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.
Birds are not real!
Peter McIndoe did a thought provoking talk on TED back in 2023. The whole thing is worth watching IMO. But if you’re wanting to get down to the real stuff, it starts 5:08 of 13:50.
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I think Vince Neil of Motley Crue got a ridiculously short sentence for drunk driving manslaughter because his record company bought off the judge so that they could make money off him performing. I suspect a lot of famous people have that happen.
A lot of coverups seem to happen in high society. Check out the story of Natalie Wood, for instance.
Sheesh I didn’t know that one.
Mexicans are the future Gauls. The caesarian era was the end of real Roman democracy due to disgusting consolidation of wealth. When all the money leaves the USA for New Constantinople, probably after the Israeli Reich looks like the Ottoman empire, the Mexicans will invade the worthless boot of rotting NA, some time around when the Atlanta beach party scene really gets cranking at end of the world and the capital Denver is weak.
I’ll let you know if we ever grow a whimsical thirst to invade the future third world. 😉
…but the gauls didnt invade the roman empire…
The gauls were part of rome.
Goths, lombards, saxons, allemans, baiuvari, fanconians and others invaded rome
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…
I have seen videos of the machines injecting water into shrimps (lots of needles), this isn’t a conspiracy theory!
A similar thing is fat; force-feed cattle quickly and they get a big lump of fat (it will just melt away, but you still pay for it), feed them normally and exercise them and the fat will be in “stripes” and makes the meat taste way better.
If it was just fat! I save all the fat from cooking, but this thing… has no fat!
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.
high-steak conspiracy theory
Frustrating if true, since I’ve heard several people float the same conspiracy while shopping in my store, despite this not being something that we do. The price of meat (at least in Canada) has just risen to absurdities post-pandemic. I don’t even buy it anymore.
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My parents have a local butcher in town. It’s about half the price of the supermarket and excellent quality.
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This is absolutely a thing with chicken. Always go for the “Air-Chilled” chicken if you can afford it.
https://www.eatlikenoone.com/air-chilled-chicken-whats-the-difference.htm
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
A company in Canada, Lilydale, used to market their chicken as “no water added”
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.
This happened to me. I went through the payment process and finished on a confirmation page. A week later I got a notice that I didn’t pay and was being fined. I looked at my bank statements and sure enough the charge never went through. I didn’t make a big deal of it because the fine was barely more than what I would’ve been charged anyway.
They can also make money by tracking the link or better if have an app. If they’re not selling the info then they would at least use it for internal statistics which is fair but we don’t have to support that.
I like this because the app would also tell them exactly where to come look for the offenders car.
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”
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
That wouldn’t generally be needed here, though. At least in the cities where most people live, they are walking and using public transit just to live, eat, etc.
I’m pretty sure they actually did get a government subsidy which is unusual
I know a good number of Japanese cultural stuff (including video game companies) do! Not sure specifically in cases like “hey let’s give SEGA money so they can make the funny laundromat game more popular” though. Hence why it is my low-stakes conspiracy… Would be pretty cool if things like DDR really gets a subsidy though, it is genuinely a good means of cardio
Honestly that’s a good enough idea that I don’t think it even needs to be a conspiracy, they could openly advertise it.
PIU is Korean, so it would be a multi nation effort.
Microsoft deliberately fucks with your video and audio drivers before a big update so you have to reboot
This isn’t a conspiracy, it is a proven fact.
I don’t disagree, but I’d like some more info and/or sources.
Does anyone have a source on this? It’s 100% believable but I’m not turning anything up and this seems like something worth knowing more about
I think it is more that the update fucks with drivers? As in, updates bring updated stuff that probably interferes with still-running old stuff.
If my experience is common, the update ‘pre-loads’ some non-locked system files as time goes on while the update is downloaded but not technically applied by the tool. So these files get changed without a reboot, and while you may not be using them at the time of overwrite, when you next load them, there are subtle incompatibilities with the previous version and your active data.
Kind of like ‘The dll was replaced by the exe is still the old version’, and this causes a ton of small but annoying glitches, crashes, and odd audio behavior.
Untill reboot, which happens less and less often now that windows doesn’t bluescreen every few hours.
My conspiracy is that they are aware of it, and do not change it despite the risks it provides, to keep everyone in line with their update schedule, denying the user the rights to control their own hardware, again.
To be fair, the very same thing happens with Linux, when you install updates but don’t restart services (or, god forbid, the whole system). Really weird tiny issues accumulate until I am fed up and hit reboot.
proven fact
no source
I’m not one to stick up for Microsoft but uhhhhh fuck no
The battery level your phone shows is just made-up bullshit. It’s roughly accurate of course, but they can’t really check how much charge is in the battery with 1:100 accuracy, so it just counts down at a roughly constant rate making adjustments to the rate based on rough measurements of broadly whether the battery is “real full” or “mostly full” or “almost empty” or whatever.
The battery has a capacity reading down to the milivolts and the phone knows how much power it is using, which changes dynamically to meet the usage. The remaining battery level is determined by the voltage available at the current consumption. There is some averaging involved based on your usage profile.
So your battery level is accurate at a given time, but changes based on what you are doing and what you have running. So your battery will drain faster if you are playing an intensive game, but will last far longer if you have nothing unessential running and the screen is in sleep mode.
Apps like Facebook, chew through battery in the background because of how often it has to use resources to check for notifications, when when you don’t actually have the app open or in the recent apps list. So your battery will lose charge faster than you would expect when you haven’t been on your phone.
so, naw lil bro.
The remaining battery level is determined by the voltage available at the current consumption
Gets all condescending about how it works
Isn’t aware of the difference between V and mAh or the extremely horizontal (for most of the range) curve defining the relationship between them for Li-ion batteries
I got irritated enough by people spouting off at me to look up how it actually works, it’s not at all how you are describing, although describing it as “bullshit” is probably a stretch
So naw big bro
the flat voltage curve is only really a problem for LFP which is not really used in smartphones due to low energy density
But Phil, the difference between V and mAh is just current draw
You misspelled “resistance and time,” but close. The “A” part is the current.
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The battery has a driver, which is written in software that indicates level based on an underlying profile of how the battery drains.
Hence why Pixel4a users were suddenly shocked by an upgrade that halved their battery life because Google made a whoopsie on the battery profile.
We are saying the same thing, I was oversimplifying though.
The profile is based on the voltage of the battery, the capacity, and the permissible amp draw. The actual voltage reading informs the device of the real remaining capacity because the device can’t read capacity and can only infer it based on historic data compared against the profile. Battery temperature is also a throttling factor, but we don’t need to get that far into the battery management weeds.
Lithium ion battery chemistry is actually incredibly well understood and easily calculated as a point value and also extrapolated into capacity values using data on how you use your phone.
My brother in Christ, may I show you the glory of The Multimeter? You can check voltage of any battery or even individual cells if you can isolate them.
That’s not a conspiracy. That’s literally how it works.
I mean… It’s closer to 100 bins than like 3 bins as described.
It’s hard because it’s not a perfect linear relationship between battery voltage and battery percentage. When the battery is 80% full, the voltage hardly changes at all as it drains. But it can change significantly with unrelated factors, like age and temperature. So they have to use the integral of current consumption to calculate the battery level. There are other tricks, too, like using temperature to check battery percentage (when the battery is charging, it heats up if it’s nearly full), and some lithium ion batteries have a third wire for measuring the temperature.
You can get a voltage sensor that is accurate to three decimal points for literal cents, so yes, your phone does know how much energy is left in the battery. It also has current sensors, so knows how much energy is being used.
It does not know the capacity loss of the cell over time. That is why you should let the battery go completely dead and then charge it to max capacity as this will recalibrate the coulomb meter on the battery manager - batman
Preach sibling
Idk how multiple super assertive people all got the idea that “voltage = battery percent” and all wanted to yell it at me the same time lol
My understanding is that happens constantly as the battery is charged and discharged.
It tries but the value is floating until it actually has a full charge cycle. There is no way to know what the entire voltage range is. You’re getting into how efficient the chemistry is over time and that is impossible to measure. It can be estimated, but that is all theoretical and not real. When the battery is fully discharged, the time, temperature, and current can be used to determine Coulombs and that is the actual energy capacity.
I’m not an expert, but I have built many circuits. My main experience here is in reverse engineering some gaming hardware that had an advanced battery management chip from Diode Semiconductors. That had such a Coulomb battery meter. The board was a 3 layer PCB and I took that as a challenge. The batman chip was also a small ball grid array (pins are inaccessible on the back side. I didn’t have xrays when I did the first trace of all pins, so I had to fully understand the chip to trace all connections only using the vias. I think I have a chip or two in parts drawers that do the same thing, but I never built anything with them, or at least haven’t yet.
I don’t think I am going to take confident proclamations about how it works from someone who thinks “voltage” translates to “how much energy is left in the battery”.
https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-903-how-to-measure-state-of-charge
I don’t really know how this stuff works, that’s why it is my conspiracy theory instead of me just giving fun facts. But, I don’t think you know how this stuff works either.
It sounds like coulomb counting (current sensors, as you said) is often the method. Personally, I suspect there’s a decent amount of bullshit inserted into that to make it look “normal” when people are looking at how the number behaves, at the expense of accuracy. You might move your phone from cold to warm for example, and the usable energy in the battery might increase when that happens (or something) but it’s definitely not going to show your battery percent going up, even if it could detect it properly which I don’t think it can. Whether to say that means it’s “bullshit” is I guess a matter of opinion.
Phones don’t use lead acid batteries, genius. I don’t know why you think that study is relevant.
Also, your phone knows what the temperature of the battery is, and almost certainly takes that into account, although this affects the output voltage but not the amount of energy stored.
Li-ion is worse. I looked up a few different articles, I just kind of picked that one at random because I didn’t want to spend more time on it. This one is pretty succinct about it:
“This method is not suitable for some other cell chemistries like lithium-ion, which has a negligible change in its voltage throughout most of its charge/discharge cycle.”
Which is why the phone also monitors charge and discharge, or current through the battery.
My new conspiracy theory is that a gang of people have teamed up to try to wind me up on this particular topic in what was supposed to be a lighthearted nonsense-question to which I gave an appropriate nonsense-answer.
You’re the only one who actually did arrive at something which is pretty much the actual answer (“coulomb counting”), although you keep mucking it up by saying things like you “can get a voltage sensor” to get the energy left in the battery, or “current through the battery” when the battery is the only part current does not flow through during discharge, or by making up wild random guesses that something is “almost certainly” taken into account. Just take all that extra stuff away and stick with “the phone monitors discharge” and you’ll be pretty much right.
Hopefully we can put this whole endeavor behind us now, and go back to talking about Chipotle and chemtrails.
It’s very clear from this exchange that you don’t know dick about electronics.
Paul McCartney died in a car crash in 1964 and was replaced by someone who turned out to be a way better song writer.
Isn’t that just, “The walrus was Paul?”
Goo goo g’joob.
We had an art teacher in school who believed this theory and he dedicated an entire day to showing us all the evidence that supported it.
Way better explanation than just personal development 👍
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?
Your spring forward closer to paying taxes, once paid, they give your time back
Wait… when is this happening?
Obviously those hours are taken back by the babies with the balls to be born after the redistribution.
Big Time conspiracy. I love it.
All brains should aspire to work like your brain.
Those two million all happened to be born after daylight savings time but before the hours are returned. So they get to live with an extra hour.
When they die it cancels out thus the Big Time Bowl doesn’t overflow or run dry.
They use them to farm the adrenechrome babies
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.
I don’t think they said farming was fun, and I’m also not sure that you lived on a farm “before people started measuring time” 🤷🏾♂️
Farming? I was talking about data engineering.
A fellow historia civilis subscriber I see
There are dozens of us.
huh?
Joy murdered Bing Bong in Disney’s Inside Out (2015).
Touch screens in cars are evidence that the auto industry is actively trying to increase auto accidents.
Nah, that’s purely a cost saving measure. Shitty touch screens are cheaper than buttons.
Industrial grade switches (i.e.: buttons) are expensive because of very high quality control requirements, and add a lot more parts that can fail to a car. It is the same thing that happened with mobile phones. Going with touchscreen reduce a lot the number of parts to check and parts that can fail, even if usability is very bad for the end-user.
Is that true? I’m too scared to look up prices. Electronically, touchscreens are infinitely more complex, but I can believe economies of scale brought it down lower than buttons… I just don’t want to believe that.
They have to have a screen anyway, backup cameras are mandated by law
Routing wires for buttons is an absolute clusterfuck as well.
Pretty much no button these days directly controls something, it’s routed through the BMS. Headlights may be one of the few that are switched without some type of computer in between, possibly power windows too?
And they’re all on a PCB.
Factorio has taken over cars.
Even so, each individual button needs to be connected to that PCB separately, and will only have the function of what it says on the button, or possibly a couple hidden functions through programming.
Touch screens are essentially one connection for infinite buttons with different screens and menus.
Touchscreens can be made at massive scale and then repurposed in batches for everywhere. They’re always the same (roughly speaking). Buttons are individual components, you have to lay the whole thing out custom how you want it to be, you have to put all these fiddly little components together… just having a robot make a big square object along with 199,999 other ones is cheaper, even if technically the big square object is orders of magnitude more complex than the chunks of plastic and springs and buttons etc.
I think the assembling is the crucial part as you stated. I mean, buttons can also be manufactured in scale by a robot, but every button needs to be wired, the touchscreen only once.
Yup, that about matches my thought process when I made that comment. Economies of scale make the complexity irrelevant.
I’ve seen comments from auto manufacturers outright stating this. I think they also overestimated how much consumers care about touchscreens.
