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Public programs are purposely underfunded to make it easy for people to point to why they don’t work (the average person doesn’t think about/care whether they get funding), making it easier to continue the process of privatizing everything.
Many conspiracy theories aren’t actually conspiracy theories but a consequence of profit-driven motives that give the illusion of a conspiracy theory.
The first one is just political strategy, it's known as starve the beast
That's just observable facts.
There is a small but self-sustaining breeding population of cougars living in the Adirondacks and possibly most of upstate New York, but this will never be officially confirmed by the various government environmental agencies because then they would have to take real action to protect them. Cougars have everything they need there and there's really no reason to believe they're just walking 1800 miles and not breeding.
This is the case for a lot of other heavily forested places east of the Rockies as well.
If I were a ghoul at Nestle, I would have spent the past couple decades propping up the shittiest local water utilities, lobbying to make sure their shittiest policies are kept and their most generous programs abolished. Having a local entity with a monopoly on providing water to the area is often the worst of both worlds in the US. You get the inflexibility of a government bureaucracy because they have no reason to improve and you get the shady billing practices of a corporation because of the insistence that we not just give people water for free. When it comes time to privatize your local water supply, many people will be chomping at the bit to bring in “competition” because they hate their local utility so much.
Major sports leagues are not rigged in the sense that winners are pre-determined, but the refs are told to keep games, serieses, and playoff races close, because blowouts and dominance are boring.
An NBA ref got busted for betting on games and IIRC talked about how the league would make the above obvious to refs (at least in the postseason). There's too much money changing hands and too little accountability for shady shit to not happen at all, and this is the type of thing all owners could have a handshake agreement on because they'll all profit from it and it doesn't really prejudice any team specifically.
Crosswalk buttons and hold open/close door buttons in elevators are just there to give an illusion of control
Those are both regional.
Almost no open/close buttons do anything in the US, but they're completely honest in Japan.
Crosswalk buttons may: actually hurry up the cycle and stop traffic sooner, wait until the next red light and show a crossing indicator that it'd otherwise skip, or do nothing at all. This can change from city to city, from intersection to intersection, and even over a schedule throughout the day.
In my experience a reasonable amount of elevator close buttons have an effect, at least where I've been in the US
Gaylor Swift. I heard someone talking about it once and I went down the rabbithole and it's crazy.
Go on
Cishet white women like to image Taylor is a lesbian or bi because it makes them feel like they're supporting a "diverse" artist instead of a rich, white, cishet one
Celebrity culture is weird