German city offers $1.1M to whoever proves it doesn’t exist

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Re: German city offers $1.1M to whoever proves it doesn’t exist

#51

Post by close04 » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 6:59 PM UTC

gibba999 wrote: post #50

close04 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poppycock! :) You can’t cry wolf for 25 years and then say you didn’t have time to collect evidence. This was the thing to do before making the claim. After ~25 years of this running conspiracy if none of the evidence was collected we can call it evidence that the conspiracy theory is indeed fake.

Who says I didn't have the time? 1) The contest has a very specific standard for evidence. Just because I went there and saw no such city existed doesn't mean that gets me a million bucks. That's my testimony. 2) Even going back, I need a high standard of evidence. They want irrefutable proof. That means I'd need to have some way of, in a photographically-secure way, guaranteeing I was there, and some kind of temper-…

> They want irrefutable proof.

You should have been able to provide irrefutable proof even without the $1.1M. Otherwise you just admitted having an unfounded supposition and pretending it's a fact. Again, 25 years is plenty of time to obtain irrefutable proof. I mean it's not rocket science.

Put a camera on your car (or even have a caravan of cars, harder to fake), live stream the video including a GPS, driving along the known route and filming the mile markers until you get to the vast empty field that is that town. Get people on reddit or something to decide at every step which speed to have, if you should flip the wipers, this kind of thing that proves you're live. You can rent a helicopter, I mean $1.1M will cover a lot of expenses.

And once you have irrefutable proof other people will just claim everyone and everything in there is part of your conspiracy setup. I mean that's the go-to explanation for any conspiracy theorist whenever they are presented with any proof, no matter how solid. So if it works for you it should also work against :).

> They'll claim they proved their existence. It does no such thing

You are correct. This will not prove its existence. It will prove that nobody can provide evidence to support the conspiracy theory even after having 25 years to collect it and $1.1M to motivate them to present it.

> they'll only post entries online they find amusing

Of course. The other entries don't exist. And they'll show you irrefutable proof of that only if you offer a prize.

Re: German city offers $1.1M to whoever proves it doesn’t exist

#52

Post by gibba999 » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 1:16 AM UTC

close04 wrote: post #51

gibba999 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who says I didn't have the time? 1) The contest has a very specific standard for evidence. Just because I went there and saw no such city existed doesn't mean that gets me a million bucks. That's my testimony. 2) Even going back, I need a high standard of evidence. They want irrefutable proof. That means I'd need to have some way of, in a photographically-secure way, guaranteeing I was there, and some kind of temper-…

> They want irrefutable proof. You should have been able to provide irrefutable proof even without the $1.1M. Otherwise you just admitted having an unfounded supposition and pretending it's a fact. Again, 25 years is plenty of time to obtain irrefutable proof. I mean it's not rocket science. Put a camera on your car (or even have a caravan of cars, harder to fake), live stream the video including a GPS, driving along…

Let's say I go into my wife's room and find her purse on the floor. Do I know she left it there? Yes, barring bizarre circumstances. Is it just an unfounded supposition? No. Do I have irrefutable proof the next day? No I don't. I didn't have any reason to generate it.

Perhaps for some odd reason, a bunch of Germans thought it'd be funny to make up a city, claim a conspiracy theory to cover it up, and posted some things about it to the Internet. Perhaps there's more to it than that and there's a great government coverup. Do I really care? Not so much. There's a bunch of people pretending there's a city. I don't know why, and I don't really care why. It's somebody else's problem.

Now, would I go to Europe for 1.1 million dollars? Sure. If I knew I'd get paid. Everything here screams I won't get paid. For the possibility of getting paid, I might even generate proof next time I'm traveling in that part of the world. But at the end of the day, I'm not dropping work deadlines on a few weeks notice for likely not getting paid.

This will absolutely not prove that nobody can provide evidence to support the conspiracy theory even after having 25 years to collect it and $1.1M to motivate them to present it. It will prove no one decided to drop everything in their life and spend a couple grand for the possibility of maybe getting paid by some marketing ploy, con artist, or otherwise.

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