Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
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Notes -
It's been a while since I've done one of these- what's a small scale conspiracy theory you're willing to go to bat for?
Now, by 'small scale conspiracy theory' I do not mean grand unified theories of the jewlluminati or lizard people, or major government direction, or whatever. It's small-scale.
Some things I think are likely true-
The 'Marriage penalty' in US welfare law is- or was- an intentional experiment to prove that marriage was outmoded in late-industrial societies. It fits the zeitgeist of the time and we know there were other reckless experiments going on in first world countries(like German pedophiles). It was not based on the assumption that single mothers need the help more.
Coyote predation on small children is far more common in the USA than commonly acknowledged(note that a huge increase over a trivial base is still trivial), and those toddlers who just disappear and everyone assumes the parents killed them but they're never charged because nobody ever finds the body were mostly snatched by coyotes. Wildlife departments and law enforcement agencies prefer to cover this up to discourage reprisals by poisoning, which has substantial knock on effects. The only confirmed coyote kill of a child(there is also a case of a hippie musician who wandered near a den, but this probably wasn't a predatory attack) was interrupted during the attack rendering it undeniable.
Conventional health wisdom overstates effect sizes because it originated in attempts to explain the rise of chronic disease in the mid twentieth century. In reality, these diseases became common because people lived long enough to get them(largely due to reduced disease burden), with effects from rising waistlines, sedentary lifestyles, etc.
Coyotes are pretty well-hated and oft-culled because of their attacks on pets and livestock, though, and there's also the 'dingos ate ma baby' option of simple incompetence. That said, if you really want to go nuts on coyote conspiracies, the degree that coyote populations have exploded and the individual coyotes themselves have gotten much smarter in <10 generations is a real fun question.
For fun conspiracies I actually believe:
XTwitter's recent fine in the UK. But there's a lot of these orgs running at <100 person levels regulating through smoke-filled backroom deals; a lot of what's 'weird' about the modern era is just the ability of those orgs to impact companies with large impacts but not the large scales of pre-internet companies.Old news, but I just ran across it when it went viral again recently and the Bloomberg story reminds me of it:
"How many similar devices with hidden functionalities might be lurking in your home, just waiting to be discovered?"
Exploitable systems are so much easier to create than secure systems that it's hard to attribute even actual proven exploitability to malice! Aside from the software issues in that discussion, consider the hardware. Fifty years ago, if something you brought into your business had a tiny secret microphone, that would have been proof-positive that someone with major signals-intelligence chops was trying to bug you. Today, it just means that the fastest way to create a special-purpose electronic device is to just grab some general-purpose computer board and flash it with your own special-purpose software, and of course your general-purpose-computer designer threw in a 3.5-cent-each MEMS microphone because why not?
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