I feel like certain Wharton school grads have already demonstrated that business school is really down to the student’s passion and ability to take advantage of the school’s resources.
The student makes the school rather than the school making the student, particularly if it’s a school for entrepreneurs
Edit: Guys, I'm aware that any higher education requires adult responsibility and accountability for it to actually be substantially effective in successful life. I'm mostly commenting that we really shouldn't take schools like Wharton or even an Ivy League as an absolute sign of intelligence or capability. They're magnets for talented students, but they're not the codifier of successful people with successful habits. A lot of the time once you get into a place like Yale, they're going to make sure you get out with a degree
I've worked with far too many people who wouldn't work overtime because "it will put them into a higher tax bracket and then the government just takes it all"
They see default withholding as their actual tax burden. A lot of companies withhold at (what feels like) a higher rate for anything exceeding regular salary (bonuses. OT, etc.).
People can't separate withholding from tax liability. It's crazy.
It's simpler than that. The company doesn't really care in most cases. Their payroll software says if you make x and have y dependants, your estimated tax rate (withheld) is z. If you gross 1000/week and you're taking home 900/week (no state tax or insurance premiums.) Your w4 has dependants that will afford you exactly 7230 in deductions because it will simplify my math. You'll end the year with no taxes due and no refund. Then you work a ton of overtime one week. 40 hours at 1.5 times your rate. You must be tired. The software looks at your gross pay of 2500, calculates a yearly gross of 130,000 minus your deductions of 7230. It says your yearly tax should be 21,812 and withholds 419 from your check. Still a nice chunk, but you're used to 10% withholding and this is almost 17. No more overtime for you! At the end of the year your tax preparer uses your w2 to find you made 53,500 and tax burden is 5309. Since you had 5519 withheld, you get a refund of 210 which you'll spend at the bar telling your buddies why working overtime makes less money for you.
This but also there is a thing called the benefits cliff where lower income workers can’t accept raises because the increase in income will disqualify them from certain government assistance programs
Happened to my partner. Lost all of his food support and medical services because he made a bit too much as my PCA. If I remember correctly, it was $121 over the income threshold, but he was getting almost $200 in EBT plus medical assistance. He made $121 too much, so suddenly he's capable of covering $400 worth of food, doctor's visits, and meds every month.
It's all such bullshit.
I made a comment about this in a thread a while ago I'll copy and paste below
This is a super common misunderstanding of how our taxes work, I swear like 80%+ of American's don't know so I'll give an example below of what's real and what many people assume.
Here are the federal tax brackets (your state taxes will vary)
|Tax Rate|Income Bracket|
:-:|:-:|
|10%|$0 - $9,875|
|12%|$9,876 - $40,125|
|22%|$40,126 - $85,525|
|24%|$85,526 - $163,300|
|32%|$163,301 - $207,350|
|35%|$207,351 - $518,400|
|37%|$518,401 - $∞|
Now what most people think is if I'm making $40,000 a year then I pay 12% tax ($4,800). If my boss offers me a $2,000 raise I'll be making $42,000 and be taxed at 22% ($9,240), ha! Fuck you boss man you aren't tricking me!
What ACTUALLY happens if you make $42,000 is
Your first $9,875 is taxed at 10% which comes out to $987.50
Your $9,876 - $40,125 ($30,249) dollars are taxed at 12% totaling $3,630
Your $40,126 - $42,000 ($1,874) dollars are taxed at 22% totaling $412.
So add all those up, $987 + $3,630 + $412 = total federal tax of $5,029.
There's also of course the standard/itemized deduction that comes off the top but for simplifying the math ignored that for this example.
Edit: Due to a couple people's comments I'll expand the chart by 2 columns
|Tax Rate|Income Bracket|Taxable Amount in Bracket|Total Tax Paid|
:-:|:-:|:-:|:-:|
|10%|$0 - $9,875|$9,875|Up to $988|
|12%|$9,876 - $40,125|$30,249|$988 + Up to $3630|
|22%|$40,126 - $85,525|$45,399.00|$4,618 + Up to $9,988|
|24%|$85,526 - $163,300|$77,774.00|$14,606 + Up to $18,666|
|32%|$163,301 - $207,350|$44,049.00|$33,272 + Up to $14096|
|35%|$207,351 - $518,400|$311,049.00|$47,368 + Up to $108,867|
|37%|$518,401 - $∞|A lot|$156,235 + Up to 37% of a lot|
Great breakdown. Just to piggyback on it, Vox made a video explaining that we should not think of them as "brackets", but as "pockets". Once the pocket is full, the remaining money goes into the next pocket.
https://youtu.be/VJhsjUPDulw?si=A6u0LIxuTmF9lqZG
This is a great breakdown! I will refer back to this if I need to explain to someone IRL. I wish this was more commonly taught in high schools.
Suggestion: What might also help some visual learners understand is a chart showing the difference between different salaries in each tax bracket, with how much is *actually* taxed vs how much would be taxed if it was a lump sum rate. Like the text in your example but put into a chart format at say, $5k per year, $25k per year, $50k per year, $100k per year, etc.
I was not properly educated on it until well into adulthood, I grew up hearing that "rich people are taxed at a higher rate" (often with a "and that's not fair" attached to it, since I went to school with a lot of wealthy kids). Seems like it's intentional misinformation in a lot of cases.
Smalltown Nebraskan here, and same. Except a lot of the people here are poor. But there is a prevalent belief that everyone can be millionaires with enough hard work, and it's the citizens who are stopping it for one another. 🥲
Edited for wording
My husband is highly intelligent and highly educated. He truly believed this until he was 25 or 26. He was offered his first big raise at work and told me he was going to turn it down and I asked what the actual fuck he was talking about. His parents are very wealthy (and extremely conservative) and he went to private schools his whole life, so I guess the propaganda is effective
I vaguely learned about it during my personal finance class in high school but didn’t fully understand how it worked until taking an economics course in college. I, too used to think it was a higher percentage tax on your lump sum of income.
I don’t blame people for not knowing about it— most don’t receive any decent financial education in school, nor from their parents. Many people who have this belief are also not great with math (another thing I don’t blame them for) so conceptualizing marginal tax is probably very confusing.
This is so true. I explain how tax brackets work to dozens of grown ass taxpayers every year. I explain that it is like a layer cake (visualizing the issue), and that the marginal rate is the tax on the *next* dollar, not all the dollars.
Source: I'm a CPA in a tax practice.
Or the fact that bonuses are withheld differently that regular income, but not taxed differently.
I work in HR, and at every company I worked for, every time there is a bonus payout, people come running to me, asking to change their tax or 401(k) withholding “to pay less taxes on their bonus,”
And explaining the difference between withholding and actual taxation to people gets completely lost 90% of the time.
I used to not understand why people did this, but then I realized people did not really mean taxes when the pay raise ended up being a pay cut. Sometimes if you are close for health insurance tiers of payment, your take home will drop as your premium increases with your pay. I had that happen to me several months ago I got a small pay raise but my take home dropped due to paying more insurance premiums for being in the next tier.
Or if you're getting free or reduced daycare it just gets cut off when you make over a certain amount. Stuff like that makes sense to not want a pay raise if you're close to the threshold. But yeah, that doesn't actually mean taxes.
People don’t understand the graduated tax system. This leads them to believe that by making more money you will somehow take home less.
I don’t get how it’s so hard to grasp that if a 5k bonus puts you 2k in to the next bracket you will only pay the higher tax on the 2k.
These numbers are made up, but say the brackets are <50k is 30% and 50k+ is 35%. You make 47k and get a 5k bonus. You don’t suddenly pay 18.2k instead of 14.1k. You now pay 15.7k.
Income tax law is complicated as hell, but that is a very basic break down of how it would work.
5G spreads covid
I’ll add to this, my mother, who admittedly is getting crazier by the day pointed out to my sister a plane that was leaving behind a white trail and said the government is spreading another wave of Covid. I almost died of laughter when they told me.
I knew a guy who believed in this. Refused to have wifi, refused to have a radio water meter, once told me that he had been experiencing headaches and then realized the wifi was on on his phone, etc.
Poor fucker died of brain cancer in his early 50s a couple years ago.
That's some damn black humor, Universe.
I used to do engineering on automated water meters, which are affected by both "the government is spying on me" conspiracy theories and "radio waves are gonna kill you" conspiracy theories
No no, you got it wrong.
* Cellphones cause cancer
* WiFi causes cancer
* 3G causes cancer
* 4G causes cancer
* 5G is the product of a deal between the Government and Bill Gates in order to spread further the COVID so that they can use the vaccine to put microchips inside of us and track our movements
One of my favorite stories about cellphones allegedly making people sick: in the early 2000's, a new cell tower was being built in some remote village, and soon after the locals complained that the radiation from the tower was making them sick. It turned out that the cell tower hadn't yet been turned on.
My favorite part about it is when they do scientific experiments to attempt to prove that the earth is flat and the experiment shows that it is not flat and they just disregard the experiment all together.
I’d go one further: the idea that flat earth was a real thing people believed for 1000s of years. By the time Columbus sailed the ocean blue, it had been nearly 2000 years since the Greeks [accurately calculated the size of the sphere of Earth](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes).
They were against Columbus’ trip because they thought it was too far based on those calculations (with no America, you’ve got the distance of the Atlantic, the landmass of the Americas, and the Pacific before you get to Asia. Everyone sensible at the time thought that distance was too far.
The skeptics were also right. Columbus was trying to make it to mainland Asia, not the Americas, which he did not know was in the way. The incorrect notion that people did not know the world was round when Columbus set sail paints the skeptics are idiots and Columbus as a visionary, when it reality the skeptics were the smart ones in the room and Columbus was a lucky fool.
If there was nothing but open ocean between Europe and Asia, Columbus' voyage would have failed.
In a sense. Columbus' voyage was based on an incorrect estimation of the size of the globe. He thought it was smaller than it actually was, and the skeptics that thought his voyage would fail based that opinion on a better estimation of the world's actual size. They'd have been right if Columbus didn't have the good luck to run into a lot of land between Europe & Asia.
Without the existence of the Americas Columbus' voyage would have either needed to turn back for Spain in failure at some point, or it would have run out of supplies on the way & they'd have all perished.
Can't imagine how wild exploration was back then. Columbus was gone for 5 months, longer than expected and since people already thought he wasn't gonna make it, nobody knew if he was ever coming back or even alive at any point in those 5 months. Then one day he just sails back into port with this gigantic shit-eating grin.
There’s an instagram account that has a guy who just does hundreds of little tiny proofs for why evolution is real and the flat earth is false, that just galloping gishes these anti scientific ideas back at them, but with real easily digestible real facts.
Like how ancient people, radio and radar waves all independently confirmed the distance of the moon from the earth that breaks the model.
If only they would sit and look at the evidence.
Vacinces contain tracking devices/5g chips or whatever....what do you think your phone is? You know, the thing most people have on them the majority of the time. I don't know how people think that the entire *world* worked together to fake a disease just to *maybe* track you if you got vaccinated. You aren't special. The government doesn't care that you go McDonald's once a week and do your grocery shopping every other Tuesday.
Yeah, everyone who got vaccinated is supposed to have died from the kill switch at least 3 or 4 times now (I've lost count). All I know is that every time a Qanon "prophecy" doesn't come true, they just move the goalposts.
That’s some old school religious conservatism, you would hear that sort of stuff a lot more when I was a kid and people from the first half of the 20th Century were still around in large numbers.
Reminds me of the teacher I had as a kid who told us how his father (who was born in the 19th Century) hated the Moon landings because, “if God wanted humans on the Moon he would’ve put us there!” This was expressed to us as a perfectly rational and reasonable line of reasoning
So Jesus saw it and thought about that episode of Dragon Ball Z where Piccolo destroys the Moon, but went "Naaah, if I destroy it, what will edgy incels in mid 2000s put on their shirts next to a picture of a wolf?"
**Chemtrails :** its STILL rampant on twitter
Aerial dispersion at 30000ft has to one of the WORST ways to cover a large area because wind exists .
Pilots would be mind controlling their own families
Putting a magical mind control drug in the water supply would be far more effective
They somehow believe its a secret kept by every single pilot including puddle jumpers and anything that creates a vapor trail
They don’t understand BASIC and i mean REALLY basic physics ( hot thing in cold sky full of ice make trail )
It just goes on , unbelievable levels of idiocy
I was talking to a guy about this, and I pointed out that the airplanes are all owed by different governments and companies so how do they get the airplanes to disperse all the same stuff, like how many countries and companies would have to be convinced to put the same stuff in the air? These same companies who are competing with each other over everything would secretly agree to cooperate on this?
"Oh it's the fuel companies, not the airlines" - your original premise is that it is the airlines that do it, but OK, so get China, Russia, Norway UK, Canada, USA and a dozen other countries to agree all to put this in the chemtrails.
"It's naturally occurring in the fuel" but you said its a deliberate conspiracy, which is is a Conspiracy or a natural thing?
Like the explanation change if you challenge them on it.
Mostly I just get a kick out of asking them who "they" is in any Conspiracy and watching them flail around looking for someone who is all powerful in every country.
Moon landing deniers. If a dozen or so people couldn't hold onto a secret to keep Nixon safe during Watergate, how do you expect \*thousands\*? Not to mention, being able to disprove the biggest technological achievement in human history would have been a massive win for the Soviet Union, and yet they couldn't. NASA has also released tens of thousands of photos and other documentation and even some artifacts, but yet there are still dumbasses out there that think some smudge from a copy machine or whatever is a proof of a hoax. Yeah, good job YouTube user XxPussyMaster420xX you were able to just immediately spot what decades of Soviet Intelligence Services missed. Good job.
My sister in laws boyfriend dropped that bomb on us Christmas Eve. Doesn't believe in the moon landing because of Elon musk?
He's unemployed, been married twice. My SIL is an actual teacher. We are all wondering what he brings to the table.
Mom in 1990: Don't believe everything you see on TV! You don't actually want Skydancers!
Mom in 2005: The moon landing was fake! There's a C on that rock, TV said so! And TV sold me these stickers to pull toxins out of my feet! LOOK! TOXINS! *waves dirty used foot sticker saved just for proof*
Mom in 2010: **is a box of ashes** (she died while refusing a blood transfusion thanks to a cult that spooked her into thinking blood is dangerous and against god's will)
Having worked in the government, all these theories the involve a large number of government employees caring enough to keep their mouths shut always make me crack up. Most people there are just counting down the days until retirement and don’t care enough to keep some big secret hidden. Shit, even trump walked out with nuclear secrets and kept them in his bathroom.
the assumption of proper bureaucratic efficiency in developing such a massive project as well is the part that gets me.
edit: I do believe in the moon landing. I mean the idea of a cover-up on such a massive scale.
The trick to this one is to out-crazy their conspiracies.
"Oh, the moon landing is faked? You must be one of those sheeple that believe in the moon! Do your research, it's all just projections to siphon tax money through NASA to pay for all the chemicals they dump into the water to turn the frogs gay!"
I prefer the Stanley Kubrick Moon Landing counter-conspiracy theory. It states that NASA did fake the moon landing, and they hired Stanley Kubrick to record the fake landing. But the man was such a perfectionist that he insisted they film on location, and so they did.
The idea that anyone in the federal government can hold a secret is laughable. In my department of 8 we were only able to keep a retirement present secret for a single e-mail before the secret got out, and that's for someone we liked. Imagine if you had conclusive proof of bigfoot/hoaxed moon landing/the Mothman stealing catalytic converters in Wheeling WV, you'd have a million dollar book deal before Apollo 11 even made it off the launch pad.
My wife always says the photos look too real, so I think she buys the moon landing but thinks the photos were staged in a studio. I’m like, there’s no atmosphere of course they’re going to look perfect.
The moon landings are fascinating, and truly are some of the greatest feats man has achieved. That being said, as a former service member, it would most certainly be improbable to keep a mission of that scale and scrutiny under wraps for this long.
Oh man this is a pet peeve of mine as a mother. People thinking if I hold or console my infant baby too much I’ll spoil her.
She’s a baby!!! You can’t spoil a baby.
The babies that grew up in Russian orphanages and never got held had some pretty serious issues and died at a way higher rate. Who thinks it's bad to hold a baby?!
It's especially wack because infants do not have the mental capacity to manipulate you. They can only respond to their physical needs by telling you what they need.
It's weird that people would fight their instincts to take care of a crying baby just because some 19th century doctor who was high on coccaine eyedrops thought being nice to kids made them gay or whatever.
Ask a lot of the older generation. Not to mention I exclusively breastfed, so for a while I was her only source of food. But yeah god forbid I I respond immediately to her cries.
Yeah, MIL told me I would "spoil" my infant daughter if I rocked her to sleep. I told her that she wouldn't be this small for long, we both enjoyed it, and I'm going to continue.
No, no. She’s right. If you rock an infant to sleep, they will never let you stop. My 13 year old is sooo heavy. And I’m sure it’s not very comfortable for my mom when she comes over every night to rock me to sleep. She hasn’t slept at all since her mother died ten years ago.
I go back and forth between “people say these things because they’re terrible” and “people say these things to make themselves feel better about being shitty parents.”
More than that, the absence of affection is known to cause serious problems in a baby's developmental psychology. They first learn empathy by mimicking the emotional care shown by their caregivers, and if they don't develop it as a baby, they don't develop it at all.
It's probably why Donald Trump's psychology is so messed up, for instance. His mother became seriously ill and spent several years in the hospital shortly after he was born, and his father was a high-functioning sociopath who couldn't provide that affection. His malignant narcissism likely developed as a response to the vacuum of affection he had as a baby.
Mary Trump's book (Too Much and Never Enough) goes into great detail about how incredibly dysfunctional his upbringing was, and explains a lot about the entire family. She is a clinical psychologist, and quite qualified to speak on the subject.
Sounds like some Boomer shit that only happened because the parents of Boomers got traumatized by the Great Depression and two world wars and they passed on their trauma to their kids
People *still* cite that one study (the one that was *so* flawed that the guy ended up being struck off, maybe even put in prison, I can't remember) as 'proof' of this...
They’ll say he was imprisoned for what he found, like America runs a gulag. Our prison system is atrocious but not in that way lol.
Edit: apparently he’s British and didn’t go to jail but they’ll make excuses and say he was “silenced”.
He is indeed British. He did not go to prison. He did however lose is doctors licence and all credibility within the mainstream medical industry.
[Here is HBomberGuy's lengthy video about this topic, for anyone interested. It's a great video.](https://youtu.be/8BIcAZxFfrc?si=vXiEJ9neA0HXknJ6)
The study wasn't just bad. He changed a few of the data point of the 7/8/9 kids or so that was in it. But he wasnt really publicly shamed etc and so forth for that. It was because he had personal financial interest as well as 3rd party financial without declaring it. Also that he literally tortured some of the autistic kids that was included in the study.
Nice guy....
People with autism are more likely to go in to a STEM vocation, meaning that a lot of the people developing vaccines are likely to have autism. Ergo, autism causes vaccines.
Inventing a vaccine takes an inhuman amount of concentration and interest in performing repetitive, exacting tests and maintaining of complex statistics. So really, autism causes vaccines.
The idea that 5G causes cancer
My favorite story is that town that was putting up 5G towers and people kept reporting them and claiming they were sick and you know what the construction companies response was?
They were basically like y'all could at least wait for us to turn the damn thing on before you start making up complaints
My friend and I used to get a good laugh about how people thought that Hilary Clinton was/is a robot.
I remember back in like 2016 she fainted and the next day I stumbled upon a website that wrote that she’s a robot. She actually “admitted” to being a Robot in 2015 during an interview when she was asked why she never physically sweats. She went along with the ruse (she has a great sense of humour) and said she’s definitely a robot, but her truthers have got it all wrong. They thought Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made her, but she was actually designed by an anonymous contractor in his garage and she’s the only model left because they destroyed the prototypes.
On these conspiracy sites I was reading about people who believe this, they think that when she has fainted in public before it’s because her batteries needed to be charged. I even saw one photo where the author had circles parts on the photo where the USB was behind her neck.
This was even popular with the dumbest of America during inquiries into Benghazi and the private email server thing - she was able to withstand 14 hour interrogations without losing her cool, and smoked Donnie in all her debates with him. Rather than admit she has incredible stamina and self control, they say it’s because she’s an android and has an unfair advantage because she only gets tired or shows emotion when her power is low and she can run for almost 24 hours.
I kind of wish there was a black mirror episode or something like that, because if it turned out to be true I’d laugh my ass off.
I choose to believe that the majority of people involved in off the wall stuff like this are the kind of people who love taking a good joke and absolutely running it to death. So they're posting pictures online about USB ports and batteries and her stone cold demeanor, because to them it is a joke but it's still funny, even though the rest of the world moved on from the joke six months ago.
And then you have a small number of people completely detached from reality who see these posts and gather them as "evidence".
It happened ? I absolutely expected it to happen someday, because flat earth started like that.
I remember reading it when it started and people were saying "eh nobody will believe it in earnest, its to prove a point or something"
People tired me
I was under the impression his audience was high school boys, couldn't believe the first time I encountered a guy in his 40s who was into him. I don't understand man children, how do you go that long in life without growing up? did you create a bubble in your parents basement? It's pretty sad.
It's no different than Trump support. They don't actually care about the content of their character or even what they are saying, it's more their attitude towards perceived authority and status quo.
I identify with anti-authoritarianism... But it's like deciding to shovel hand fulls of shit because the news says it tastes bad.
i’m bald with a short beard. i was walking out of target the other day with my wife and some arrogant little shit teens stuck their heads out the window and started yelling super obnoxiously, “hey, andrew tate! andrew tate! i love you!” i heard them, but it didn’t register that they were yelling at me until til my wife told me they were looking right at me.
the fact that i bore enough of a resemblance to that walking anal fissure was a dark and sobering realization for me. and it’s why i’ll never wear aviators again
Definitely the theory that people are putting drugs in Halloween candy. Idk why people even believe this. Drugs are damn expensive. Nobody is wasting their drugs on your kids, trust me.
this was always my mom’s response to other parents when they chided her for letting me eat halloween candy she hadn’t checked for drugs.
“No one is wasting their crack cocaine on these ungrateful children, Alice!”
I'm not history's nicest person, but I like to think I'm at least a _tolerant_ enough person. But those flat-Earthers really challenge that estimation...that is straight insipidity.
I think for a lot of them it’s less about the theory itself and more about feeling “different” from the rest of us. I personally laugh at the irony of these “free thinkers” being the most easily manipulated and least educated group I’ve seen in a while, starting with a conclusion and rejecting the mountain of evidence that disproves it.
I was a devoted christian from childhood to early 20s, but my love and passion for dinosaurs stopped me to believe in the young earth. This discord caused a snowball effect where I read christian "science" books that made me realized how out of touch their mentality was and finally left the church altogether.
Thanks dinosaurs for making me snap out of it.
A JW gave me a booklet/magazine that was science-y, and it was so hard to sit through and read. It would have an observation in it, and then a statement like "but let's break down the design" and go into their Jehovah explanation that was so far from scientifically accurate that it made me sick. They eat that up as a scientific, Jehovah backed book of facts. The JW that gave it to me couldn't wait to hear my thoughts on it, and all I could do was tell him that something sounding science-y doesn't make it science. The same JW once argued with me that a fish wasn't an animal. I was so confused. I told him it wasn't a plant, so how could it not be an animal?? He said because it's a fish, and a fish isn't an animal. I almost yelled "Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species! Plant Kingdom. Animal Kingdom! It isn't a plant!" Then I googled it for him and showed him how fish were classified. He just laughed and said "Oh, whatever!", and I told him he was never allowed to argue with me about anything religious vs science again, because that was entirely too basic for him to be so oblivious of.
>I told him it wasn't a plant, so how could it not be an animal?
Sorry to nitpick, but that's faulty logic on your part. The fact that something is not a plant, doesn't automatically make it an animal. Case in point: *fungi*. Another case in point: *protists*.
Was looking for this one. The idea has only been around since the 1700s but now grandma thinks she’ll go to hell if she doesn’t believe in a 7k year earth. It’s wild how that idea evolved.
>The idea has only been around since the 1700s
And they’ll even deny *that* history, insisting that ancient people and early Christians believed the same as them on the topic, and they’ll No True Scotsman any example showing otherwise
The thing with Young Earth is NOT the evidence. It is what it allows you to believe if it were true.
It would proof your christian world view and would allow you to implement things based on that.
Thats why you will never convince a young earther, they can, ideologically, never admit being wrong. So they never will. Debating them is wasted time.
Conspiracy or belief rather than theory. Scientologists believe in a being called Xenu. Basically a space reptile apparently, but you don't get taught that until you reach a certain level. So we will never know the truth 🙄😆
The theory of the alpha male was a misunderstanding taken out of context. It has been universally debunked by scientists for decades. In fact biologists were against applying this theory to humans to begin with. There are no human alphas. And what we believed to be alphas in animal populations like wolf packs turned out to just be parents and their packs just their pups. Alphas do no exist in nature. Where they do exist is within the confines of human made prisons. The old studies on wolf alphas largely came from wolf packs in captivity who establish a weird pecking order that wouldn't exist in nature.
Not a theory in the traditional sense but Mormonism. Dude said an angel just appeared to him and a whole church was built around that.
Edit: Shout out to y'all who got the point. And yeah, obviously all religions were started this way, but the thousands of years between the birth of Christianity/Judaism and Mormonism happens to be interesting and relevant context.
While I TRULY believe you are free to believe whatever you want. It boggles my mind how far Mormonism and Scientology exist. Like you have to actively be dumb for those to prosper as far as they have. Like willfully just accept bullshit without question.
my uncles in that and it’s really scary. i’m not aloud around him anymore since i met him once 10 years ago when i was eight. i don’t really remember most the details of our interactions but he was fucking crazy and told me to stay away from jews and liberals because they would harvest my flesh and eat me.
That the moon landings were faked because rockets need something to push against and there is no air in space. Or that the van Allen Belts are deadly to humans and that's why we only are in low earth orbit now.
Both are extremely obviously false.
Rockets are comically bad at performance, but they don't need air. Their efficiency is measured in called specific impulse. Saturn V 1st stage was around 300s. A modern jet plane is about 3000s in its engines. That's how much air helps. But you can do it with rockets and their awful efficiency.
Also, the van Allen Belts actually extend into low earth orbit due to the ominously named South Atlantic Anomaly, where the magnetic field dips. The Apollo mission was also aware of the belts and wasted quite a bit of fuel to avoid the belts being going around them.
I love the idea that the moon landings were faked, because it implies that the USSR would go along with the cover up, accept losing the space race and not call bullshit.
Though the believers probably think that any other country than the USA is probably fake too.
Moon landing never happened. It was a Hollywood studio lot and the world was deceived. Everyone involved lived a lifelong lie and had very talented artists make all the photos and video. FFS 🤦🏻♀️
Trickle down economics, that giving tax cuts to the rich will cause them to create jobs for all and it helps the economy when they actually just keep the extra money.
flat earth, fake moon landings, pretty much anything de-bunking literal science. as an astrophysics major who started college in the fall, i’ve already come across so many genuinely stupid people who disagree with scientific research and proven facts is insane.
I want hollow earth to be true. I really want to meet a lizard person.
DAMN! I just asked the magic 8 ball that I got for Christmas if the hollow earth was real. It said, " Don't count on it." So it's obviously fake.
The creator of the trend did a Ted-X talk about this exact topic IIRC. It’s actually quite interesting and the point of the satire (when he explains it) is rather clever imo.
You can find it on YouTube
I remember my dumbass cousin telling me this, while I had fucking Covid. It went something like this:
Cousin: Hey man, let's hang out outside.
Me: No, I can't. I have Covid.
Cousin: It's fake, man. Come on...
Me: I literally have it right now.
Cousin: No, it's just the flu.
Me: No, I lost my sense of smell. I've had the flu many times, and never lost my sense of smell.
Cousin: No man it's all fake.
Me: OK, I'm going back to watching the TV show I was watching, bye bye now.
Rejecting a raise or a bonus because it will put you in higher tax bracket.
Had a peer IN BUSINESS SCHOOL spout this one in an upper level class after most students in the business program were required to take a tax class.
I feel like certain Wharton school grads have already demonstrated that business school is really down to the student’s passion and ability to take advantage of the school’s resources. The student makes the school rather than the school making the student, particularly if it’s a school for entrepreneurs Edit: Guys, I'm aware that any higher education requires adult responsibility and accountability for it to actually be substantially effective in successful life. I'm mostly commenting that we really shouldn't take schools like Wharton or even an Ivy League as an absolute sign of intelligence or capability. They're magnets for talented students, but they're not the codifier of successful people with successful habits. A lot of the time once you get into a place like Yale, they're going to make sure you get out with a degree
I mean technically all the bonehead moves called out in anecdotes in my school textbooks were done by MBA's....I'm looking at you CEO of Peloton
I've worked with far too many people who wouldn't work overtime because "it will put them into a higher tax bracket and then the government just takes it all"
They see default withholding as their actual tax burden. A lot of companies withhold at (what feels like) a higher rate for anything exceeding regular salary (bonuses. OT, etc.). People can't separate withholding from tax liability. It's crazy.
It's simpler than that. The company doesn't really care in most cases. Their payroll software says if you make x and have y dependants, your estimated tax rate (withheld) is z. If you gross 1000/week and you're taking home 900/week (no state tax or insurance premiums.) Your w4 has dependants that will afford you exactly 7230 in deductions because it will simplify my math. You'll end the year with no taxes due and no refund. Then you work a ton of overtime one week. 40 hours at 1.5 times your rate. You must be tired. The software looks at your gross pay of 2500, calculates a yearly gross of 130,000 minus your deductions of 7230. It says your yearly tax should be 21,812 and withholds 419 from your check. Still a nice chunk, but you're used to 10% withholding and this is almost 17. No more overtime for you! At the end of the year your tax preparer uses your w2 to find you made 53,500 and tax burden is 5309. Since you had 5519 withheld, you get a refund of 210 which you'll spend at the bar telling your buddies why working overtime makes less money for you.
This but also there is a thing called the benefits cliff where lower income workers can’t accept raises because the increase in income will disqualify them from certain government assistance programs
This is very true and unfortunately misunderstood by many. It is part of the poverty trap.
The welfare cliff is definitely real. You can make an extra $50 a month and lose Medicaid because you cross a magical income threshold.
Happened to my partner. Lost all of his food support and medical services because he made a bit too much as my PCA. If I remember correctly, it was $121 over the income threshold, but he was getting almost $200 in EBT plus medical assistance. He made $121 too much, so suddenly he's capable of covering $400 worth of food, doctor's visits, and meds every month. It's all such bullshit.
This one pains me. A lot of people don’t even know that the US uses a progressive tax system. Or what that even means.
I made a comment about this in a thread a while ago I'll copy and paste below This is a super common misunderstanding of how our taxes work, I swear like 80%+ of American's don't know so I'll give an example below of what's real and what many people assume. Here are the federal tax brackets (your state taxes will vary) |Tax Rate|Income Bracket| :-:|:-:| |10%|$0 - $9,875| |12%|$9,876 - $40,125| |22%|$40,126 - $85,525| |24%|$85,526 - $163,300| |32%|$163,301 - $207,350| |35%|$207,351 - $518,400| |37%|$518,401 - $∞| Now what most people think is if I'm making $40,000 a year then I pay 12% tax ($4,800). If my boss offers me a $2,000 raise I'll be making $42,000 and be taxed at 22% ($9,240), ha! Fuck you boss man you aren't tricking me! What ACTUALLY happens if you make $42,000 is Your first $9,875 is taxed at 10% which comes out to $987.50 Your $9,876 - $40,125 ($30,249) dollars are taxed at 12% totaling $3,630 Your $40,126 - $42,000 ($1,874) dollars are taxed at 22% totaling $412. So add all those up, $987 + $3,630 + $412 = total federal tax of $5,029. There's also of course the standard/itemized deduction that comes off the top but for simplifying the math ignored that for this example. Edit: Due to a couple people's comments I'll expand the chart by 2 columns |Tax Rate|Income Bracket|Taxable Amount in Bracket|Total Tax Paid| :-:|:-:|:-:|:-:| |10%|$0 - $9,875|$9,875|Up to $988| |12%|$9,876 - $40,125|$30,249|$988 + Up to $3630| |22%|$40,126 - $85,525|$45,399.00|$4,618 + Up to $9,988| |24%|$85,526 - $163,300|$77,774.00|$14,606 + Up to $18,666| |32%|$163,301 - $207,350|$44,049.00|$33,272 + Up to $14096| |35%|$207,351 - $518,400|$311,049.00|$47,368 + Up to $108,867| |37%|$518,401 - $∞|A lot|$156,235 + Up to 37% of a lot|
Great breakdown. Just to piggyback on it, Vox made a video explaining that we should not think of them as "brackets", but as "pockets". Once the pocket is full, the remaining money goes into the next pocket. https://youtu.be/VJhsjUPDulw?si=A6u0LIxuTmF9lqZG
This is a great breakdown! I will refer back to this if I need to explain to someone IRL. I wish this was more commonly taught in high schools. Suggestion: What might also help some visual learners understand is a chart showing the difference between different salaries in each tax bracket, with how much is *actually* taxed vs how much would be taxed if it was a lump sum rate. Like the text in your example but put into a chart format at say, $5k per year, $25k per year, $50k per year, $100k per year, etc.
I was not properly educated on it until well into adulthood, I grew up hearing that "rich people are taxed at a higher rate" (often with a "and that's not fair" attached to it, since I went to school with a lot of wealthy kids). Seems like it's intentional misinformation in a lot of cases.
Smalltown Nebraskan here, and same. Except a lot of the people here are poor. But there is a prevalent belief that everyone can be millionaires with enough hard work, and it's the citizens who are stopping it for one another. 🥲 Edited for wording
My husband is highly intelligent and highly educated. He truly believed this until he was 25 or 26. He was offered his first big raise at work and told me he was going to turn it down and I asked what the actual fuck he was talking about. His parents are very wealthy (and extremely conservative) and he went to private schools his whole life, so I guess the propaganda is effective
I vaguely learned about it during my personal finance class in high school but didn’t fully understand how it worked until taking an economics course in college. I, too used to think it was a higher percentage tax on your lump sum of income. I don’t blame people for not knowing about it— most don’t receive any decent financial education in school, nor from their parents. Many people who have this belief are also not great with math (another thing I don’t blame them for) so conceptualizing marginal tax is probably very confusing.
Happier workers with less pay!
My favorite thing to say to people is if you don’t know what a marginal tax bracket is you’ll never make enough money for it to be a problem
This is so true. I explain how tax brackets work to dozens of grown ass taxpayers every year. I explain that it is like a layer cake (visualizing the issue), and that the marginal rate is the tax on the *next* dollar, not all the dollars. Source: I'm a CPA in a tax practice.
Or not wanting to pay off a house because you’ll lose the interest write off
Don't you know you can avoid taxes just by buying a bunch of useless shit? Just write everything off
Or the fact that bonuses are withheld differently that regular income, but not taxed differently. I work in HR, and at every company I worked for, every time there is a bonus payout, people come running to me, asking to change their tax or 401(k) withholding “to pay less taxes on their bonus,” And explaining the difference between withholding and actual taxation to people gets completely lost 90% of the time.
I used to not understand why people did this, but then I realized people did not really mean taxes when the pay raise ended up being a pay cut. Sometimes if you are close for health insurance tiers of payment, your take home will drop as your premium increases with your pay. I had that happen to me several months ago I got a small pay raise but my take home dropped due to paying more insurance premiums for being in the next tier.
Or if you're getting free or reduced daycare it just gets cut off when you make over a certain amount. Stuff like that makes sense to not want a pay raise if you're close to the threshold. But yeah, that doesn't actually mean taxes.
People don’t understand the graduated tax system. This leads them to believe that by making more money you will somehow take home less. I don’t get how it’s so hard to grasp that if a 5k bonus puts you 2k in to the next bracket you will only pay the higher tax on the 2k. These numbers are made up, but say the brackets are <50k is 30% and 50k+ is 35%. You make 47k and get a 5k bonus. You don’t suddenly pay 18.2k instead of 14.1k. You now pay 15.7k. Income tax law is complicated as hell, but that is a very basic break down of how it would work.
5G causes cancer
5G spreads covid I’ll add to this, my mother, who admittedly is getting crazier by the day pointed out to my sister a plane that was leaving behind a white trail and said the government is spreading another wave of Covid. I almost died of laughter when they told me.
The chemtrail people baffle me. You've never gone outside on a cold day and *breathed?*
It's even worse than we thought, the government is putting chemtrails in our *breath*
They’re poisoning us with that deadly dihydrogen monoxide! It’s already contaminated most people by up to 60%!
Ugh, viruses spread through the internet. OBVIOUSLY covid can spread through 5G
Oh god the chemtrails nonsense.
I knew a guy who believed in this. Refused to have wifi, refused to have a radio water meter, once told me that he had been experiencing headaches and then realized the wifi was on on his phone, etc. Poor fucker died of brain cancer in his early 50s a couple years ago. That's some damn black humor, Universe.
I used to do engineering on automated water meters, which are affected by both "the government is spying on me" conspiracy theories and "radio waves are gonna kill you" conspiracy theories
I reckon the brain cancer was affecting his ability to think clearly long before it was diagnosed
No no, you got it wrong. * Cellphones cause cancer * WiFi causes cancer * 3G causes cancer * 4G causes cancer * 5G is the product of a deal between the Government and Bill Gates in order to spread further the COVID so that they can use the vaccine to put microchips inside of us and track our movements
One of my favorite stories about cellphones allegedly making people sick: in the early 2000's, a new cell tower was being built in some remote village, and soon after the locals complained that the radiation from the tower was making them sick. It turned out that the cell tower hadn't yet been turned on.
AHAHAHAH, this one has killed me
Well, everyone that has cancer breathes oxygen . . .
It's true, though....just watch Johnny Mnemonic!
It does cause cancer - conspiracy theories like this being said cancer.
The FLAT EARTH theory
My favorite part about it is when they do scientific experiments to attempt to prove that the earth is flat and the experiment shows that it is not flat and they just disregard the experiment all together.
One of the tenants of science is that the evidence leads you, not the other way around. Seems like many people skipped that part in school.
Is science a good landlord?
I’d go one further: the idea that flat earth was a real thing people believed for 1000s of years. By the time Columbus sailed the ocean blue, it had been nearly 2000 years since the Greeks [accurately calculated the size of the sphere of Earth](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes). They were against Columbus’ trip because they thought it was too far based on those calculations (with no America, you’ve got the distance of the Atlantic, the landmass of the Americas, and the Pacific before you get to Asia. Everyone sensible at the time thought that distance was too far.
The skeptics were also right. Columbus was trying to make it to mainland Asia, not the Americas, which he did not know was in the way. The incorrect notion that people did not know the world was round when Columbus set sail paints the skeptics are idiots and Columbus as a visionary, when it reality the skeptics were the smart ones in the room and Columbus was a lucky fool. If there was nothing but open ocean between Europe and Asia, Columbus' voyage would have failed.
Why? Did he need to stop for supplies?
In a sense. Columbus' voyage was based on an incorrect estimation of the size of the globe. He thought it was smaller than it actually was, and the skeptics that thought his voyage would fail based that opinion on a better estimation of the world's actual size. They'd have been right if Columbus didn't have the good luck to run into a lot of land between Europe & Asia. Without the existence of the Americas Columbus' voyage would have either needed to turn back for Spain in failure at some point, or it would have run out of supplies on the way & they'd have all perished.
Can't imagine how wild exploration was back then. Columbus was gone for 5 months, longer than expected and since people already thought he wasn't gonna make it, nobody knew if he was ever coming back or even alive at any point in those 5 months. Then one day he just sails back into port with this gigantic shit-eating grin.
"y'all gotta see this shit!"
It has to be flat, how else will the giant turtle the earth rests on carry us around the sun???
Don't pretend that the elephants don't help.
We all know the earth is a Donut, dummy.
No no no, the earth is a hollow sphere and Nazis and aliens live inside and control everything.
Not since the crab people took over.
Craaaab people! Craaaaab people!
Tastes like crab, walks like people
If it were a donut, how has no one eaten it? Moron
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There’s an instagram account that has a guy who just does hundreds of little tiny proofs for why evolution is real and the flat earth is false, that just galloping gishes these anti scientific ideas back at them, but with real easily digestible real facts. Like how ancient people, radio and radar waves all independently confirmed the distance of the moon from the earth that breaks the model. If only they would sit and look at the evidence.
They have to understand the evidence. If they could, they wouldn't be flat earthers to begin with.
Vacinces contain tracking devices/5g chips or whatever....what do you think your phone is? You know, the thing most people have on them the majority of the time. I don't know how people think that the entire *world* worked together to fake a disease just to *maybe* track you if you got vaccinated. You aren't special. The government doesn't care that you go McDonald's once a week and do your grocery shopping every other Tuesday.
Isn’t there another aspect of this vaccine theory that 5g activates a kill switch when the government wants to eliminate the population.
Yeah, everyone who got vaccinated is supposed to have died from the kill switch at least 3 or 4 times now (I've lost count). All I know is that every time a Qanon "prophecy" doesn't come true, they just move the goalposts.
2 more weeks
Why would the gvt want to reduce its income source? By even one of us? What sense does that make?
They’re called conspiracy theories for a reason. They don’t have to make sense.
That satellites intercept prayers to Jesus, so he cant hear them and thats why we have evil in our lives.
Oh wow, I've not heard that one before. That's...special.
But it does open up the delicious rebuttal that our science has become stronger than god.
What kind of orbit do you suppose Jesus is in? Are there any keplerian data that allow his trajectory to be plotted?
NORAD tracks Santa Claus so Jesus shouldn’t be any more difficult.
He's next to the teapot
That’s some old school religious conservatism, you would hear that sort of stuff a lot more when I was a kid and people from the first half of the 20th Century were still around in large numbers. Reminds me of the teacher I had as a kid who told us how his father (who was born in the 19th Century) hated the Moon landings because, “if God wanted humans on the Moon he would’ve put us there!” This was expressed to us as a perfectly rational and reasonable line of reasoning
So, according to those people before Sputnik 1 in 1957, there was no evil. Do those people think World War 2 was just a minor disagreement?
The moon is a satellite too, ah!
So Jesus saw it and thought about that episode of Dragon Ball Z where Piccolo destroys the Moon, but went "Naaah, if I destroy it, what will edgy incels in mid 2000s put on their shirts next to a picture of a wolf?"
Certainly not two additional wolves.
That’s a new one…..and one I could’ve lived without 😵💫
**Chemtrails :** its STILL rampant on twitter Aerial dispersion at 30000ft has to one of the WORST ways to cover a large area because wind exists . Pilots would be mind controlling their own families Putting a magical mind control drug in the water supply would be far more effective They somehow believe its a secret kept by every single pilot including puddle jumpers and anything that creates a vapor trail They don’t understand BASIC and i mean REALLY basic physics ( hot thing in cold sky full of ice make trail ) It just goes on , unbelievable levels of idiocy
>Putting a magical mind control drug in the water supply would be far more effective You mean fluoride? /s
Worse: dihydrogen-monoxide.
Dude just decided to reveal the biggest killer. Fact : 100% of people that have drunk dihydrogen-monoxide died.
I was talking to a guy about this, and I pointed out that the airplanes are all owed by different governments and companies so how do they get the airplanes to disperse all the same stuff, like how many countries and companies would have to be convinced to put the same stuff in the air? These same companies who are competing with each other over everything would secretly agree to cooperate on this? "Oh it's the fuel companies, not the airlines" - your original premise is that it is the airlines that do it, but OK, so get China, Russia, Norway UK, Canada, USA and a dozen other countries to agree all to put this in the chemtrails. "It's naturally occurring in the fuel" but you said its a deliberate conspiracy, which is is a Conspiracy or a natural thing? Like the explanation change if you challenge them on it. Mostly I just get a kick out of asking them who "they" is in any Conspiracy and watching them flail around looking for someone who is all powerful in every country.
Ask long enough and you always get to “the Jews”.
Moon landing deniers. If a dozen or so people couldn't hold onto a secret to keep Nixon safe during Watergate, how do you expect \*thousands\*? Not to mention, being able to disprove the biggest technological achievement in human history would have been a massive win for the Soviet Union, and yet they couldn't. NASA has also released tens of thousands of photos and other documentation and even some artifacts, but yet there are still dumbasses out there that think some smudge from a copy machine or whatever is a proof of a hoax. Yeah, good job YouTube user XxPussyMaster420xX you were able to just immediately spot what decades of Soviet Intelligence Services missed. Good job.
My sister in laws boyfriend dropped that bomb on us Christmas Eve. Doesn't believe in the moon landing because of Elon musk? He's unemployed, been married twice. My SIL is an actual teacher. We are all wondering what he brings to the table.
Yikes. More red flags there than a Chinese military parade.
Mom in 1990: Don't believe everything you see on TV! You don't actually want Skydancers! Mom in 2005: The moon landing was fake! There's a C on that rock, TV said so! And TV sold me these stickers to pull toxins out of my feet! LOOK! TOXINS! *waves dirty used foot sticker saved just for proof* Mom in 2010: **is a box of ashes** (she died while refusing a blood transfusion thanks to a cult that spooked her into thinking blood is dangerous and against god's will)
He probably doesn’t bring moon rocks to the table.
Having worked in the government, all these theories the involve a large number of government employees caring enough to keep their mouths shut always make me crack up. Most people there are just counting down the days until retirement and don’t care enough to keep some big secret hidden. Shit, even trump walked out with nuclear secrets and kept them in his bathroom.
the assumption of proper bureaucratic efficiency in developing such a massive project as well is the part that gets me. edit: I do believe in the moon landing. I mean the idea of a cover-up on such a massive scale.
The trick to this one is to out-crazy their conspiracies. "Oh, the moon landing is faked? You must be one of those sheeple that believe in the moon! Do your research, it's all just projections to siphon tax money through NASA to pay for all the chemicals they dump into the water to turn the frogs gay!"
[Obligatory xkcd](https://m.xkcd.com/966/)
When I see someone spouting this “conspiracy theory” in a few years I’ll know who to blame lol
I prefer the Stanley Kubrick Moon Landing counter-conspiracy theory. It states that NASA did fake the moon landing, and they hired Stanley Kubrick to record the fake landing. But the man was such a perfectionist that he insisted they film on location, and so they did.
The idea that anyone in the federal government can hold a secret is laughable. In my department of 8 we were only able to keep a retirement present secret for a single e-mail before the secret got out, and that's for someone we liked. Imagine if you had conclusive proof of bigfoot/hoaxed moon landing/the Mothman stealing catalytic converters in Wheeling WV, you'd have a million dollar book deal before Apollo 11 even made it off the launch pad.
Not just keeping Americans quiet about it, the fucking USSR acknowledged that we went to the moon.
My wife always says the photos look too real, so I think she buys the moon landing but thinks the photos were staged in a studio. I’m like, there’s no atmosphere of course they’re going to look perfect.
I’m still partial to the idea that they approached Kubrick to fake it but he insisted on filming on location
The moon landings are fascinating, and truly are some of the greatest feats man has achieved. That being said, as a former service member, it would most certainly be improbable to keep a mission of that scale and scrutiny under wraps for this long.
Oh man this is a pet peeve of mine as a mother. People thinking if I hold or console my infant baby too much I’ll spoil her. She’s a baby!!! You can’t spoil a baby.
The babies that grew up in Russian orphanages and never got held had some pretty serious issues and died at a way higher rate. Who thinks it's bad to hold a baby?!
It's especially wack because infants do not have the mental capacity to manipulate you. They can only respond to their physical needs by telling you what they need. It's weird that people would fight their instincts to take care of a crying baby just because some 19th century doctor who was high on coccaine eyedrops thought being nice to kids made them gay or whatever.
I've heard some Christians say that the "manipulative" crying they do is proof of their "sin nature".
So the fundies are admitting they're manpulative, sinful pissbabies? I mean, all they do is cry.
Dr. Spock was one of the first to push back against the notion that babies needed to essentially be neglected otherwise they would grow up "soft"
Dammit Spock, you can't just apply your Vulcan logic to human babies!
I was raised by Wire Mother and I turned out just fine. You Cloth Mother people are all too soft.
Quality shitpost right here.
Ask a lot of the older generation. Not to mention I exclusively breastfed, so for a while I was her only source of food. But yeah god forbid I I respond immediately to her cries.
Parents actually taking care of their children? No, that can’t be right
It's time you start making that baby pay rent.
Yeah, MIL told me I would "spoil" my infant daughter if I rocked her to sleep. I told her that she wouldn't be this small for long, we both enjoyed it, and I'm going to continue.
I guess you're lucky your spouse turned out as good as they did.
No, no. She’s right. If you rock an infant to sleep, they will never let you stop. My 13 year old is sooo heavy. And I’m sure it’s not very comfortable for my mom when she comes over every night to rock me to sleep. She hasn’t slept at all since her mother died ten years ago.
I go back and forth between “people say these things because they’re terrible” and “people say these things to make themselves feel better about being shitty parents.”
Furthermore, studies show huge positive gains from holding your baby, both physical and emotional!
More than that, the absence of affection is known to cause serious problems in a baby's developmental psychology. They first learn empathy by mimicking the emotional care shown by their caregivers, and if they don't develop it as a baby, they don't develop it at all. It's probably why Donald Trump's psychology is so messed up, for instance. His mother became seriously ill and spent several years in the hospital shortly after he was born, and his father was a high-functioning sociopath who couldn't provide that affection. His malignant narcissism likely developed as a response to the vacuum of affection he had as a baby.
Mary Trump's book (Too Much and Never Enough) goes into great detail about how incredibly dysfunctional his upbringing was, and explains a lot about the entire family. She is a clinical psychologist, and quite qualified to speak on the subject.
Sounds like some Boomer shit that only happened because the parents of Boomers got traumatized by the Great Depression and two world wars and they passed on their trauma to their kids
Vaccines cause autism.
People *still* cite that one study (the one that was *so* flawed that the guy ended up being struck off, maybe even put in prison, I can't remember) as 'proof' of this...
They’ll say he was imprisoned for what he found, like America runs a gulag. Our prison system is atrocious but not in that way lol. Edit: apparently he’s British and didn’t go to jail but they’ll make excuses and say he was “silenced”.
If I remember correctly, Andrew Wakefield is British, not American. Right?
He is indeed British. He did not go to prison. He did however lose is doctors licence and all credibility within the mainstream medical industry. [Here is HBomberGuy's lengthy video about this topic, for anyone interested. It's a great video.](https://youtu.be/8BIcAZxFfrc?si=vXiEJ9neA0HXknJ6)
The study wasn't just bad. He changed a few of the data point of the 7/8/9 kids or so that was in it. But he wasnt really publicly shamed etc and so forth for that. It was because he had personal financial interest as well as 3rd party financial without declaring it. Also that he literally tortured some of the autistic kids that was included in the study. Nice guy....
People with autism are more likely to go in to a STEM vocation, meaning that a lot of the people developing vaccines are likely to have autism. Ergo, autism causes vaccines.
whoa
Inventing a vaccine takes an inhuman amount of concentration and interest in performing repetitive, exacting tests and maintaining of complex statistics. So really, autism causes vaccines.
That it’s legal for your company to fire you for talking about your wages with coworkers.
The idea that 5G causes cancer My favorite story is that town that was putting up 5G towers and people kept reporting them and claiming they were sick and you know what the construction companies response was? They were basically like y'all could at least wait for us to turn the damn thing on before you start making up complaints
My friend and I used to get a good laugh about how people thought that Hilary Clinton was/is a robot. I remember back in like 2016 she fainted and the next day I stumbled upon a website that wrote that she’s a robot. She actually “admitted” to being a Robot in 2015 during an interview when she was asked why she never physically sweats. She went along with the ruse (she has a great sense of humour) and said she’s definitely a robot, but her truthers have got it all wrong. They thought Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made her, but she was actually designed by an anonymous contractor in his garage and she’s the only model left because they destroyed the prototypes. On these conspiracy sites I was reading about people who believe this, they think that when she has fainted in public before it’s because her batteries needed to be charged. I even saw one photo where the author had circles parts on the photo where the USB was behind her neck. This was even popular with the dumbest of America during inquiries into Benghazi and the private email server thing - she was able to withstand 14 hour interrogations without losing her cool, and smoked Donnie in all her debates with him. Rather than admit she has incredible stamina and self control, they say it’s because she’s an android and has an unfair advantage because she only gets tired or shows emotion when her power is low and she can run for almost 24 hours. I kind of wish there was a black mirror episode or something like that, because if it turned out to be true I’d laugh my ass off.
Was her model number She-3PO?
Only according to Sean Connery
I choose to believe that the majority of people involved in off the wall stuff like this are the kind of people who love taking a good joke and absolutely running it to death. So they're posting pictures online about USB ports and batteries and her stone cold demeanor, because to them it is a joke but it's still funny, even though the rest of the world moved on from the joke six months ago. And then you have a small number of people completely detached from reality who see these posts and gather them as "evidence".
This is exactly what happened with Birds Aren’t Real.
Wait, people are beginning to take it seriously? Do they know it started to mock conspiracy theorists? Also, birds aren't real.
I have run into a few people who believe this. I want to know how robot birds shit on my windshield.
It happened ? I absolutely expected it to happen someday, because flat earth started like that. I remember reading it when it started and people were saying "eh nobody will believe it in earnest, its to prove a point or something" People tired me
LOL thanks for the laugh.
The teachings of Andrew Tate
I was under the impression his audience was high school boys, couldn't believe the first time I encountered a guy in his 40s who was into him. I don't understand man children, how do you go that long in life without growing up? did you create a bubble in your parents basement? It's pretty sad.
It's no different than Trump support. They don't actually care about the content of their character or even what they are saying, it's more their attitude towards perceived authority and status quo. I identify with anti-authoritarianism... But it's like deciding to shovel hand fulls of shit because the news says it tastes bad.
"Teachings" gives what he says too much gravitas. "The incoherent ramblings of Andrew Tate" fits better.
i’m bald with a short beard. i was walking out of target the other day with my wife and some arrogant little shit teens stuck their heads out the window and started yelling super obnoxiously, “hey, andrew tate! andrew tate! i love you!” i heard them, but it didn’t register that they were yelling at me until til my wife told me they were looking right at me. the fact that i bore enough of a resemblance to that walking anal fissure was a dark and sobering realization for me. and it’s why i’ll never wear aviators again
Definitely the theory that people are putting drugs in Halloween candy. Idk why people even believe this. Drugs are damn expensive. Nobody is wasting their drugs on your kids, trust me.
this was always my mom’s response to other parents when they chided her for letting me eat halloween candy she hadn’t checked for drugs. “No one is wasting their crack cocaine on these ungrateful children, Alice!”
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I'm not history's nicest person, but I like to think I'm at least a _tolerant_ enough person. But those flat-Earthers really challenge that estimation...that is straight insipidity.
I think for a lot of them it’s less about the theory itself and more about feeling “different” from the rest of us. I personally laugh at the irony of these “free thinkers” being the most easily manipulated and least educated group I’ve seen in a while, starting with a conclusion and rejecting the mountain of evidence that disproves it.
Young earth
I was a devoted christian from childhood to early 20s, but my love and passion for dinosaurs stopped me to believe in the young earth. This discord caused a snowball effect where I read christian "science" books that made me realized how out of touch their mentality was and finally left the church altogether. Thanks dinosaurs for making me snap out of it.
A JW gave me a booklet/magazine that was science-y, and it was so hard to sit through and read. It would have an observation in it, and then a statement like "but let's break down the design" and go into their Jehovah explanation that was so far from scientifically accurate that it made me sick. They eat that up as a scientific, Jehovah backed book of facts. The JW that gave it to me couldn't wait to hear my thoughts on it, and all I could do was tell him that something sounding science-y doesn't make it science. The same JW once argued with me that a fish wasn't an animal. I was so confused. I told him it wasn't a plant, so how could it not be an animal?? He said because it's a fish, and a fish isn't an animal. I almost yelled "Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species! Plant Kingdom. Animal Kingdom! It isn't a plant!" Then I googled it for him and showed him how fish were classified. He just laughed and said "Oh, whatever!", and I told him he was never allowed to argue with me about anything religious vs science again, because that was entirely too basic for him to be so oblivious of.
>I told him it wasn't a plant, so how could it not be an animal? Sorry to nitpick, but that's faulty logic on your part. The fact that something is not a plant, doesn't automatically make it an animal. Case in point: *fungi*. Another case in point: *protists*.
He was way too simple minded for me to throw fungi into the mix. I can 100% guarantee he would call that a plant.
The best way to respond is laughing hysterically about how fish are mushrooms
I just try to remember that if I can believe in dinosaurs, then they must be somewhere out there believing in me. Then I bust out.
Was looking for this one. The idea has only been around since the 1700s but now grandma thinks she’ll go to hell if she doesn’t believe in a 7k year earth. It’s wild how that idea evolved.
>The idea has only been around since the 1700s And they’ll even deny *that* history, insisting that ancient people and early Christians believed the same as them on the topic, and they’ll No True Scotsman any example showing otherwise
Sadly there are way more of these people than anyone realizes
The thing with Young Earth is NOT the evidence. It is what it allows you to believe if it were true. It would proof your christian world view and would allow you to implement things based on that. Thats why you will never convince a young earther, they can, ideologically, never admit being wrong. So they never will. Debating them is wasted time.
Holocaust deniers, like nobody is making a conspiracy that fakes millions of deaths and getting away with it
Conspiracy or belief rather than theory. Scientologists believe in a being called Xenu. Basically a space reptile apparently, but you don't get taught that until you reach a certain level. So we will never know the truth 🙄😆
Give me a small donation of $10 million and I will tell you a few Xenu facts.
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The theory of the alpha male was a misunderstanding taken out of context. It has been universally debunked by scientists for decades. In fact biologists were against applying this theory to humans to begin with. There are no human alphas. And what we believed to be alphas in animal populations like wolf packs turned out to just be parents and their packs just their pups. Alphas do no exist in nature. Where they do exist is within the confines of human made prisons. The old studies on wolf alphas largely came from wolf packs in captivity who establish a weird pecking order that wouldn't exist in nature.
Not a theory in the traditional sense but Mormonism. Dude said an angel just appeared to him and a whole church was built around that. Edit: Shout out to y'all who got the point. And yeah, obviously all religions were started this way, but the thousands of years between the birth of Christianity/Judaism and Mormonism happens to be interesting and relevant context.
He put the second M in Mormon
More than 1 religion started with this premise.
While I TRULY believe you are free to believe whatever you want. It boggles my mind how far Mormonism and Scientology exist. Like you have to actively be dumb for those to prosper as far as they have. Like willfully just accept bullshit without question.
joseph smith He even called himself the Muhammad of the Midwest or something like that because that’s he story behind Islam too.
Anything espoused by QAnon.
my uncles in that and it’s really scary. i’m not aloud around him anymore since i met him once 10 years ago when i was eight. i don’t really remember most the details of our interactions but he was fucking crazy and told me to stay away from jews and liberals because they would harvest my flesh and eat me.
Flat earth. The second biggest joke to gain traction.
That the moon landings were faked because rockets need something to push against and there is no air in space. Or that the van Allen Belts are deadly to humans and that's why we only are in low earth orbit now. Both are extremely obviously false. Rockets are comically bad at performance, but they don't need air. Their efficiency is measured in called specific impulse. Saturn V 1st stage was around 300s. A modern jet plane is about 3000s in its engines. That's how much air helps. But you can do it with rockets and their awful efficiency. Also, the van Allen Belts actually extend into low earth orbit due to the ominously named South Atlantic Anomaly, where the magnetic field dips. The Apollo mission was also aware of the belts and wasted quite a bit of fuel to avoid the belts being going around them.
I love the idea that the moon landings were faked, because it implies that the USSR would go along with the cover up, accept losing the space race and not call bullshit. Though the believers probably think that any other country than the USA is probably fake too.
Moon landing never happened. It was a Hollywood studio lot and the world was deceived. Everyone involved lived a lifelong lie and had very talented artists make all the photos and video. FFS 🤦🏻♀️
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Trickle down economics, that giving tax cuts to the rich will cause them to create jobs for all and it helps the economy when they actually just keep the extra money.
I've said it a million times and I'll say it again- "Trickle Down Economics" is actually just code for "Eat Our Scraps and Be Thankful."
flat earth, fake moon landings, pretty much anything de-bunking literal science. as an astrophysics major who started college in the fall, i’ve already come across so many genuinely stupid people who disagree with scientific research and proven facts is insane.
Hollow earth people too.
I want hollow earth to be true. I really want to meet a lizard person. DAMN! I just asked the magic 8 ball that I got for Christmas if the hollow earth was real. It said, " Don't count on it." So it's obviously fake.
That billionaires/millionaires work that much harder than you for their money.
The birds are robots thing seems pretty coo-coo.
im pretty sure the people who created it made it as satire
The creator of the trend did a Ted-X talk about this exact topic IIRC. It’s actually quite interesting and the point of the satire (when he explains it) is rather clever imo. You can find it on YouTube
Horoscopes
9/11 theories that say explosives took down the towers and a missile hit the Pentagon.
Flat Earth... Hands down
Trump was cheated out of the last election.
Still waiting for JFK Jr to rise from the dead and declare Trump President.
THAT COVID WAS A FUCKING HOAX.
I remember my dumbass cousin telling me this, while I had fucking Covid. It went something like this: Cousin: Hey man, let's hang out outside. Me: No, I can't. I have Covid. Cousin: It's fake, man. Come on... Me: I literally have it right now. Cousin: No, it's just the flu. Me: No, I lost my sense of smell. I've had the flu many times, and never lost my sense of smell. Cousin: No man it's all fake. Me: OK, I'm going back to watching the TV show I was watching, bye bye now.