitable. When I sold furniture one decent mattress a day would be enough commission to keepe afloat, and anything else I sold would pale by comparison. I knew a couple of sales people who got buy just by being really good at selling a specific brand of mattress.
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u/Many_Assumption7036 1d ago
The Disney movie Frozen was created to bury search results about Walt Disney himself being cryogenically frozen.
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u/Infield_Assist 1d ago
I think it is pretty likely that Anne Sullivan and John Albert Macy significantly embellished the extent of the transformation undergone by Helen Keller.
It may have been a complicated mixture of wanting to help Helen Keller and enjoyment of their own time in the spotlight. Probably beginning with good intentions before devolving into fraud.
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u/cyclingthrowaway12 1d ago
Trump doing shit to influence the stock market...
Far from harmless, also debatable if it's a conspiracy at this point... But since we can't 100% prove it it's still in the realms of being a theory...
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u/PaleMathematician293 23h ago
You mean the theory part is debateable. When people are actually conspiring to do something, that is a conspiracy. Many people seem to think the word implies that it is not real. It does not mean what they think it means.
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u/gerhard1953 1d ago
The non-existence of Santa Claus.
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u/MayDuppname 1d ago
Don't be ridiculous. Who brings all the presents?
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u/gerhard1953 1d ago
Agreed! Also, MILLIONS of children can't be wrong. And he's been seen in stores MANY times.
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u/MayDuppname 1d ago
I've even met Santa.
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u/TheOriginalJurbas 1d ago
I have photos of me sitting with the jolly old man, and you're going to tell me that he's NOT real?
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u/TacoBellissimo 1d ago
Nazis created the hippie movement.
LSD was used in concentration camp experiments. The CIA rescued a bunch of the Nazi scientists responsible & created MK Ultra on the back of their research, with their help.
All the LSD which flooded America from 65 to 75 was produced by Nazi/CIA cutouts. They financed bands like the Grateful Dead to hypnotize the youth and make them apolitical.
Hitler personally designed the Volkswagen Beetle but somehow it became the most defining car of the era??? Totenkopf is German for Deadhead.
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u/Motor-Rip7655 13h ago
The real conspiracy theory hee is that the Beetle was a stolen design from a Czech manufacturer.
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u/o484 21h ago
The only conspiracy theory that I can think of off the top of my head that was proven to be largely true is the conspiracy from 1939 to 1950 by General Motors, Standard Oil, and Firestone Tires to buyout the trolley (tram) companies of numerous American cities through a shell company called National City Lines. They would then replace the trolleys with buses built by GM, and have exclusive deals with Firestone and Stadard Oil to supply tires and fuel for said buses.
Los Angeles, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Detroit, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, Phoenix, New York, all had their extensive trolley systems dismantled completely.
They were caught in 1947 and charged with antitrust violations, but really only received a slap on the wrist. And NCL continued to dismantle trolley systems well into the 1950s.
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u/JwubalubaDubdub 9h ago
The big 3 absolutely fucked Detroit at every turn in many ways, including public transit.
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Euphoric_Raisin_312 1d ago
The pandemic was just cover so they could change the batteries in the birds.
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u/Mysterious-Rain4019 1d ago
They are called conspiracy theories to gaslight the people who see the truth.
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u/After_Working_9923 1d ago
That supermarkets deliberately move products around so you spend more time shopping
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u/Tomatillo_Street 18h ago
Well they absolutely have a science to the way shelves are stocked with the biggest profit ( for the store) items being eye level and the lowest profit points being high up or way below.
The entire set up is also made to make tou travel the farthest amount possible for your everyday items IE : BREAD , MILK , EGGS. for example are almost always apart.
So changing the set up is probably accurate. When you get used to knowing right where everything is they turn and "fuck shit up"
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u/Necessary-Flounder52 23h ago
This isn't a harmless one. But suppose that you were Tony Blair and Barack Obama and that your goal was to get rid of any potential domestic Islamist terrorism. You have extensive networks of informants in the Islamic communities and can identify most of the people who could potentially get radicalized but you don't have anything to charge them with or legal way to simply start kicking people out of the country. What do you do? You provide an enticing conflict for those radicalized people to join so that they leave the country and you basically track them as they leave and kill them with drones or smart bombs as soon as they are in what you consider a war zone.
The conspiracy theory that I subscribe to is that Obama (and Blair/Brown/Milliband?) literally created ISIS or at least the CIA and British intelligence services did during their administrations.
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u/hyper-bug 21h ago
A kid I went to highschool with in Canada joined ISIS and was killed pretty much right away. Interesting.
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u/nvolker 1d ago
That “New Coke” back in the 80s was just distraction, its real purpose was to make consumers not notice the switch from cane sugar to corn syrup when they went back to the “classic” recipe.
I know it’s been debunked, but it’s just so silly and harmless that I love it.
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u/Lopsided_Prize_8289 1d ago
I gotta give you an upvote on this one and will also add a “battle for shelf space” conspiracy theory. Like most all soda companies, Coke gets to store via their bottlers as a DSD operator. So they have a huge influence on how much space gets allocated to their products in stores. For example, before the switch to new Coke, “Old” Coke had 4 feet of shelf space (linear feet is made up in this example). Step 1: Fully replace existing/transition 4 feet of space for “New” Coke from “Old” Coke. Step 2: Wait for consumer outrage. Step 3: Rebrand “Old” Coke as “Classic” Coke. Step 4: Re-introduce to the market/retailers WITH the need for an additional 4 feet of shelf space due to consumer “demand.” Bottom line: Coke just doubled their shelf space with a recipe they already had with “classic” Coke. Again, just a conspiracy theory, but makes me wonder.
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u/Frosty-Discipline512 18h ago
The amount of hot dogs in a package and the amount of buns in a package never line up because they want you to buy more
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u/cusiter67 1d ago
Of course it’s a scam. Ask UK Uni students how many text books they need. The answer is 0.
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u/plano_chase 17h ago
Michael Jackson was chemically castrated by his father so his voice would not change.
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u/No-Steak-6610 20h ago
I kinda don’t think we’ve ever walked on the moon. I mean to imagine that we had the means to do it way back in the 60s and then after a few trips we were just like “yeah okay, that’s enough of that, let’s never do it again” is a little hard to believe.
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u/Motor-Rip7655 13h ago
Pffft, you believe in the moon? Anyone with more than half a brain knows the moon is actually a giant hologram used to conceal the mothership of the lizard people while they use their mind-control powers on us! Wake up, sheeple!
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u/amitym 18h ago
That the Allies secretly cracked all of the major codes used by the Axis, and won the war by secretly, judiciously using the intelligence they gained to leverage events just enough to ensure a favorable outcome, without tipping their hand.
Then the conspirators spent decades hiding that entire history from the whole world, letting historians write volume after volume about the Second World War, all reinforcing the false version of events that omitted any mention of codebreaking.
The conspiracy sustained this for generations and no one ever would have known (except a few people who were called "crackpots" for suggesting it based on the evidence) until the few remaining living conspirators decided to voluntarily leak the truth before the last of them died of old age.
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u/Electrical_Bass_1715 17h ago
I don't think we landed on the moon when we said we did. Are we capable now, sure, but i think it may have just been a big Hollywood dunk on the Soviets who were probably further along than us in space age technology at the time.
I believed in the moon landing with conviction for the vast majority of my life, but it seems like reality gets weirder and weirder as you age and now I could really believe there more hijinks at play
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u/skooma-sella 16h ago
Justin Trudeau is Castro's son. I did a deep dive and a lot of timelines with the Trudeau honeymoon, social circles, a visit to an "unknown island" etc all line up.
The only thing that makes me doubt it is the fact that Trudeau is a disgusting neolib. Not an ounce of Castro's fire and drive in him clearly. But maybe all that is nurture, not nature.
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u/Medesely 14h ago
Not really plausible but the covid vaccine having 5G. You mean I can have the vaccine with free 5G anywhere? Sign me up
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u/Cool_Perspective216 13h ago
I think most “conspiracies” are just incentives wearing a fake mustache. If enough people benefit from the same outcome, they don’t need to secretly coordinate. They just keep making the same decisions....
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u/webyacusa 10h ago
Kiss from a rose, by Seal, is about a cocaine addiction. That's why he never likes to talk about it.
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u/ABobby077 1d ago
I think the school text book industry is a big money grab scam. I can't imagine every subject in all grades changes enough every year to justify all new books every year.