I am an atheist and I believe the world would be much better without religions. Having said that, I don't conisder it as a scam in itslef. Instead they must have been something evolved over the time due to our ignorance, fear and helplessness. The very same factors that still keep them going.
But hell yeah, people are exploited in the name of religion. I'm from India, one of the largest so called democracies, currently under the governance of a fascist hindutva party that thrives on polarizing people in the name of religion.
BTW I was actually looking for specific instances of scams carefully plotted by known people, companies or even countries instead of broad answers like religion.
Having said that, I don’t conisder it as a scam in itslef
I think the more correct thing to say is that Organized Religion is a scam. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being religious (provided you don't force those views on others), but organized religion always winds up rotten at the top - and it's not surprising. Organized religion is one of the most powerful tools for controlling people, even if it wasn't (though it might have been) intended to be that way at the beginning. A king/president/dictator can threaten the lives of their subjects, but only a holy man can threaten their immortal soul (from the perspective of the devotee anyways).
Now that's a take I completely stand behind and agree with. I couldn't have put it better myself. That said, some religions were not made with the intent of controlling others. I don't think Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism were made with the intent to control people. We can argue about Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as they were made for control by their founders, and what they intended for these movements after their deaths we do not know (or at least I don't, maybe someone out there does).
Again - I'm not arguing necessarily that any of them started out that way, in fact - I'm willing to bet that very few (looking at you, Mormons) actually were. Most religion (in my humble opinion) just stems from folks trying to make sense of an unfathomable universe using what tools are available to them at the time. But once you have the religion, and you have holy men/women who have the ability to excersize some form of power over their flock, you'll inevitably find corrupt people flocking to those positions, as they do in every position of power. Then over time they'll carve out more power for themselves and more authority, find ways of extracting influence and power from their positions until soon you've got "holy men" living in palaces with the authority of kings.
It's just human nature for positions of power to eventually become corrupted to some degree, and positions of religious authority offer an unparalleled lever in which to move the masses, which only serves to make it more attractive to would-be tyrants
Religion was needed, but at some point logic and critical thinking should have been enough.
The issue is the wealthiest benefit when the masses don't have the tools to use that. They want people who won't question rules and blindly follow them.
Humans are just animals, we're not born with those abilities, we need to be taught.
So we see education outright cut or forced to focus on rote memorization rather than the process to understand and figure shit out on our own.
We should be past religion as a species, but it's not automatic, we have to continually teach the next generation to think for themselves
Just imagine what could have been done in the last 300 years if every dollar that was donated to churches went to some other cause, or back into the pockets of the masses. There is an immense amount of wealth that is trapped in the collective real estate, bank accounts, etc owned by churches. I'm not even talking about megachurches or the mormon's giant stack of cash, just mom'n'pop little parishes that are everywhere across the US.
If ALL that money was still kicking around in the economy and in the pockets of people to spend on real things, building real businesses, etc...we'd be way better off.
Always makes me sad when I visit my in-laws who live in a particularly bible thumpy area and you go and there are spots there where churches outnumber normal businesses. It seems like it's just a huge drain on the local economy devoting that much money into propping up churches of various kinds...
There’s a church across the street from my home in a small rural town in Oklahoma. It sits completely empty except for about 90 minutes from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM when about 6 cars pull up into the parking lot and maybe 15 people saunter in for Sunday service after ringing a loud bell announcing to the whole neighborhood. None of these attendees live in the neighborhood I might add.
There are literally dozens of other churches just like it throughout the town. It blows my mind that a religion that claims to be about spreading the love of their savior and saving as many people as possible from literal damnation would let a resource like that go unused. They could have volunteers there every day of the week helping to improve the community and help people in need but they couldn’t care less.
Religion is used as a scam by many people. It is also used in other ways by other people.
Sometimes I mull over what state we'd be in as a society if instead of celebrating a man's deeds we had been celebrating nature and the environment that hosts us since the beginning.
I can't help but think there would be a lot less damage to the environment and less greed.
Homeopathy, acupuncture, ozone therapy... all "alternative medicines" basically.
Like the old joke, "What do you call alternative medicine that works?" "Medicine!"
If some herb, plant or extract has a proven effect it will be adopted by real medicine, and all that is left in alternative medicine is the scams that do not work.
You’re almost right. Modern medicine needs to synthesize natural compounds to profit fully from them. They can’t just use natural remedies and present them to patients because they can’t patent them.
I'm sure that's a major part of it, but I also wouldn't want to live in a world where we could only get aspirin from willow bark. We either wouldn't have enough aspirin or we wouldn't have any more willow trees. Medicines derived from the actual source aren't possible on a global scale in most cases.
Capitalism is a blight on society and has lead to countless deaths. But in a utopia where money doesn't exist and people create medicine for the world only to help people with no profit they still need to synthesize it.
major part of it, but I also wouldn’t want to live in a world where we could only get aspirin from willow bark. We either wouldn’t have enough aspirin or we wouldn’t have any more willow trees. Medicines derived from the actual source aren’t possible on a global scale in most cases.
Capitalism is a blight on society and has lead to countless deaths. But in a utopia where money doesn’t exist and people create medicine for the world only to help people wit
I agree with you but in that case, the need to synthesize it could be made entirely based on practicality rather than profit.
Not all countries have for profit medicine though. I'm sure it's a factor, but it's not a universal thing.
There are other reasons why "natural" remedies get more scrutiny in the medical community, and the other comments have touched on a few of them
There's a slight gotcha here:
I'm in Asia and a lot of traditional chinese medicine you can buy is just regular medicine with a marketing disguise hiding the fact. Why yes, this is a box of whatever the fuck extract, very interesting, old northern recipe to cure the shit, let me just check what's written on this paper, and, yep, there it is, it's just Loperamide but with an additive to make it taste like Ginseng. Got it.
Once I made a joke online about paying for homeopathy by dipping a dollar in a jar of water and giving them the jar, and like five people I know unfollowed me lol
Did you hear the one about the homeopathic who tried to commit suicide?
He took a 10X dilution of cyanide.
Lol yeh a surprising amount of people believe in it.
I once trained to work in pharmacies, we had companies present on their products and one of them was selling homeopathic products. One of the other students asked if it actually worked and the rep's response was 'if it didn't do you think people would buy it?' I didn't say anything but I thought to myself yes, there absolutely are people who hand over money for dumb shit that doesn't work lol.
I have a pinched nerve. I went to many doctors, done many tests, went to months of PT and was still in pain. I went to my acupuncturist and she is able to release the muscles around the pinch enough that my right arm doesn’t feel constantly numb. I a man of science. I don’t believe in he Chi traveling my body etc but the physical result of the acuponcture cannot be denied.
And there are physical therapists who do acupuncture strictly for muscle release without all of the chi stuff.
Yes absolutely. They call it needling though
Acupuncture has actually been shown to help in some cases beyond a placebo effect.
There isn't much evidence there. There's dry needling, which is the evidence-based alternative with different techniques - but much of that is built on the same evidence behind massage therapy.
I feel the same about chiropractic - many people call bullshit, but I’ll be damned if they don’t help me. Like you, I don’t believe “your spine is where all your problems originate” like some chiropractics try to peddle, but the dude pushes on my back and it pops and it feels better.
My brother was in total kidney failure and his chiro said the pain was likely "toxins" released from his session. Utter quack. They arent all hacks, but they can do real damage. They can paralyze you for life or even worse. I hope you will not have firsthand experience
I used to believe the "they aren't all hacks thing" until I met more chiropractors. While I would like to believe that there's a subset of them out there who treat it more like a science of doing adjustments and what not, I don't think that's actually the case. My mom works for a chiropractor and has gone to several of their conventions over the years, and from what it sounds like they are all nutjobs who believe aligning your spine will cure you of all disease.
I would really love to see the numbers of how many chiropractors are antivaxxers. I bet it's in the high 90%.
I base that solely off the fact that some have MDs and a dislike of sweeping generalizations... no matter how true 😅
Oh I know, and I don’t trust any that ask me what other non-skeletal ailments I have (I had one tell me my acid reflux could be cured by chiro). But I have a few skeletal problems I go to them for about 3 times a year, and it helps.
Yeah but so can regular doctors.
A friend went in for a colonoscopy and died from a series of complications. First they nicked the inside of her colon, and it started bleeding. Then there was a whole series of stupid responses, based on the meds she was taking and had disclosed. They just made one mistake after another, until she died.
None of us knew she was walking into that hospital for the last time, because we were all relying on the doctors to be masters of their craft.
To find religious behavior in the medical field doesn’t take long. Another friend has described being unable to process patients because the blood pressure equipment is broken. They’re down to one machine, and the manual squeeze bulbs have all failed, so there’s a massive backlog in their clinic.
Now, they know clinical outcomes are suffering as a result of the lack of throughput, but they have to take blood pressure on every patient before they do anything else. So they’re beholden to this policy, and can’t practice medicine in a rational manner. But they’re embedded in a system that won’t let them use their eyes and brains to operate on what’s in front of them.
So even without belief in the supernatural, doctors are serving a “false god” which is the bureaucracy, and because they can’t serve two gods that means actual medical practice itself takes a second seat.
The issue with chiropractors is that they treat the symptom and not the cause. If your back is misaligned, it’s because your muscles are pulling on it the wrong way, the chiro will pull it back in place but now your muscles are still pulling the wrong way and they may have pulled on the muscle to make it move and may have injured it, now your muscle says hell no you don’t and starts pulling even more. It’s instant relief with little lasting result. which is a great business model, instant result and returning customers because the problem isn’t treated. It’s like going to the mechanic because your motor is out of oil but not trying to fix the leak so you come back every week to refill the oil.
The problem is I’ve been to numerous doctors, working with a pain management specialist now, done physical therapy with a few different places for months, do physical therapy every morning, do yoga, exercise every day, and still no relief. So, like, sometimes it gets so bad I go to the chiropractor because at least they can give me some relief.
Yeah and the idea that a doctor is going to treat the root cause is laughable.
You go to a doctor with pain caused by muscles pulling too much out of alignment and they (a) won’t recognize the fact about muscles at all, (b) will start talking surgery, and (c) will either give you a prescription for pain meds that you wouldn’t need if they simply fixed the pain, or make the whole thing about denying you the meds that you aren’t even asking for.
The few things they do that are effective are better delivered by an evidence-based provider (e.g., physiotherapist, massage therapist) without the pseudoscience.
See an osteopath instead, in the UK at least, they are trained and regulated unlike chiropractors who regularly kill or permanently disable people with unsafe and inappropriate "manipulations".
osteopath
Thanks, I'll check it out (though I'm in the US). Also, I researched my chiropractor very thoroughly to ensure that he's not likely to kill or disable me.
edit: turns out my insurance covers osteopathic manipulative medicine, and there's 1 practitioner in my area (25 miles, probably more in the 50 mile range since I'm close to a big city). I will be making an appointment with her. Thanks kind stranger!
Awesome I hope they are helpful to you ☺️
The guy who told you to see an osteopath is a little misinformed and had things a bit upside down. Osteopathy is basically just chiropractic and has the same pseudoscientific origins.
However, for historical reasons osteopaths are very different either side of the Atlantic.
In the UK, osteopaths are basically just chiropractors with pretensions. In the US, doctors of Osteopathy are basically just doctors who went to a school that teaches osteopathic nonsense alongside real medicine, and they are licensed and operate as real physicians.
I love how ruthless the wikipedia pages on these topics are, by the way. Do check them out if you get the chance.
Hey umm so ... homeopathy. There is a case to be made --hear me out here please-- that it might have been effective once, but now we've got millions of "practitioners" doing things that clearly do not work.
The reasoning is obvious.
The concentration of practitioners within the population is clearly too damn high (insert meme here). To show how effective it can truly be, all we need to do is to dilute the ratio ... by a lot.
Don't you agree that this is worth looking into?
(/s in case anyone is in doubt)
A few weeks ago I got the flu and went to see my doctor. She wasn't in so I got sent to a substitute who examined my ear with a weird beeping device. I asked her what it was and she just said that she practices "Chinese medicine".
She told me her device indicated that I have huge problems with my thyroid and she said I should get some sort of crystal necklace that's good for that and that I should apply some essential oils daily. Of course, she happened to sell those at a good price.
I went to have a blood test and my thyroid was fine, my values were right in the middle of the acceptable range.
Ponzi schemes, especially the insurance companies. They really are a Ponzi scheme.
Think about it, they promise you things asking for money, then when you need their services they decide where you go, how much they will pay (leaving the rest for you to pay as a deductible), then they turn around and increase your costs for their services, that they fight tooth and nail not to pay anything.
I argue insurance in and of itself is no ponzi scheme. Working together is the basis of all civilisation. Trying to make a business out of a social service however ... that's rife for abuse, yes.
I work in the insurance industry and I 100% agree with this.
The only time it's wise to take out an insurance policy is when
A) It's legally required (though this is sometimes due to lobbying by the insurance companies themselves)
B) When you absolutely will not be able to actually pay for a potential, but necessary expense by yourself (cancer treatments and stuff like that)
So Health Insurance, Auto Insurance (even if your car is cheap and self-insurable, the car you hit may not be), Home-owners insurance and stuff like that are necessary and generally a good financial bet, even if they are crooked af.
Any "micro-insurances" though? All total scams. Travel insurance, phone insurance (or "Extended Warranties"), Apple Care, all that kind of shit is 100% going to cost you more money to have than it'll save you - unless you get really really lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it). You'd be better off spending what you'd pay on those insurance premiums on a hand of blackjack, I'll bet the odds would be slightly more in your favor that way
Ugh my parents both insist on travel insurance. What if you get sick?? Idk, I'll cancel the stuff I can and take the loss on what I can't, for all the travel I've done the amount of times that has happened does not even remotely come close to how much I would have paid each time for travel insurance.
No mom, I'm not going to insure our 2 night stay at the Hilton in (mid sized city). I'm sure it's going to be fine.
Last time I did was for a very very expensive flight across an ocean, just because it was like, 15 dollars on a 2000 flight for a few people. Fine, but everything else we took the risk. (And we did not use it)
Travel insurance is especially terrible, because a lot of the time it's a pretty substantial premium, and actually filing a claim on it is a HUGE PITA.
I worked for a traveler insurance company before, and we denied most claims that came in. People would buy insurance on a $100 concert ticket, paying a $10 premium for the insurance, then when they'd go to file the claim, we'd require a doctors note, so now they also have to cough up a $20 copay and a whole afternoon just to get a note saying "yup, this person is sick". And that's just one of the many ways people got fleeced. During COVID, a lot of travel insurance claims got denied because illnesses resulting from pandemics aren't covered in some policies as well
not surprised at all, I've found it's just better to learn the cancellation policy of your items. Most hotels are full refund if they know >48 hours, and if less usually you'll at least get points/credit back which for me I'll absolutely use next time. Not worth the premium and the hassle to get cash back if I only find out less than 48 hours ahead of time
Thanks for your input, it helps not make me sound like a conspiracy theorist or anti-biz whack job
nothing conspiracy theorist about it at all. If anyone gives you sideways looks when you mention that insurance is a scam, just point out the very simple and undeniable fact that insurance companies are (very) profitable. That means, by definition that the average customer pays more in premiums than they get in payouts, and not just a bit more, a lot more, as that profit they make is after they pay their thousands of employees, award multi-million dollar bonuses to their executives, pay for their bigass skyscrapers, and all that other shit. If insurance was a "fair" deal, they'd be losing money from the administration costs
Always self-insure if you can afford it
Travel insurance is my big one. Why would you not get that? That seems like such a stupid risk not to get that.
Like if I get hit by a car in the middle of nowhere and they got to fly my home because the medical care there sucks. That's going to cost an absolute fortune. Even having to send my dead body home will cost my family loads.
Why would you not get that? That seems like such a stupid risk not to get that.
Pretty much for all the reasons I said in my comment - you'll almost certainly spend more on premiums for travel insurance than you'll ever claim (this is true of all insurance) and the expenses incurred by self-insuring are generally manageable. Even in the two situations you refer to, we're "only" talking about costs of a few thousand, and both of those are highly unlikely events that most people go their whole lives not dealing with. you're much better off putting the money you'd spend on that travel insurance into an emergency fund to cover those kinds of unexpected expenses.
Insurance is only a good financial call if you risk completely bankrupting yourself by not having insurance, otherwise you're just trading potential lump sum costs for small continuous costs, and the premiums will generally always wind up being more than what you're saving (because if they weren't, then the Insurance companies wouldn't be making so much money).
That being said, it's your money, if you'd rather accept that you're paying more over a lifetime on travel insurance than you're saving just to have the peace of mind that you won't have to dip into savings for any incident that happens before or during the trip (assuming your incident doesn't fall under one of the many carefully crafted exclusions that the insurance companies add to their policies to prevent paying out, which it probably will), then by all means, buy it - but if you're buying it because you think it's the financially savy move, and you have at least a few grand in your bank account for emergencies, then you're kidding yourself.
I just read a news article this week about a young Australian man on vacation in Indonesia who got in an accident. His family now face costs of around $350,000 because his insurance didn't cover riding motorized scooters.
I think travel insurance is generally wise to have, and to be aware of what you are covered for. This is an example both of the potential costs and how if you don't read your policy carefully they will fuck you over.
When you say travel insurance, are you thinking of overseas medical expenses?
I cut my foot on some rocks in the US and that insurance claim paid for all the previous travel insurance I'd taken out previously.
I got travel insurance recently for a hiking trip with my wife. We had an emergency and my wife had to be airlifted out by helicopter, and we were so glad to have the travel insurance because it covers emergency evacuation up to $10,000 (and the helicopter costed around $5,000). Awesome, right?
Well... actually no. Turns out, the terms of our policy dictate we needed to call insurance first and have them organize the airlift. Since we dialed 911 and organized the helicopter ourselves, our insurance won't cover it. I guess it's my fault for not reading the fine print, but it feels pretty scummy from the insurance company. Even if we had read the fine print, in the moment I don't think I would have remembered as my immediate instinct is to contact emergency services.
That's not a Ponzi scheme. Sorry, but this misuse of the term really grinds my gears.
A Ponzi scheme is a specific scam promoted as an investment, but in reality the payouts made to early victims come from the incoming money paid by new investors.
Oh my god, thank you so much! I'm glad I'm not the only one that sees it. They get money, they invest that money in pension funds, and then they try not to pay that back. The only things stopping it from being one legally are some slight changes such as the investment part and the part where they pay back to people in need, not people at the top.
A large portion of art/artifacts are forgeries. Everyone is alright with it because galleries and collectors want to brag about having some unique old art piece and forgers are very good at making pieces that would fool anyone who is just looking at it.
My personal conspiracy theory is that almost all art the public is exposed to is a forgery. Why show the plebs the real thing? We wouldn’t notice a difference anyway.
Maybe whenever you hear those stories about a famous work of art being stolen and later recovered, they've actually just stolen the forgery and the galley just puts up a new fake one.
The robbers then can't sell it because they have a worthless fake and the 'real' one is clearly on display in the gallery, and they can't expose the fraud because then they'd out themselves and go to jail.
The perfect scam!
That's what they do with a lot more paintings that you would think. Not because they don't want the plebs to look at them but because being exposed to the environment would cause irreparable damage to it. So they have experts make recreations and display those.
This isn't really a conspiracy theory is it? I thought it was something they were open about that they often have replicas on display for security/preservation reasons
There was a fantastic interview on The Jordan Harbinger Show podcast with a professional forger. I'd recommend searching for it. I've been meaning to give it a second listen for a few years, but have too much other content.
That you can get rich if you work hard.
Additionally, that it's okay to work yourself until death, because when you die you'll actually live a new eternal life of permanent luxury.
Someone already mentioned religion, yes.
Lotteries. They're just tax for poor people.
I think most people buying a lottery ticket know that it's a loss on average. I think people buy it for the experience and the dreams that it represents. From that perspective, I don't think that it's a scam for most people but rather just buying a slice of fantasy
You quite literally described the scam part though, selling false hope
You only need to squeeze out an amount the size of a pea on to the bristles of your toothbrush.
The image of squeezing along the entire length of the brush bristles was concocted by an ad agency, a la Mad Men, to make consumers use their toothpaste faster, hence buy more product.
I've never used that much. I just assumed it was to look nice since a pea sized about would look silly in a picture. I think it I used that much my mouth would be so full of foam it would be uncomfortable
I swear it's also why they made that newer garbage cap design that slowly leaks toothpaste and gums up unless you carefully clean the end and fully close it every time. I know y'all know what I am talking about!
The garbage flip cap instead of the good old screw on lid
Homeopathy. It's literally based on the idea that diluting stuff turns it into a remedy.
joke's on you, i've been drinking 100000x distilled dinosaur piss and i'm growing stronger by the day
Wait... Distilled?
i'm glad someone said something
no comment though
Ah, the Bear Grylls diet.
Homeopaths: thoroughly confused by cordial.
The McDonald's Monopoly promotions
Wait, they were scams?
I knew employees fixed a couple, but...
It wasn't McDonald's themselves that were scamming, it's more like the trusted 3rd party they engaged to run the promotion had a bad actor that used his position to fix the game.
He began stealing winning game pieces after a supplier mistakenly provided him a sheet of the anti-tamper seals needed to securely conduct the legitimate transfer of winning pieces. Jacobson first offered the game pieces to friends and family but eventually began selling them to Gennaro "Jerry" Colombo of the Colombo crime family, whom he had met by chance at the Atlanta airport.[11] Colombo would then recruit people to act as contest winners in exchange for half of the winnings.[9][10]
I remember getting like 3 tickets for "part 1 out of 2 for a free car" a few months ago when they were doing the monopoly thing. I now realise that the employees probably just took all the part 2 ones for themselves.
They definitely didn't because they count the sleeves that those prize pieces are on.
What really happens is they print 5 million part 1 pieces and like 10 part 2 pieces.
printer ink, it costs them like 3 cents to make each cartridge and they sell it for so god damn much.
they also go out of their way to have chips in the cartridges and in the printers that make the printer not function if any ink is even running low, doesn't matter if you want to print something in black and white you had better fucking buy more cyan ink
The whole issue here is that people fall for the trick of buying the cheapest printer available, that is clearly way cheaper than what it costs to build. Then people get cranky for having to buy these proprietary cartridges which are way overpriced to cover the cost of the printer.
The easiest solution is to buy a laser printer (unless you need photo finish on your prints). It's a higher initial cost, but it never dries out. Would it cost me more that an ink printer in the long run? Maybe, but with my infrequent printing, i wouldn't have to replace dried out cartridges every year.
Anyone who buys a color laser printer should be aware that the initial cartridges, at least from HP, are not as full as refills, so you will have to replace them fairly soon and it is expensive. That being said, the refills will last a looooong time.
Also, and the main reason why I purchased one, the printer will just work, even if you don't print anything for a couple of weeks, or months even. I went through a couple of inkjets (not the cheapest ones), which would constantly get dried out, a head clogged, etc, before I said "fuck it," and sprung for a laser. My wallet isn't that happy, but it sure is nice not gambling on whether the damn printer will actually print.
I had an amazing multifunction colour laser printer. It always worked. It scanned straight to OCRd PDF which it placed on an FTP server. It was full duplex, in printing and scanning. It copied ultra-quickly. The toner was endless, or so it seemed. It was everything I needed and wanted in a printer.
But my wife thought it was “ugly” and “too big”. It became a real sticking point, this thing. So eventually it was replaced by a shitty ink-jets so “we could print good photos at home”. Now it’s clogged up to fuck, no amount of head cleaning works and she’s complaining about the shitty quality prints.
Stand your ground on a good printer. Stand. Your. Ground.
Cryptocurrency in general. Even on the surface, as presented, the main appeal to buy in is "to get rich from it" and the main way you're supposed to get rich is "other people buying in, get in early while you can."
Ponzi. Schemes. All of them.
It does have a utility though, buying drugs, moving money past capital controls, and creating fake revenue/losses for laundering money and tax evasion.
You forgot the human trafficking potential. Checkmate
The dollar is the favourite currency for that stuff. Cryptocurrencies are meant to take power away from banks and give it to the people. Sure, the vast majority of the people use them for spsculation, but that doesn't make the technology useless. It's just that people are mostly interested in making as much money as they can. That's a society problem, not cryptocurrency's.
The main appeal is the ability to make transactions without intermediaries. The problem is that most people have as the only interest to get richer and richer and there will be always other people happy to sell them that dream.. For a fee. These are the vastmajorituy of the people in cryptocurrencies, but that doesn't disreguard the power and utility of the technology. It's easy to shit on the tool, but the real problem is the greed-driven society we live in.
I disagree that cryptocurrency in itself is a scam. It can have legitimate utility, for example I want to exchange money for international services without a credit card or mailing an envelope of cash/cheque. Bitcoin and some others are mainstream enough that I can do this.
That said, investing in them is absolutely a scam, using it as a marketing buzzhype is a scam, and most of them are founded as scams.
It can have legitimate utility
Sure, sure. But does it and can it actually stay that way?
I haven't seen a functioning example actually out there yet of a planet-burning electricity-wasting math busywork generator that actually does anything it supposedly can do besides become another ruinous and wasteful grift that does more damage to the planet than whatever convenience it supposedly offers to comfort the comforted.
It clearly has lower utility than being able to buy drugs legally
Its best use cases are only circumstantial and in every case it wastes a lot of electricity, jacks up the price of video cards, and dumps a lot of extra carbon into the atmosphere. It's like a shitty planet-burning Rube Goldberg machine.
You take small loans each month via a credit card that you have to pay back. This increases an imaginary number that lets you take out bigger loans in the furure.
This is all tracked by private companies that you trust with your personal data. That, or you'll not be able to take out a loan if you want to buy a house or start a business.
If you have a good credit score it means that you don't overspend or forget to pay, which you can also achieve with a regular debit card by default. This doesn't serve people, only the banks who expect that a number of people will overspend or not be able to pay their loans back.
Credit cards alone aren't the problem. Forcing them on people with the credit score system is.
Coming from a civilized country where the credit score is calculated by looking at income, taxes and property, I cannot fathom how the US credit score calculation is supported by anyone.
o
/ \ Morals
/ ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾
Money /
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A lot of people actually like it because it really doesn't work the way OP said it did. They are partially correct, but you also get rewarded for perverse incentives. If you double pay your CC, it will actually slightly lower your credit score. If you have a lot of credit cards with no balance, that can also lower your score. The quickest way to buildup credit in the US is to get a card that has a 0% 18 Month introductory interest rate. Pay the minimum balance each month, and save the cash to pay it all off in 17 months. You will accumulate credit like crazy, holding a balance strangely increases your credit (until the balance gets too high or you start missing payments, then it will take a nosedive).
Interest, late fees, holding a balance, a lot of the bad stuff is actually weirdly good for your credit in the US. I mean it makes sense... they want to reward people who are stupid and pay interest, but actually have enough income to keep making payments forever.
When someone from the US remarks about their credit score, it always causes me to raise eyebrows. You can be poor and have a high credit score, it's incredibly common.
One way to make credit scores more consumer friendly would be to make it totally transparent what data is collected, retained and transmitted when calculating the score. If you want to open a new line of credit, instead of having businesses look up all this shit behind your back you'd request a letter of credit and provide it to the business yourself, knowing exactly what is in it.
But no, instead it's a total mystery how it is calculated and you just have to hope that they don't get confused and make a mistake because it can wreck your life if they do.
In many countries, mine included, there's no credit score system. We recently took out a bigger loan to buy a house and what we had to provide was:
proof of a steady income (in our case from our employer)
3 months of bank account history (to prove that we don't overspend)
written permission that they can request our data from the central (government operated) loan database
That's it. From these they could tell that we are safe to loan money to because we'll most likely be able to pay it back.
I don't see how a credit score system is essential when you can provide them with the necessary data only when it's needed.
Trim out the first half of that sentence and you'd have yourself a top comment.
Tax-free charitable organizations
In a society with capitalism at its core, externalities exist. That's a fact that everyone agrees with. Nonprofits help mitigate those gaps. Calling all nonprofits scams is misguided at best. I think OP is looking for something more specific. What nonprofits?
There are a lot who have an extremely positive impact. It's a small minority that causes a huge number of issues.
I personally help out with a non profit charity and we get a lot done with not a lot financially. The reduced taxes are a huge help.
There are a lot who have an extremely positive impact. It’s a small minority that causes a huge number of issues.
I would argue it's the other way around frankly
To be fair, there are some good ones out there. I worked for a drug-rehab company in the 90s as the IT head that got mostly government funding for a 6 month-rehab-program for non-violent drug offenders (mostly stuff like heroine, cocaine, etc.). We also had an in-prison program but I don’t think that was as effective. Of course to get government contact money we would have to meet lots of strict guidelines too.
I definitely more wary of ones that don’t get any public funding and therefore have practically no guardrails and less forced transparency.
Landlords aren't a scam, they're anti-society economic hoarders and gougers. Scam suggests there's something voluntary about 'falling for' it. Human trafficking isn't a scam, and so nor are landlords.
Bitcoin
To be fair, there are much worse projects too that were rugpulled. But I guess these didn't go on long.
Restaurants being rated with “Michelin stars” was created as a ploy to encourage people to buy cars and drive more to go on road trips to these restaurants so they’d wear through more tires and have to buy more
*Edited because I was a bit off base
That sounds like it could be plausible or could be a great story. Do you have a source?
Not quite middle class people, but otherwise correct:
In 1900, there were fewer than 3,000 cars on the roads of France. To increase the demand for cars and, accordingly, car tyres, car tyre manufacturers and brothers Édouard and André Michelin published a guide for French motorists, the Michelin Guide.
Thanks for the assist o7
Happy to help!
Thank you!
Just because that is the origin, doesn't mean it was a scam then or now.
Old Egypt was full of pyramid schemes way back then
ESG and carbon offsets as an effective way of combating climate change
Interest and Rent.
Passiv income in general ,as it obviously constituts itself from other Peoples Active Income , its per definition a scam...
*"Because you once where in need and i lended you some coin , you now have to pay me back a expotentially rising amount of Coin ! its rate of rising is not messured on your harvest or the amount of offspring of your Herd but on Time going forward ! Because it surely will ! , If you Cant you will fall in Debt-Slavery to me. I am a Risktaker . you take the Risk . I Take . Always ." *
I mean, this is really the source of all anti-semitism. Jews are (generally) forbidden from usury with other Jews but not non-Jews. This evolves into “Jews run the banks” and then “Jews run the world”.
For that matter “religion” matches the OPs question.
It's a source. It's certainly not the 'one true source of all'. Quite a lot is just plain old unqualified nationalism and xenophobia too.
no the religion is actually the instrument to limit & forbid the Usury , Time is Gods realm thereby enslaving Time is Satans work (check out "the Pillars of Islam" ) Jesus wanted to also fight the Landholder & Creditor Classes and agitatoed for the Debt Cancelation (the Tabula Rasa , the Clean Slate , the Debt Jubilee ) , like they where demanded by the Scripture , the Creditor and Landholderclasses thereby had their Powerbase threatend by this Social Revolutionary & killed him. But his Message of "Debt Cancelation" they could not put back into the Box , thereby they twisted it..
Concret Debt became "Sin" and Jesus then suddenly "Died for our Sins" , removing christianity from its social revolutionary BASE function and putting all it into the Afterlife (Superstrutuctre)
. Not the Jews Killed Jesus , the "Landholder and Creditor Classes killed jesus" , thats why "class awareness" is soooo fucking key , if one does not have Class awareness , he will instead use "Peoplegroups" (Jews , Russians , Angloids) in his Mental Framing , bringing hate upon them (antisemitism good example) instead of the Parasitic Classes.. The "Landholder Classes " killed him , then castrated his message until the Religion became a instrument in service of their power....
Religion does thereby not match accutly the Definition of Scam , Islam protects specificly from this Scam , but the Landholder Christianity ,you know of , really is a scam. Obviously Religion will always serve the status quo Powerstructures ... but there are diffrences ..
Wouldn't they have noticed that there were only 3 stories of windows on the blueprint?
Surprising that no one noticed the double prime symbol for inches instead of the single prime symbol for feet. The scammer was like "well, I didn't lie, you weren't careful enough and it's not my problem!".
Oh yes, I've heard about this. Thanks for reminding.
Adding more details for others:
Founded in 2003 by then 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos raised more than US$700 million from venture capitalists and private investors, resulting in a $10 billion valuation at its peak in 2013 and 2014. The company claimed that it had devised blood tests that required very small amounts of blood and that could be performed rapidly and accurately, all using compact automated devices which the company had developed. These claims were later proven to be false.
You don't want to deal with the shit HR handles for you.
I'm sure there are plenty of bad, bureaucratic messes, but 3/4 of the HR departments I the last 10 years have been quite helpful.
The outlier was just not very communicative, but otherwise good.
Maybe it's the industry. I work in clinical so we're used to documenting the fuck out of everything. HR mandated documentation is just another step to cover all of our asses.
My experience with them is basically them trying to convince people to stay at the job when the job is overworking people underpaying people etc. Staying never payed off. More of a dead end job scenerio
in general.
When some talking head talks about why today or today, the real reason is "insiders traded it that way" with a mix of "this is how rich assholes feel."
Lottery's the expected value is always lower than the prize of a ticket. And even if you win it is on the back of other poor desparete people who lost. An then there is the fact winning often leads to a lot of other problems.
My sister used to call the lottery a tax on stupid people.
It's more accurate to call it a tax on desperation I think.
Neither are scams but the UK is fond of permanently doing temporary things. Income tax in the UK was first imposed as a temporary measure to fund the Napoleonic Wars but after Waterloo it was never repealed since it brought in so much. Same sort of deal for the 70 mph national speed limit, it was a temporary measure in the 1960s apparently in response to someone caning it down the motorway in an AC Cobra and as we know, there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
Same thing with the removal of the gold standard. Nixon was supposed to do it temporarily but since it gave ths US the license to print money backed by nothing, why would they bring it back (they could never pay off the gold needed, there's just not enough of it mined in total). And because the US dollar is the world reserve currentcy (meaning every currency can be exchanged for a dollar) and the moment you add in the fact that banks can create money out of thin air by being able to, for example take a deposit of 100, give a loan to someone else for 80, and then there's technically 180 in circulation, however if the depositor decides to take the money back while there are no more money in the bank, the bank needs to be bailed out by the Federal Reserve, Bank of England or whatever the national bank is in this example land.
Pretty sure that's what happens nearly everywhere not specifically the UK.
Phoebus Cartel, essentially the few oligopolistic light bulb companies got together and colluded and intentionally reduced the lifespan of light bulbs.
The rate at which our LED bulbs are failing (usually over-driven leds or garbage capacitors for the power supply), has me thinking it’s still a thing, only less formal and more profitable.
In fact, “There weren’t that many people involved and the economic repercussions were pretty minor,” Goldgar says. “I couldn’t find anybody that went bankrupt. If there had been really a wholesale destruction of the economy as the myth suggests, that would’ve been a much harder thing to face.”
1950 to present antipsychotics whose severe side effects are written off as crazy talk.
I have taken an antipsychotic for insomnia at different times. Can you elaborate on what you're saying? It isn't clear to me. Severe side effects, however, have been extremely clear at different times. Are you saying those are downplayed to the point of gaslighting?
The Bernie Madoff investment scandal. Started in the 1970’s and continued into the 2000’s. It eventually dissolved in 2008 during the financial crisis. There’s a really great documentary on Netflix about it.
I remember at the time of Brexit I seriously believed that it might be a positive from a left wing perspective but then it happened and almost immediately I realised I was a fucking moron for not considering that it wasn't a left wing government doing it, it was the unending clown show of the Tories running it
eh, don't feel bad, it was a big split in opinion in most orgs too
big neoliberal imperial bloc vs the tories having even less oversight
I think that this is the basis my in laws voted for it on.
Microtransactions
The one I'm running right now, and you don't have a clue, Kevin!
The Democratic Party of the USA
And NOT the GOP? Dude
It's a scam because they are trying to come off as good and are just pushing liberal crap that helps capitalism. GOP is less of scammers as in they're more transparently and openly racist and fascist. Even their scamming grifting is pretty open lol. Overall tho, GOP is like a hundred times more harmful.
There are two doors, one is labelled "Leopards that will eat your face" the other "Cat cafe" both lead into the same leopard cage.
Much more harmful in the imperial core, at least. They both love their violence outside of it.
GOP politicians actually work to follow through on their promise to make everything worse for most people
Unless they're referring to scummy mega-banks that exist by fucking over the little guy with random fees, hard to close accounts, and other scummy practices like Wells Fargo, BofA, etc.
You're a central bank, you manage the economy giving out dollars.
Do you lend to people directly or do you think, "no, we should guarantee private individuals tremendous power and profit so that the financial system can collapse due to their mismanagement every couple decades"
Yeah? What should back the currency? What would have happened to the dollar if it was still pegged to gold? What is the difference between an artificially scarce natural resource and a currency backed by a superpower?
Like gold value has any meaning lol, humans are still just "ooo shiney"
That's exactly my point. Gold shills sit around and wax on about how it's a cure-all and how the gold standard was better blah blah without understanding the basic reasons why it had to go.
It’s backed by the government. Yes, if the government falls apart the dollar will be worthless, but if the government falls apart a lot more will happen than just the currency dying.
That's my reasoning behind trusting banks with my money. If shit goes down to the point I can't get my money out of a bank then it won't have much value for long anyways and I have bigger issues.
Nowadays, yes. Back in the day a run on the bank could screw everyone.
Religion
I am an atheist and I believe the world would be much better without religions. Having said that, I don't conisder it as a scam in itslef. Instead they must have been something evolved over the time due to our ignorance, fear and helplessness. The very same factors that still keep them going.
But hell yeah, people are exploited in the name of religion. I'm from India, one of the largest so called democracies, currently under the governance of a fascist hindutva party that thrives on polarizing people in the name of religion.
BTW I was actually looking for specific instances of scams carefully plotted by known people, companies or even countries instead of broad answers like religion.
I think the more correct thing to say is that Organized Religion is a scam. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being religious (provided you don't force those views on others), but organized religion always winds up rotten at the top - and it's not surprising. Organized religion is one of the most powerful tools for controlling people, even if it wasn't (though it might have been) intended to be that way at the beginning. A king/president/dictator can threaten the lives of their subjects, but only a holy man can threaten their immortal soul (from the perspective of the devotee anyways).
Now that's a take I completely stand behind and agree with. I couldn't have put it better myself. That said, some religions were not made with the intent of controlling others. I don't think Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism were made with the intent to control people. We can argue about Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as they were made for control by their founders, and what they intended for these movements after their deaths we do not know (or at least I don't, maybe someone out there does).
Again - I'm not arguing necessarily that any of them started out that way, in fact - I'm willing to bet that very few (looking at you, Mormons) actually were. Most religion (in my humble opinion) just stems from folks trying to make sense of an unfathomable universe using what tools are available to them at the time. But once you have the religion, and you have holy men/women who have the ability to excersize some form of power over their flock, you'll inevitably find corrupt people flocking to those positions, as they do in every position of power. Then over time they'll carve out more power for themselves and more authority, find ways of extracting influence and power from their positions until soon you've got "holy men" living in palaces with the authority of kings.
It's just human nature for positions of power to eventually become corrupted to some degree, and positions of religious authority offer an unparalleled lever in which to move the masses, which only serves to make it more attractive to would-be tyrants
Religion was needed, but at some point logic and critical thinking should have been enough.
The issue is the wealthiest benefit when the masses don't have the tools to use that. They want people who won't question rules and blindly follow them.
Humans are just animals, we're not born with those abilities, we need to be taught.
So we see education outright cut or forced to focus on rote memorization rather than the process to understand and figure shit out on our own.
We should be past religion as a species, but it's not automatic, we have to continually teach the next generation to think for themselves
Just imagine what could have been done in the last 300 years if every dollar that was donated to churches went to some other cause, or back into the pockets of the masses. There is an immense amount of wealth that is trapped in the collective real estate, bank accounts, etc owned by churches. I'm not even talking about megachurches or the mormon's giant stack of cash, just mom'n'pop little parishes that are everywhere across the US.
If ALL that money was still kicking around in the economy and in the pockets of people to spend on real things, building real businesses, etc...we'd be way better off.
Always makes me sad when I visit my in-laws who live in a particularly bible thumpy area and you go and there are spots there where churches outnumber normal businesses. It seems like it's just a huge drain on the local economy devoting that much money into propping up churches of various kinds...
There’s a church across the street from my home in a small rural town in Oklahoma. It sits completely empty except for about 90 minutes from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM when about 6 cars pull up into the parking lot and maybe 15 people saunter in for Sunday service after ringing a loud bell announcing to the whole neighborhood. None of these attendees live in the neighborhood I might add.
There are literally dozens of other churches just like it throughout the town. It blows my mind that a religion that claims to be about spreading the love of their savior and saving as many people as possible from literal damnation would let a resource like that go unused. They could have volunteers there every day of the week helping to improve the community and help people in need but they couldn’t care less.
Religion is used as a scam by many people. It is also used in other ways by other people.
Sometimes I mull over what state we'd be in as a society if instead of celebrating a man's deeds we had been celebrating nature and the environment that hosts us since the beginning.
I can't help but think there would be a lot less damage to the environment and less greed.
Very true my fellow enlightened gentlesir tips fedora
this but unironically
The American healthcare system.
Capitalism, especially with little to no regulation*
Scam for sure. Hard to say it’s been unnoticed for a long time though
idk - only 63% of Americans support single-payer healthcare, nearly half of Americans still haven't caught on at least
"only"
That's a clear majority. If we had a referendum about it we'd get it (but the US doesn't have federal referendums.)
Homeopathy, acupuncture, ozone therapy... all "alternative medicines" basically.
Like the old joke, "What do you call alternative medicine that works?" "Medicine!"
If some herb, plant or extract has a proven effect it will be adopted by real medicine, and all that is left in alternative medicine is the scams that do not work.
You’re almost right. Modern medicine needs to synthesize natural compounds to profit fully from them. They can’t just use natural remedies and present them to patients because they can’t patent them.
I'm sure that's a major part of it, but I also wouldn't want to live in a world where we could only get aspirin from willow bark. We either wouldn't have enough aspirin or we wouldn't have any more willow trees. Medicines derived from the actual source aren't possible on a global scale in most cases.
Capitalism is a blight on society and has lead to countless deaths. But in a utopia where money doesn't exist and people create medicine for the world only to help people with no profit they still need to synthesize it.
I agree with you but in that case, the need to synthesize it could be made entirely based on practicality rather than profit.
Not all countries have for profit medicine though. I'm sure it's a factor, but it's not a universal thing.
There are other reasons why "natural" remedies get more scrutiny in the medical community, and the other comments have touched on a few of them
There's a slight gotcha here:
I'm in Asia and a lot of traditional chinese medicine you can buy is just regular medicine with a marketing disguise hiding the fact. Why yes, this is a box of whatever the fuck extract, very interesting, old northern recipe to cure the shit, let me just check what's written on this paper, and, yep, there it is, it's just Loperamide but with an additive to make it taste like Ginseng. Got it.
Tim Minchin
Once I made a joke online about paying for homeopathy by dipping a dollar in a jar of water and giving them the jar, and like five people I know unfollowed me lol
Did you hear the one about the homeopathic who tried to commit suicide?
He took a 10X dilution of cyanide.
Lol yeh a surprising amount of people believe in it.
I once trained to work in pharmacies, we had companies present on their products and one of them was selling homeopathic products. One of the other students asked if it actually worked and the rep's response was 'if it didn't do you think people would buy it?' I didn't say anything but I thought to myself yes, there absolutely are people who hand over money for dumb shit that doesn't work lol.
I have a pinched nerve. I went to many doctors, done many tests, went to months of PT and was still in pain. I went to my acupuncturist and she is able to release the muscles around the pinch enough that my right arm doesn’t feel constantly numb. I a man of science. I don’t believe in he Chi traveling my body etc but the physical result of the acuponcture cannot be denied.
And there are physical therapists who do acupuncture strictly for muscle release without all of the chi stuff.
Yes absolutely. They call it needling though
Acupuncture has actually been shown to help in some cases beyond a placebo effect.
There isn't much evidence there. There's dry needling, which is the evidence-based alternative with different techniques - but much of that is built on the same evidence behind massage therapy.
Not really.
I feel the same about chiropractic - many people call bullshit, but I’ll be damned if they don’t help me. Like you, I don’t believe “your spine is where all your problems originate” like some chiropractics try to peddle, but the dude pushes on my back and it pops and it feels better.
My brother was in total kidney failure and his chiro said the pain was likely "toxins" released from his session. Utter quack. They arent all hacks, but they can do real damage. They can paralyze you for life or even worse. I hope you will not have firsthand experience
I used to believe the "they aren't all hacks thing" until I met more chiropractors. While I would like to believe that there's a subset of them out there who treat it more like a science of doing adjustments and what not, I don't think that's actually the case. My mom works for a chiropractor and has gone to several of their conventions over the years, and from what it sounds like they are all nutjobs who believe aligning your spine will cure you of all disease.
I would really love to see the numbers of how many chiropractors are antivaxxers. I bet it's in the high 90%.
I base that solely off the fact that some have MDs and a dislike of sweeping generalizations... no matter how true 😅
Oh I know, and I don’t trust any that ask me what other non-skeletal ailments I have (I had one tell me my acid reflux could be cured by chiro). But I have a few skeletal problems I go to them for about 3 times a year, and it helps.
Yeah but so can regular doctors.
A friend went in for a colonoscopy and died from a series of complications. First they nicked the inside of her colon, and it started bleeding. Then there was a whole series of stupid responses, based on the meds she was taking and had disclosed. They just made one mistake after another, until she died.
None of us knew she was walking into that hospital for the last time, because we were all relying on the doctors to be masters of their craft.
To find religious behavior in the medical field doesn’t take long. Another friend has described being unable to process patients because the blood pressure equipment is broken. They’re down to one machine, and the manual squeeze bulbs have all failed, so there’s a massive backlog in their clinic.
Now, they know clinical outcomes are suffering as a result of the lack of throughput, but they have to take blood pressure on every patient before they do anything else. So they’re beholden to this policy, and can’t practice medicine in a rational manner. But they’re embedded in a system that won’t let them use their eyes and brains to operate on what’s in front of them.
So even without belief in the supernatural, doctors are serving a “false god” which is the bureaucracy, and because they can’t serve two gods that means actual medical practice itself takes a second seat.
The issue with chiropractors is that they treat the symptom and not the cause. If your back is misaligned, it’s because your muscles are pulling on it the wrong way, the chiro will pull it back in place but now your muscles are still pulling the wrong way and they may have pulled on the muscle to make it move and may have injured it, now your muscle says hell no you don’t and starts pulling even more. It’s instant relief with little lasting result. which is a great business model, instant result and returning customers because the problem isn’t treated. It’s like going to the mechanic because your motor is out of oil but not trying to fix the leak so you come back every week to refill the oil.
The problem is I’ve been to numerous doctors, working with a pain management specialist now, done physical therapy with a few different places for months, do physical therapy every morning, do yoga, exercise every day, and still no relief. So, like, sometimes it gets so bad I go to the chiropractor because at least they can give me some relief.
Yeah and the idea that a doctor is going to treat the root cause is laughable.
You go to a doctor with pain caused by muscles pulling too much out of alignment and they (a) won’t recognize the fact about muscles at all, (b) will start talking surgery, and (c) will either give you a prescription for pain meds that you wouldn’t need if they simply fixed the pain, or make the whole thing about denying you the meds that you aren’t even asking for.
Doctors and root causes are like oil and water.
The few things they do that are effective are better delivered by an evidence-based provider (e.g., physiotherapist, massage therapist) without the pseudoscience.
See an osteopath instead, in the UK at least, they are trained and regulated unlike chiropractors who regularly kill or permanently disable people with unsafe and inappropriate "manipulations".
Thanks, I'll check it out (though I'm in the US). Also, I researched my chiropractor very thoroughly to ensure that he's not likely to kill or disable me.
edit: turns out my insurance covers osteopathic manipulative medicine, and there's 1 practitioner in my area (25 miles, probably more in the 50 mile range since I'm close to a big city). I will be making an appointment with her. Thanks kind stranger!
Awesome I hope they are helpful to you ☺️
The guy who told you to see an osteopath is a little misinformed and had things a bit upside down. Osteopathy is basically just chiropractic and has the same pseudoscientific origins.
However, for historical reasons osteopaths are very different either side of the Atlantic.
In the UK, osteopaths are basically just chiropractors with pretensions. In the US, doctors of Osteopathy are basically just doctors who went to a school that teaches osteopathic nonsense alongside real medicine, and they are licensed and operate as real physicians.
Trust me bro.
I love how ruthless the wikipedia pages on these topics are, by the way. Do check them out if you get the chance.
Hey umm so ... homeopathy. There is a case to be made --hear me out here please-- that it might have been effective once, but now we've got millions of "practitioners" doing things that clearly do not work.
The reasoning is obvious.
The concentration of practitioners within the population is clearly too damn high (insert meme here). To show how effective it can truly be, all we need to do is to dilute the ratio ... by a lot.
Don't you agree that this is worth looking into?
(/s in case anyone is in doubt)
A few weeks ago I got the flu and went to see my doctor. She wasn't in so I got sent to a substitute who examined my ear with a weird beeping device. I asked her what it was and she just said that she practices "Chinese medicine".
She told me her device indicated that I have huge problems with my thyroid and she said I should get some sort of crystal necklace that's good for that and that I should apply some essential oils daily. Of course, she happened to sell those at a good price.
I went to have a blood test and my thyroid was fine, my values were right in the middle of the acceptable range.
Ponzi schemes, especially the insurance companies. They really are a Ponzi scheme.
Think about it, they promise you things asking for money, then when you need their services they decide where you go, how much they will pay (leaving the rest for you to pay as a deductible), then they turn around and increase your costs for their services, that they fight tooth and nail not to pay anything.
I argue insurance in and of itself is no ponzi scheme. Working together is the basis of all civilisation. Trying to make a business out of a social service however ... that's rife for abuse, yes.
I work in the insurance industry and I 100% agree with this.
The only time it's wise to take out an insurance policy is when
A) It's legally required (though this is sometimes due to lobbying by the insurance companies themselves)
B) When you absolutely will not be able to actually pay for a potential, but necessary expense by yourself (cancer treatments and stuff like that)
So Health Insurance, Auto Insurance (even if your car is cheap and self-insurable, the car you hit may not be), Home-owners insurance and stuff like that are necessary and generally a good financial bet, even if they are crooked af.
Any "micro-insurances" though? All total scams. Travel insurance, phone insurance (or "Extended Warranties"), Apple Care, all that kind of shit is 100% going to cost you more money to have than it'll save you - unless you get really really lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it). You'd be better off spending what you'd pay on those insurance premiums on a hand of blackjack, I'll bet the odds would be slightly more in your favor that way
Ugh my parents both insist on travel insurance. What if you get sick?? Idk, I'll cancel the stuff I can and take the loss on what I can't, for all the travel I've done the amount of times that has happened does not even remotely come close to how much I would have paid each time for travel insurance.
No mom, I'm not going to insure our 2 night stay at the Hilton in (mid sized city). I'm sure it's going to be fine.
Last time I did was for a very very expensive flight across an ocean, just because it was like, 15 dollars on a 2000 flight for a few people. Fine, but everything else we took the risk. (And we did not use it)
Travel insurance is especially terrible, because a lot of the time it's a pretty substantial premium, and actually filing a claim on it is a HUGE PITA.
I worked for a traveler insurance company before, and we denied most claims that came in. People would buy insurance on a $100 concert ticket, paying a $10 premium for the insurance, then when they'd go to file the claim, we'd require a doctors note, so now they also have to cough up a $20 copay and a whole afternoon just to get a note saying "yup, this person is sick". And that's just one of the many ways people got fleeced. During COVID, a lot of travel insurance claims got denied because illnesses resulting from pandemics aren't covered in some policies as well
not surprised at all, I've found it's just better to learn the cancellation policy of your items. Most hotels are full refund if they know >48 hours, and if less usually you'll at least get points/credit back which for me I'll absolutely use next time. Not worth the premium and the hassle to get cash back if I only find out less than 48 hours ahead of time
Thanks for your input, it helps not make me sound like a conspiracy theorist or anti-biz whack job
nothing conspiracy theorist about it at all. If anyone gives you sideways looks when you mention that insurance is a scam, just point out the very simple and undeniable fact that insurance companies are (very) profitable. That means, by definition that the average customer pays more in premiums than they get in payouts, and not just a bit more, a lot more, as that profit they make is after they pay their thousands of employees, award multi-million dollar bonuses to their executives, pay for their bigass skyscrapers, and all that other shit. If insurance was a "fair" deal, they'd be losing money from the administration costs
Always self-insure if you can afford it
Travel insurance is my big one. Why would you not get that? That seems like such a stupid risk not to get that.
Like if I get hit by a car in the middle of nowhere and they got to fly my home because the medical care there sucks. That's going to cost an absolute fortune. Even having to send my dead body home will cost my family loads.
Pretty much for all the reasons I said in my comment - you'll almost certainly spend more on premiums for travel insurance than you'll ever claim (this is true of all insurance) and the expenses incurred by self-insuring are generally manageable. Even in the two situations you refer to, we're "only" talking about costs of a few thousand, and both of those are highly unlikely events that most people go their whole lives not dealing with. you're much better off putting the money you'd spend on that travel insurance into an emergency fund to cover those kinds of unexpected expenses.
Insurance is only a good financial call if you risk completely bankrupting yourself by not having insurance, otherwise you're just trading potential lump sum costs for small continuous costs, and the premiums will generally always wind up being more than what you're saving (because if they weren't, then the Insurance companies wouldn't be making so much money).
That being said, it's your money, if you'd rather accept that you're paying more over a lifetime on travel insurance than you're saving just to have the peace of mind that you won't have to dip into savings for any incident that happens before or during the trip (assuming your incident doesn't fall under one of the many carefully crafted exclusions that the insurance companies add to their policies to prevent paying out, which it probably will), then by all means, buy it - but if you're buying it because you think it's the financially savy move, and you have at least a few grand in your bank account for emergencies, then you're kidding yourself.
I just read a news article this week about a young Australian man on vacation in Indonesia who got in an accident. His family now face costs of around $350,000 because his insurance didn't cover riding motorized scooters.
I think travel insurance is generally wise to have, and to be aware of what you are covered for. This is an example both of the potential costs and how if you don't read your policy carefully they will fuck you over.
When you say travel insurance, are you thinking of overseas medical expenses?
I cut my foot on some rocks in the US and that insurance claim paid for all the previous travel insurance I'd taken out previously.
I got travel insurance recently for a hiking trip with my wife. We had an emergency and my wife had to be airlifted out by helicopter, and we were so glad to have the travel insurance because it covers emergency evacuation up to $10,000 (and the helicopter costed around $5,000). Awesome, right?
Well... actually no. Turns out, the terms of our policy dictate we needed to call insurance first and have them organize the airlift. Since we dialed 911 and organized the helicopter ourselves, our insurance won't cover it. I guess it's my fault for not reading the fine print, but it feels pretty scummy from the insurance company. Even if we had read the fine print, in the moment I don't think I would have remembered as my immediate instinct is to contact emergency services.
That's not a Ponzi scheme. Sorry, but this misuse of the term really grinds my gears.
A Ponzi scheme is a specific scam promoted as an investment, but in reality the payouts made to early victims come from the incoming money paid by new investors.
Oh my god, thank you so much! I'm glad I'm not the only one that sees it. They get money, they invest that money in pension funds, and then they try not to pay that back. The only things stopping it from being one legally are some slight changes such as the investment part and the part where they pay back to people in need, not people at the top.
A large portion of art/artifacts are forgeries. Everyone is alright with it because galleries and collectors want to brag about having some unique old art piece and forgers are very good at making pieces that would fool anyone who is just looking at it.
My personal conspiracy theory is that almost all art the public is exposed to is a forgery. Why show the plebs the real thing? We wouldn’t notice a difference anyway.
Maybe whenever you hear those stories about a famous work of art being stolen and later recovered, they've actually just stolen the forgery and the galley just puts up a new fake one.
The robbers then can't sell it because they have a worthless fake and the 'real' one is clearly on display in the gallery, and they can't expose the fraud because then they'd out themselves and go to jail.
The perfect scam!
That's what they do with a lot more paintings that you would think. Not because they don't want the plebs to look at them but because being exposed to the environment would cause irreparable damage to it. So they have experts make recreations and display those.
This isn't really a conspiracy theory is it? I thought it was something they were open about that they often have replicas on display for security/preservation reasons
There was a fantastic interview on The Jordan Harbinger Show podcast with a professional forger. I'd recommend searching for it. I've been meaning to give it a second listen for a few years, but have too much other content.
That you can get rich if you work hard.
Additionally, that it's okay to work yourself until death, because when you die you'll actually live a new eternal life of permanent luxury.
Someone already mentioned religion, yes.
Lotteries. They're just tax for poor people.
I think most people buying a lottery ticket know that it's a loss on average. I think people buy it for the experience and the dreams that it represents. From that perspective, I don't think that it's a scam for most people but rather just buying a slice of fantasy
You quite literally described the scam part though, selling false hope
Toothpaste.
You only need to squeeze out an amount the size of a pea on to the bristles of your toothbrush.
The image of squeezing along the entire length of the brush bristles was concocted by an ad agency, a la Mad Men, to make consumers use their toothpaste faster, hence buy more product.
I've never used that much. I just assumed it was to look nice since a pea sized about would look silly in a picture. I think it I used that much my mouth would be so full of foam it would be uncomfortable
I swear it's also why they made that newer garbage cap design that slowly leaks toothpaste and gums up unless you carefully clean the end and fully close it every time. I know y'all know what I am talking about!
The garbage flip cap instead of the good old screw on lid
Homeopathy. It's literally based on the idea that diluting stuff turns it into a remedy.
joke's on you, i've been drinking 100000x distilled dinosaur piss and i'm growing stronger by the day
Wait... Distilled?
i'm glad someone said something
no comment though
Ah, the Bear Grylls diet.
Homeopaths: thoroughly confused by cordial.
The McDonald's Monopoly promotions
Wait, they were scams?
I knew employees fixed a couple, but...
It wasn't McDonald's themselves that were scamming, it's more like the trusted 3rd party they engaged to run the promotion had a bad actor that used his position to fix the game.
And that’s just the start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s_Monopoly
I remember getting like 3 tickets for "part 1 out of 2 for a free car" a few months ago when they were doing the monopoly thing. I now realise that the employees probably just took all the part 2 ones for themselves.
They definitely didn't because they count the sleeves that those prize pieces are on.
What really happens is they print 5 million part 1 pieces and like 10 part 2 pieces.
printer ink, it costs them like 3 cents to make each cartridge and they sell it for so god damn much.
they also go out of their way to have chips in the cartridges and in the printers that make the printer not function if any ink is even running low, doesn't matter if you want to print something in black and white you had better fucking buy more cyan ink
The whole issue here is that people fall for the trick of buying the cheapest printer available, that is clearly way cheaper than what it costs to build. Then people get cranky for having to buy these proprietary cartridges which are way overpriced to cover the cost of the printer.
The easiest solution is to buy a laser printer (unless you need photo finish on your prints). It's a higher initial cost, but it never dries out. Would it cost me more that an ink printer in the long run? Maybe, but with my infrequent printing, i wouldn't have to replace dried out cartridges every year.
Anyone who buys a color laser printer should be aware that the initial cartridges, at least from HP, are not as full as refills, so you will have to replace them fairly soon and it is expensive. That being said, the refills will last a looooong time.
Also, and the main reason why I purchased one, the printer will just work, even if you don't print anything for a couple of weeks, or months even. I went through a couple of inkjets (not the cheapest ones), which would constantly get dried out, a head clogged, etc, before I said "fuck it," and sprung for a laser. My wallet isn't that happy, but it sure is nice not gambling on whether the damn printer will actually print.
I had an amazing multifunction colour laser printer. It always worked. It scanned straight to OCRd PDF which it placed on an FTP server. It was full duplex, in printing and scanning. It copied ultra-quickly. The toner was endless, or so it seemed. It was everything I needed and wanted in a printer.
But my wife thought it was “ugly” and “too big”. It became a real sticking point, this thing. So eventually it was replaced by a shitty ink-jets so “we could print good photos at home”. Now it’s clogged up to fuck, no amount of head cleaning works and she’s complaining about the shitty quality prints.
Stand your ground on a good printer. Stand. Your. Ground.
y'all need to stop buying printers from HP
Do yourself a favour and buy a Brother laser printer. You'll thank me later
Hardly “unnoticed” - it’s just a fundamental part of the business model.
Cryptocurrency in general. Even on the surface, as presented, the main appeal to buy in is "to get rich from it" and the main way you're supposed to get rich is "other people buying in, get in early while you can."
Ponzi. Schemes. All of them.
It does have a utility though, buying drugs, moving money past capital controls, and creating fake revenue/losses for laundering money and tax evasion.
You forgot the human trafficking potential. Checkmate
The dollar is the favourite currency for that stuff. Cryptocurrencies are meant to take power away from banks and give it to the people. Sure, the vast majority of the people use them for spsculation, but that doesn't make the technology useless. It's just that people are mostly interested in making as much money as they can. That's a society problem, not cryptocurrency's.
The main appeal is the ability to make transactions without intermediaries. The problem is that most people have as the only interest to get richer and richer and there will be always other people happy to sell them that dream.. For a fee. These are the vastmajorituy of the people in cryptocurrencies, but that doesn't disreguard the power and utility of the technology. It's easy to shit on the tool, but the real problem is the greed-driven society we live in.
I disagree that cryptocurrency in itself is a scam. It can have legitimate utility, for example I want to exchange money for international services without a credit card or mailing an envelope of cash/cheque. Bitcoin and some others are mainstream enough that I can do this.
That said, investing in them is absolutely a scam, using it as a marketing buzzhype is a scam, and most of them are founded as scams.
Sure, sure. But does it and can it actually stay that way?
I haven't seen a functioning example actually out there yet of a planet-burning electricity-wasting math busywork generator that actually does anything it supposedly can do besides become another ruinous and wasteful grift that does more damage to the planet than whatever convenience it supposedly offers to comfort the comforted.
It clearly has lower utility than being able to buy drugs legally
Its best use cases are only circumstantial and in every case it wastes a lot of electricity, jacks up the price of video cards, and dumps a lot of extra carbon into the atmosphere. It's like a shitty planet-burning Rube Goldberg machine.
I don't remember what my og argument was
Credit scores are a scam to sell credit cards.
You take small loans each month via a credit card that you have to pay back. This increases an imaginary number that lets you take out bigger loans in the furure.
This is all tracked by private companies that you trust with your personal data. That, or you'll not be able to take out a loan if you want to buy a house or start a business.
If you have a good credit score it means that you don't overspend or forget to pay, which you can also achieve with a regular debit card by default. This doesn't serve people, only the banks who expect that a number of people will overspend or not be able to pay their loans back.
Credit cards alone aren't the problem. Forcing them on people with the credit score system is.
Coming from a civilized country where the credit score is calculated by looking at income, taxes and property, I cannot fathom how the US credit score calculation is supported by anyone.
A lot of people actually like it because it really doesn't work the way OP said it did. They are partially correct, but you also get rewarded for perverse incentives. If you double pay your CC, it will actually slightly lower your credit score. If you have a lot of credit cards with no balance, that can also lower your score. The quickest way to buildup credit in the US is to get a card that has a 0% 18 Month introductory interest rate. Pay the minimum balance each month, and save the cash to pay it all off in 17 months. You will accumulate credit like crazy, holding a balance strangely increases your credit (until the balance gets too high or you start missing payments, then it will take a nosedive).
Interest, late fees, holding a balance, a lot of the bad stuff is actually weirdly good for your credit in the US. I mean it makes sense... they want to reward people who are stupid and pay interest, but actually have enough income to keep making payments forever.
When someone from the US remarks about their credit score, it always causes me to raise eyebrows. You can be poor and have a high credit score, it's incredibly common.
One way to make credit scores more consumer friendly would be to make it totally transparent what data is collected, retained and transmitted when calculating the score. If you want to open a new line of credit, instead of having businesses look up all this shit behind your back you'd request a letter of credit and provide it to the business yourself, knowing exactly what is in it.
But no, instead it's a total mystery how it is calculated and you just have to hope that they don't get confused and make a mistake because it can wreck your life if they do.
In many countries, mine included, there's no credit score system. We recently took out a bigger loan to buy a house and what we had to provide was:
That's it. From these they could tell that we are safe to loan money to because we'll most likely be able to pay it back.
I don't see how a credit score system is essential when you can provide them with the necessary data only when it's needed.
Bernie Madoff should have been caught years before he did.
There's zero chance the SEC wasn't fully aware of what he was doing, just like they're fully aware of what Ken Griffen is doing.
They probably weren't fully aware because they didn't want to be.
Mormon church
Trim out the first half of that sentence and you'd have yourself a top comment.
Tax-free charitable organizations
In a society with capitalism at its core, externalities exist. That's a fact that everyone agrees with. Nonprofits help mitigate those gaps. Calling all nonprofits scams is misguided at best. I think OP is looking for something more specific. What nonprofits?
Yes, I'm looking for more specific cases.
There are a lot who have an extremely positive impact. It's a small minority that causes a huge number of issues.
I personally help out with a non profit charity and we get a lot done with not a lot financially. The reduced taxes are a huge help.
I would argue it's the other way around frankly
To be fair, there are some good ones out there. I worked for a drug-rehab company in the 90s as the IT head that got mostly government funding for a 6 month-rehab-program for non-violent drug offenders (mostly stuff like heroine, cocaine, etc.). We also had an in-prison program but I don’t think that was as effective. Of course to get government contact money we would have to meet lots of strict guidelines too.
I definitely more wary of ones that don’t get any public funding and therefore have practically no guardrails and less forced transparency.
Landlords
Landlords aren't a scam, they're anti-society economic hoarders and gougers. Scam suggests there's something voluntary about 'falling for' it. Human trafficking isn't a scam, and so nor are landlords.
Bitcoin
To be fair, there are much worse projects too that were rugpulled. But I guess these didn't go on long.
It's absurd that people still think chiropractic is legitimate.
i know a girl who takes her literal newborns to her chiropractor
completely fucking horrifying and it's impossible to convince her that doing so is like playing catch with your baby as the ball
i am pretty sure kids die every year because of that shit
I get it to some extent cause it feels good when I crack my back
That's just simple streaching of the muscles. Chiropractic treatments put pressure on the spine to change the alignment of it.
"yeah but I mean, if it feels good when I crack my own back , what if a guy who went to school for that did it, I bet it'd feel great!"
-poor dupe who thinks they're a real thing
I don't know what they did to me but I actually got lot of relief from them when I hurt my back deadlifting.
Restaurants being rated with “Michelin stars” was created as a ploy to encourage people to buy cars and drive more to go on road trips to these restaurants so they’d wear through more tires and have to buy more
*Edited because I was a bit off base
That sounds like it could be plausible or could be a great story. Do you have a source?
Not quite middle class people, but otherwise correct:
From Wikipedia
Thanks for the assist o7
Happy to help!
Thank you!
Just because that is the origin, doesn't mean it was a scam then or now.
Old Egypt was full of pyramid schemes way back then
Capitalism, religion, monarchy, and religion.
Hey, you said oppression four times.
Patriarchy
The current economic order
Oof ow my democratic centralism
Luxury handbags that cost $60k. Not just a handbag, but to diversify your investment and launder money.
Capitalism
Let's lump organized religion in with this one.
ESG and carbon offsets as an effective way of combating climate change
Interest and Rent.
Passiv income in general ,as it obviously constituts itself from other Peoples Active Income , its per definition a scam...
*"Because you once where in need and i lended you some coin , you now have to pay me back a expotentially rising amount of Coin ! its rate of rising is not messured on your harvest or the amount of offspring of your Herd but on Time going forward ! Because it surely will ! , If you Cant you will fall in Debt-Slavery to me. I am a Risktaker . you take the Risk . I Take . Always ." *
they sold you for absolute Fools , Folks !
(PS: Muslims not included)
I mean, this is really the source of all anti-semitism. Jews are (generally) forbidden from usury with other Jews but not non-Jews. This evolves into “Jews run the banks” and then “Jews run the world”.
For that matter “religion” matches the OPs question.
It's a source. It's certainly not the 'one true source of all'. Quite a lot is just plain old unqualified nationalism and xenophobia too.
no the religion is actually the instrument to limit & forbid the Usury , Time is Gods realm thereby enslaving Time is Satans work (check out "the Pillars of Islam" ) Jesus wanted to also fight the Landholder & Creditor Classes and agitatoed for the Debt Cancelation (the Tabula Rasa , the Clean Slate , the Debt Jubilee ) , like they where demanded by the Scripture , the Creditor and Landholderclasses thereby had their Powerbase threatend by this Social Revolutionary & killed him. But his Message of "Debt Cancelation" they could not put back into the Box , thereby they twisted it.. Concret Debt became "Sin" and Jesus then suddenly "Died for our Sins" , removing christianity from its social revolutionary BASE function and putting all it into the Afterlife (Superstrutuctre)
. Not the Jews Killed Jesus , the "Landholder and Creditor Classes killed jesus" , thats why "class awareness" is soooo fucking key , if one does not have Class awareness , he will instead use "Peoplegroups" (Jews , Russians , Angloids) in his Mental Framing , bringing hate upon them (antisemitism good example) instead of the Parasitic Classes.. The "Landholder Classes " killed him , then castrated his message until the Religion became a instrument in service of their power....
Religion does thereby not match accutly the Definition of Scam , Islam protects specificly from this Scam , but the Landholder Christianity ,you know of , really is a scam. Obviously Religion will always serve the status quo Powerstructures ... but there are diffrences ..
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World's smallest skyscraper, the product of a remarkable con.
Wouldn't they have noticed that there were only 3 stories of windows on the blueprint?
Surprising that no one noticed the double prime symbol for inches instead of the single prime symbol for feet. The scammer was like "well, I didn't lie, you weren't careful enough and it's not my problem!".
Theranos ‘company’.
Oh yes, I've heard about this. Thanks for reminding.
Adding more details for others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos
That 90% of the people who don't watch sports on Cable TV subsidize it to the tune of 10% of their bill for the 10% of people who watch it
I'm going to go with the great wine fraud
Took a glimpse at the article and it seems they could've gone uncaught for longer if they were a little more careful with the dates!
That was a fun read. Thanks for posting.
There's a documentary about this guy. I think I watched it on Netflix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sour_Grapes_(2016_film)
ITT: Things people personally think are scammy, but not actual legally-defined scams.
When a scam is good enough it gets put into law.
It's how cults become religions.
Also people completely omitting the “unnoticed” aspect.
capitalism
Chiropractic medicine
Windows
The OS? Yes for sure. The glass stuff? Not too sure about that.
Why would you want windows when you can live in a basement with no sunlight?
ITT: “something I don’t like” —> “scam”
Capitalism
HR departments in corporate jobs.
I’m not sure you know what the word “scam” means.
You don't want to deal with the shit HR handles for you.
I'm sure there are plenty of bad, bureaucratic messes, but 3/4 of the HR departments I the last 10 years have been quite helpful.
The outlier was just not very communicative, but otherwise good.
Maybe it's the industry. I work in clinical so we're used to documenting the fuck out of everything. HR mandated documentation is just another step to cover all of our asses.
My experience with them is basically them trying to convince people to stay at the job when the job is overworking people underpaying people etc. Staying never payed off. More of a dead end job scenerio
When some talking head talks about why
today or 
today, the real reason is "insiders traded it that way" with a mix of "this is how rich assholes feel."
Lottery's the expected value is always lower than the prize of a ticket. And even if you win it is on the back of other poor desparete people who lost. An then there is the fact winning often leads to a lot of other problems.
My sister used to call the lottery a tax on stupid people.
It's more accurate to call it a tax on desperation I think.
Neither are scams but the UK is fond of permanently doing temporary things. Income tax in the UK was first imposed as a temporary measure to fund the Napoleonic Wars but after Waterloo it was never repealed since it brought in so much. Same sort of deal for the 70 mph national speed limit, it was a temporary measure in the 1960s apparently in response to someone caning it down the motorway in an AC Cobra and as we know, there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
Same thing with the removal of the gold standard. Nixon was supposed to do it temporarily but since it gave ths US the license to print money backed by nothing, why would they bring it back (they could never pay off the gold needed, there's just not enough of it mined in total). And because the US dollar is the world reserve currentcy (meaning every currency can be exchanged for a dollar) and the moment you add in the fact that banks can create money out of thin air by being able to, for example take a deposit of 100, give a loan to someone else for 80, and then there's technically 180 in circulation, however if the depositor decides to take the money back while there are no more money in the bank, the bank needs to be bailed out by the Federal Reserve, Bank of England or whatever the national bank is in this example land.
Pretty sure that's what happens nearly everywhere not specifically the UK.
Enron, perhaps. I think it qualifies.
A good documentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron:_The_Smartest_Guys_in_the_Room
Phoebus Cartel, essentially the few oligopolistic light bulb companies got together and colluded and intentionally reduced the lifespan of light bulbs.
https://youtu.be/zb7Bs98KmnY
I’d like to point you to this excellent video by Technology Connections.
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The rate at which our LED bulbs are failing (usually over-driven leds or garbage capacitors for the power supply), has me thinking it’s still a thing, only less formal and more profitable.
See dubai bulbs for why.
Battle Passes
But in history it took forever for people in Holland to realize that Tulips are not worth entire plots of land
Like Thermopylae?
Exactly like Thermopylae.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-tulip-fever-180964915/
1950 to present antipsychotics whose severe side effects are written off as crazy talk.
I have taken an antipsychotic for insomnia at different times. Can you elaborate on what you're saying? It isn't clear to me. Severe side effects, however, have been extremely clear at different times. Are you saying those are downplayed to the point of gaslighting?
Care to elaborate?
Neoliberalism!
The second is financialization.
Both are huge scams still running.
The Bernie Madoff investment scandal. Started in the 1970’s and continued into the 2000’s. It eventually dissolved in 2008 during the financial crisis. There’s a really great documentary on Netflix about it.
Religion. The absolute first.
Religions
Fósil fuels
Are we allowed to mention capitalism and brexit?
I remember at the time of Brexit I seriously believed that it might be a positive from a left wing perspective but then it happened and almost immediately I realised I was a fucking moron for not considering that it wasn't a left wing government doing it, it was the unending clown show of the Tories running it
eh, don't feel bad, it was a big split in opinion in most orgs too
big neoliberal imperial bloc vs the tories having even less oversight
I think that this is the basis my in laws voted for it on.
Microtransactions
The one I'm running right now, and you don't have a clue, Kevin!
The Democratic Party of the USA
And NOT the GOP? Dude
It's a scam because they are trying to come off as good and are just pushing liberal crap that helps capitalism. GOP is less of scammers as in they're more transparently and openly racist and fascist. Even their scamming grifting is pretty open lol. Overall tho, GOP is like a hundred times more harmful.
There are two doors, one is labelled "Leopards that will eat your face" the other "Cat cafe" both lead into the same leopard cage.
Much more harmful in the imperial core, at least. They both love their violence outside of it.
GOP politicians actually work to follow through on their promise to make everything worse for most people
Banks.
elaborate
They can't.
Unless they're referring to scummy mega-banks that exist by fucking over the little guy with random fees, hard to close accounts, and other scummy practices like Wells Fargo, BofA, etc.
But banks as an institution? No.
You're a central bank, you manage the economy giving out dollars.
Do you lend to people directly or do you think, "no, we should guarantee private individuals tremendous power and profit so that the financial system can collapse due to their mismanagement every couple decades"
Bitcoin
Religion
Replies are wild, i love it
G2A
Compound interest
In what way is compound interest a scam? Who has been "scammed" by compound interest and how?
For most of history charging interest was considered very unethical. There's even a derogatory term for it: usury.
It's a rather recent phenomenon that usury has become acceptable.
Yep. The one time Jesus got violent in the Bible, it was against the money lenders.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlowTex
For Germany, though it was big but not "too long"
The US dollar with no backing value
Yeah? What should back the currency? What would have happened to the dollar if it was still pegged to gold? What is the difference between an artificially scarce natural resource and a currency backed by a superpower?
Like gold value has any meaning lol, humans are still just "ooo shiney"
That's exactly my point. Gold shills sit around and wax on about how it's a cure-all and how the gold standard was better blah blah without understanding the basic reasons why it had to go.
It’s backed by the government. Yes, if the government falls apart the dollar will be worthless, but if the government falls apart a lot more will happen than just the currency dying.
That's my reasoning behind trusting banks with my money. If shit goes down to the point I can't get my money out of a bank then it won't have much value for long anyways and I have bigger issues.
Nowadays, yes. Back in the day a run on the bank could screw everyone.
MLMs
En clo sure of he commens duh