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”
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 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.
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.
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
Arcade rhythm games (DDR, Pump It Up, maimai, etc) are subsidized by the Japanese government to get Otakus/NEETs to go out, touch grass, and exercise
Have you ever wondered why you can have 10-15 minutes of game time for the same amount of money as one (sometimes half) a pull on a claw machine?? /puts on tinfoil hat
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
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.
I think the US government actively encouraged the UFO craze, because it drew attention away from the experimental aircraft they were testing, like the SR-71 blackbird.
They’ve admitted that.
Someone at Pentagon was recently investigating UFO conspiracies and found that several kept looping back to them. And they realized that at least one was directly planted by themselves during the cold war to confuse the USSR about what weapons were real or not.
Back when reddit had awards, the admins would routinely award posts to make it appear like people were actually buying them.
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.
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.
That a lot of non-american food is rebranded to use tacky american names to get people to try it. Too many americans are afraid to try “foreign” food, but will happily try “Cajun Jim’s Cornballs”. A couple I can think of are Aioli to “Garlic Mayo” and Chicken Satay becoming “Peanut Butter Chicken”. Sounds like mm mm good home american cookin’ to me, course I’ll try some.
Multinational conglomerates regularly rename their products worldwide to try to cater to local tastes
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”.
Apps and web sites can also apply custom pricing based on the individual’s ability to pay. Payday? The parking spot costs more.
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?
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.
Big Time conspiracy. I love it.
