People always chime in with stories about how chiropractors helped them with XY and Z problem they were having.
And overall I don't doubt them. There's a lot of things that can go wrong with your spine or other joints, and I'm certain that some of them can be addressed by physically manipulating and adjusting it.
But the basic premise of chiropractic treatments is that basically all human ailments can be fixed in that way, which should sound like total bullshit to anyone with half a brain. And that's before you get into all spiritual nonsense that pervades a lot of the field.
Now some of them understand that that's a load of bullshit and may even be realistic about the things they can treat, but it can be pretty damn hard to sort them out from the ones who think that your pancreatic cancer is caused by ghosts in your spine and they know how to get them out or some bullshit like that.
Now if you have a good idea what your issue is and what needs to be done to fix it, take the time to carefully vet your chiropractor to make sure they're not going to try some crazy bullshit on you, you very well may be able to get a decent treatment from them. Maybe you'll even be able to save some money going with that.
But for most of us who aren't doctors and so only have kind of vague ideas what exactly the issue is and that the treatments we're doing actually make any sense, and don't necessarily have time to do all of that research and carefully vet that the person treating them isn't secretly a quack, you could just get the same sort of treatments from actually physical therapists, orthopedists, physiatrists, etc. with the added benefit of them actually understanding the issues and how to fix them properly.
Chiropractors are kind of like the rednecks of the medicine world. Some of them know exactly what they're doing with that harbor freight welder, they may not do things by the book but they know for certain what works and what doesn't and more importantly know when something is beyond what them and their buddies can accomplish on a free Saturday with a case of beer and when they need to suck it up and limp their truck to the shop and let a professional deal with it. Others know just enough to be dangerous and while they can get the job done 90% of the time or at least not make things worse, that 10% of the time something is literally going to blow up in someone's face. And still others are just meth heads looking to make a quick buck and it's a miracle they're not behind bars. And when you see them hanging around the local watering hole, it may not be totally clear which is which until it's too late.
The entire industry is built on catering to the vast swaths of women who get ignored by doctors and need somewhere to turn.
I highly suspect doctors are taught in medical school, "women are over emotional and prone to exaggeration."
Hell, "hysteria" was considered a valid diagnosis until the 1950s.
This guy gets it. Chiropractors are a scam, but scammers are drawn to people who "fall through the cracks" because they're treated like their problems don't actually exist. Finally, they meet someone who takes their pain seriously. It's too bad the person who takes it "seriously" is a fucking charlatan.
It falls harder on women, who have more instances of pain that are ignored by the medical community, partially from the history mentioned above, claiming women must be experiencing "hysteria."
It absolutely happens because of the failings of the medical community.
Private health insurance is the biggest fucking scam ever. The private insurance companies benefit by getting the aggregate healthiest population into their plans (working adults). The most likely to be expensive people, i.e. old people (on medicare) or poor people (on medicaid, or not even on an insurance plan) are on government, tax payer insurance plans. There is literally no reason except for corporate profiteering that Medicare should not be expanded to cover all people.
Also all those conversations, especially in the 2020 election period, were totally bullshit. You say something like M4A will cost 44 trillion dollars or whatever, which sounds like an insane amount of money. What is often left out of the discussion is that estimated cost was 1) over 10 years and 2) has to be weighed against the current costs we already pay for insurance. So the deal was very simple: the overall costs would go down because the overall spending would be less, and at the same time millions of people without coverage would be covered, and at the same time you don't have to contemplate stupid bullshit like in network, out of network providers. Or ever again talk to your insurance about why something is or isn't covered. Boils my blood when I think too much about this.
Private insurance (for the average person) in general is dumb. We have a collective need to insure various things against disaster, and realistically the federal government shells out huge amounts for most disasters anyways (after the so called insurance companies go bankrupt).
So why the heck are we paying a premium for all of the overhead of the insurance companies?! It's this massive inefficient system that doesn't work, while the "government as insurance" system works great, and doesn't require nearly as much overhead. There's no room for private sector insurance to inovate, because there's nothing to inovate on; IMO, the private insurance industry contributes nothing of value to society except jobs that it pays for by forcing everyone to engage with it.
The insurance industry in general is betting you'll be fine, and you're betting "maybe I won't." It's extra bad for medicine because they stick their head even into the small stuff, not just "I need a 10,000 unexpected hospital bill covered."
The stock market and publicly traded companies. The idea that a business that is making consistent profits isn't good unless those profits are increased each quarter is asinine. This system of shortsighted hyper focus on short term quarterly growth for the sake of growth is the cause of so much pain and suffering in the world. Even companies with amazing financials will work to push workers compensation down, cut corners and exploit loopholes to make sure their profits are always growing. Consistent large profits aren't good enough.
Instapot. Instapot made too good of a product, most people buy one and its good for years. That's good for consumers but terrible for investors. The company that bought them out and took them public saddled them with a ton of debt from other sectors and now they're bankrupt.
Diamond Sports is suing Sinclair for doing the same, minus the "good product" part.
Sinclair bought up the Fox RSNs a few years back, renaming the company as Diamond Sports and the channels as Bally Sports. Not too long afterwards, they went bankrupt. Diamond is claiming that Sinclair has saddled them with massive debts and extraordinarily high management fees. Sinclair also kept the funds from the sponsorship agreement with Bally.
The lawsuit accuses Sinclair of receiving about $1.5 billion as a result of alleged misconduct, including fraudulent transfers of assets, unlawful distributions and payments, breaches of contracts, unjust enrichment and breaches of fiduciary duties.
“Diamond Sports Group is seeking to vindicate its rights and protect the value of the Diamond bankruptcy estate, including by recovering value from Sinclair Broadcast Group that was improperly transferred from Diamond prior to its filing for bankruptcy in March 2023,” a spokesperson for Diamond said in a statement.
Google and similar data hungry companies (while not a financial scam but moreso a privacy scam, companies like Google and Meta profiteering on our personal data without our knowledge or awareness)
Technically insurance only works if everybody pays in. Wouldn't work as a concept if every tom dick and harry could pay them $100 then a week later need $100,000. They'd basically be out of business right quick with nothing to provide for anyone. Maybe as some believe it should just be provided through taxes, but it's certainly not a scam.
The scam part comes when you are forced to fight tooth and nail to get money from them even when you are clearly covered
This. For non trivial claims they basically won't lift a finger until you take them to court.
This. I got a detailed bill for a minor surgery, every single value was under the value of their own detailed coverage, and they still didn't pay back around 12% of the value and never justified what the difference was about. They did it because they know I won't fight them on it and they do it to everyone. That objectively and legally makes their detailed coverage a scam.
It’s true insurance companies need to take in adequate premiums in order to have the money the money to pay claims. And when done in balance, insurance is a great thing. Not all insurance in a scam, no doubting that.
But the current state of insurance, especially health insurance in the US, shows that these companies are making massive profits. How does this happen? Literally one way: They take in more premiums than they pay out in coverage. How? By either knowingly overcharging people or skirting out of paying covered claims through other means (such as baseless rejections).
That’s the problem with the entire insurance industry and why it must be properly regulated in any industry: It is a race to the bottom. The worse the insurer treats the people that buy insurance from them, the better the company does financially (charge a lot, pay out a little). Mix in the fact that (1) you cannot shop around at the time you need a claim and (2) the contracts are so intensive only a sophisticated legal team can interpret them, and it’s a recipe for disaster.
So you’re right that all insurance isn’t necessarily a scam. But if you can’t see that the US health insurance industry raking in profits shows serious dysfunction that could be considered a scam, it’s worth taking a second look.
But the problem is that medical costs are only as high as they are because of insurance. Hospitals started making up fake, artificially high prices because insurance companies wanted a discount for referring patients to their hospital.
Hold up don't forget that in the US, healthcare providers base their pricing on what they will receive after insurance discounts. This creates a massively overinflated market where most of the value is made up and a large portion of actual payments goes to insurance and corporations
People pay every month but most don't use the sub to it's full value, and forget how expensive it becomes over the years. And you don't own anything on a subscription, you just borrow it.
Also trial periods that prolong automatically into subscriptions.
I was really surprised when I shipping forwarder I use after I upgraded from the "free" tier to the $10/month tier to save a few hundred dollars of state taxes, when I downgraded back to their "free" tier five days later once the package was out of their hands, the answer was "Your subscription will end at the end of your current paid month"
Framing "fulfilling your contract" as "silent quitting".
In what other context would be "delivering what's in the contract" anything less than satisfactory?
When I buy a litre of milk and the box contains exactly a litre of milk it isn't "silent stealing" either.
Unpaid overtime is usually illegal too. Highly depends on your position though. A lot of software engineers are marked as exempt when they shouldn't be.
The annoying thing is, depending on your job and financial situation, it hardly matters whether it's illegal or not. I'm not talking about my comfortable situation as a software engineer, but rather people working crap jobs and not having alternatives.
If you know, you'll be out of work for longer if you get fired, you basically cannot report any illegal stuff your employer is doing.
Unregulated capitalism imo. I don't buy the idea I've seen around here that capitalism itself is the problem and switching to communism would solve all the problems. Both are systems that have merit, but when left unchecked all the power and money will go to the few, like we have now.
If by "have merit" you mean "has some positive aspects", sure. Every system has merit. Slavery had merit (slave owners got cheap cotton). The Holocaust had merit (antisemites felt better). The issue is weighing the merit against the negatives. You can't just say two systems have positive aspects and call it a day.
Are you a fan of democracy or authoritarianism? Capitalism is a system where productive forces are driven undemocratically, in the name of profit instead of by worker democracy. The commodification of everything exists in a world of private property:
our bodies (labor power)
our thoughts (intellectual property)
the specific ordering of bits on a hard drive you own (digital media, DRM)
the means of production (which exist as a result of collective knowledge, infrastructure, and labor)
These things being commodified and privatized are ridiculous in any democratic, non-capitalist system.
However, these ridiculous conditions are absolutely necessary in a capitalist society. Without them the system falls apart. And as society continues to progress, the situation gets more and more ridiculous.
What about when AI "takes away" jobs for 50% of Americans (as in capitalists fire humans in favor of AI)? That'll collapse our society. Less work would be a good thing in any reasonable system, but not in capitalism. Less work is an existential threat to our society.
If we ever have an AI that is as capable as humans are intellectually, the only work left for us will be manual labor. If that happens, and robots get to the point of matching our physical abilities, we won't be employable anymore. The two classes will no longer be owners and workers, they'll be owners and non-owners. At that point we better have dismantled capitalism, because if we don't then we'll just be starving in the street, along with the millions who die every year from starvation under the boot of global capitalism.
The tradition isn't as old as people think and was literally started by a jewelry company to sell more jewelry. Specifically diamonds, which are not as rare as commonly believed and if not for the false scarcity and misinformation, would be dirt cheap.
It's crazy that even when people are told about this, they usually still defend it. I don't get why the heck any normal person would like the idea of spending a few months salary on a ring. It's such a terrible way to start a new marriage, especially with wages being what they are these days.
Diamonds were fairly rare when we used to mine them in Asia and America. And it's a nice shiny stone which is also very durable.
Then, we found out Africa is actually full of diamonds and DeBeers said "we can't have that!" and started buying all the African diamonds to keep them away to artificially inflate the price and scarcity.
Then we found out we can make them in labs better than the mined ones and DeBeers sai "that's not a natural diamond, you don't want that!" and so on.
The whole marketing about "A diamond is forever!" is to make you think you'll never want to sell your diamon ring, so you don't find out your precious gift paid $2,000 is actually wortth $50.
An EA spokeperson would say "it's all about the experience".
"Don't you want to give your significant other a feeling of pride and accomplishment?" - DeBeers.
Professors requiring their own, expensive textbook for their course.
worse than that is professors being required by the school's contract with the textbook company to tell you to buy a book that they have no intent on using because it's awful. that was way way more common for me.
And the versioning of those textbooks to make sure it can sell for exactly nothing.
I loved getting my math degree. Almost every professor provided us with copies of the book. One went so far as to hand out flash drives with the pdfs on them on day 1. For the few classes I did buy books for, I went online and found the international edition, which was generally around 30 bucks instead of 300.
Fuck text book publishers and fuck school bookstores.
This! My English teacher in my first year required us to buy a specific book that she wrote from a specific book store for $250. You had to bring it and the receipt in proving you bought it and aren't just sharing with someone else.
We then opened the table of contents to "go over" the book and never touched it again.
She then said "you should probably leave those here so you don't forget them". Never fucking touched it again.
This one, every time. Imagine buying a product or service for an agreed price, and then being guilt-tripped into having to pay 20%, or more, on top because the owners don't pay their staff enough salary to survive on. It should be fucking illegal. Pay your staff a proper salary and charge your clients the price you published on your menu/price-list etc. Running a business isn't a god-given right, and if you can't do it without screwing your employees over, then you're not capable of running a business period. You should bugger off and let someone who is capable, and who isn't an empathy vacuum have a go.
Car dealerships. They are awful on purpose. In many places car manufacturers are not legally allowed to sell their cars directly to customers, in order to create what is essentially legally mandated car dealerships, which all suck.
My younger coworker was just super stoaked that he only paid $3000 over MSRP for his new car. They gave him a year of oil changes and undercoat for free though!
Yeesh.
Man, I am so tired of feeling broke all the time... But I'd still rather get a used car than do that.
The price for glasses. It's like this because of a stupid duopoly
And the person selling you out glasses out front is for legal reasons a separate business from the doctor who prescribed you the glasses in the back. They don't at any point make it clear to you that you are legally entitled to not buy glasses there, you can ask for your prescription, take it home with you, and find a good deal online. Its a dark UI pattern in real life. Its the exact same psychological thing that's going on when a retailer defaults the "sign up for promotional emails?" tickbox to enabled
I got some cheap glasses from zenni, the've held up for a few years now
I took the gamble because I had the money to spare and never looked back again.
The money I would pay for a set of glasses in my country goes easily over €300. With that amount, I can pay an ophthalmologist appointment, have my eyes checked by a doctor, properly, get the prescription, order two sets of glasses (one as a backup) and still have money to spare.
In some ways, Australia is actually worse than America. Not like, in terms of how "good" the overall system is. We've got you way beat there. But in terms of it being "a scam".
We have a really good public healthcare system called Medicare. But, if you're over 30, you're required to take out private health insurance anyway, or you pay the "Medicare Levy Surcharge" if you have above certain thresholds of income. This levy is not marginal, so you could theoretically take home less pay after getting a pay raise if it puts you over the next threshold.
Additionally, if you later do sign up for private health insurance, you pay an addition levy of 2% on top of the normal premiums for every year you waited. So sign up at 40 and you pay 20% more for insurance than you otherwise would have.
All this means more funding being funneled into the private health sector, taking resources away from the public system, increasing wait times for non-urgent procedures—except for those willing and able to pay to cut the queue. If that's not a scam, I don't know what is.
Americans take it as received wisdom that homes are meant to generate income through higher valuations over time. We just assume home prices go up over time and if it's not actively increasing in value, the home was a failure.
Many other countries don't treat homes this way. They are dwellings, invest what you want to your liking, but it's not a retirement account.
This focus on wealth generation creates lots of perverse incentives, such as exclusionary zoning, building on lots that are overly large, and suburban sprawl. These don't reflect people's actual, desired form of housing but rather maximize wealth for homeowners at the expense of everyone else.
We have a completely warped view of housing that causes us to be preyed upon by real estate agents, landlords, HOAs and the like.
You make good points, and it is a perverse line of thinking. However I do think that homes and land are the only real investments we can make. Not in a sense of trying to make a profit on it, but as something to put our money into.
The United States health insurance system. It's such a for-profit racket that more taxpayer money goes into it per capita than any other system out there and its outcomes are worse and shittier.
It was so disheartening that the ACA just funneled billions more to insurance companies, only it was taxpayer money.
It would be like trying to fix broadband internet by forcing everyone to have a Comcast plan, and using taxpayer dollars to pay for those plans.
Windows.
You pay ~100€ just to give your personal data to MS and get a bloated OS that will use all of your resources. Even MacOS is a more fair deal than this.
I agree that it's not great that telemetry is shared, but to say that you buy it "just" to share your data is an exaggeration. I am sure you do useful things with it.
That said, yes, it is bloated and I wish you could really turn off all telemetry. Am totally with you on that.
Is it normalized? I very rarely hear anyone taking homeopathic medicine or advocating for it. But I live in Norway, so maybe this is a thing elsewhere?
I agree that I never ear anyone I know tell me they use it, but they are sold in every drug store here in Canada so people must buy them, otherwise they would be bankrupt.
Maybe there's better examples. Maybe glasses. Like 500$ for plastic. More people are buying online though these days.
It is very normalized in the south of Germany, but generally Germany is very pro homeopathy so so it is even subsided by the public health care system.
For-profit housing is a massive racket. Investment firms posing as housing developers get tax breaks for buying up properties, inflating the market, pricing out families, and renting those same homes back to the community to pay the mortgage on their investment, plus profit. What fucking purpose do they serve society? Pure predatory capitalist greed at the expense of our housing. For-profit housing needs to be banned. Investment real estate needs to be regulated until all our citizens can afford to buy homes in their localities.
Credit scores. It goes up when you have more debt and goes down when you pay your debt off, but it goes down if you ask for a loan and it goes down if you even try to check what it is.
Absolute nonsense.
It doesn't usually go down when you pay debt off. In fact, paying off all your credit card debt every single month is a great strategy that will get you a good credit score. And is ideal, because that way you avoid the high interest rates that credit cards have.
It also doesn't go down if you check it with sites like Credit Karma. I believe what you're thinking of is hard checks, which loan issuers use and they can slightly ding your score as they represent you about to get a new line of credit. Though honestly that part is pretty sketchy, since it applies even if you don't get a new loan.
I've got dings on my credit report for no debt lol. I get dings for not using enough of my credit limit and also for using too much. It's a stupid system that exists to measure how easily banks can fleece you.
It does go down if you pay things off early, though
Yes that's not my experience. It's a measure of how responsibly you utilize your debt. They like to see you use your debt. But they like to see you pay it off. They don't like for you to sit at a high percentage of debt. And they like to see that you've used your debt responsibly for an extended period of time
They want you in debt so you're forced to work, and so that they can grift interest money off you. According to their system it's irresponsible to not have debt, and it's also irresponsible to ask what their magic number is.
It's so stupid, in a state with a communist vanguard party a social credit system is unironically better since it marks a step towards a classless moneyless society that the American credit score system is antithetical towards.
This is the third post I’ve seen on Lemmy recently where people seem to overwhelmingly think the word “scam” just means “something I don’t like”. To be a scam, something needs to be dishonest in its representation, usually either by falsifying the true cost to the buyer, or lying about what is being provided in return.
Your ISP is suddenly asking for more money. What are you gonna do? Disconnect from the internet?
The ISP have probably made careful calculations of how much they can increase the price before people start looking for alternative ISPs. So if we could collectively lower our thresholds to look for alternatives, we could probably achieve lower prices.
Here's what happens. Say you have three businesses providing roughly the same service in your area. They know you are going with one of them.
If they compete too much on price is a race to the bottom. There's a point at which one or more companies are losing money to compete. The ones with deeper pockets starve everyone else out then start raising prices.
Now, let's assume these three are the ones that made it.
They are not allowed to collude on price. That's illegal, they would be acting like a monopoly. Can't have that so they passed a law.
What's allowed? Publishing your pricing online. What's crazy is the other companies can see this so it's kind of light all three can still meet and compare pricing.
Because of this, you'll be paying about the same no matter where you go. You might be able to find a reseller that provides the connection but no real service. That's fine, but most people aren't using that.
You might find services bundled with other services like a mobile phone plan, tv packages, etc. That's even worse since they call use "price confusion" to make it look like price diversity but no one is letting anyone else eat their lunch.
All of this should be yelling at you full volume that this business is a de facto monopoly so therefore should be regulated heavily or run as a government utility.
The absolute failure to enforce antitrust laws is possibly the single biggest contributor to all problems in the western world right now.
That only works in a competitive market. A lot of places, even in the developed world, have just a single provider in some of the areas people live in outside of major cities. And even in major cities there’s often not enough competition to find reasonably cheap internet, all the prices are within stone throw of each other. Essential utilities being privatized is a scam, especially when infra is funded by the public dollar.
The way mobile providers charge. The likes of Vodafone, any random Telecom, T-Mobile and so forth. It's a huge scam, bordering theft sometimes. Want samples? Here we go:
"Your credit expires in x days. Better recharge now to not lose it!" (Banks should start doing this /s)
"Your credit has expired. Better give us more money within our generous deadline, or else we are forced to delete your number. We love you."
"Your data has expired. We now charge you a horrendous amount every minute, because we are too greedy to warn you in time. For technical reasons we also cannot stop you from using data after your allowance has been used. Fortunately you still have credit, huh?"
"Your data expires today. We don't insult your intelligence by telling you when. Surely you remember when you bought the package, right? It's not hard to count 24 hours. We also do not send any SMS anymore to save the environment."
"Your data has expired. You need data to buy a new bundle. Our app charges data for our convenience."
"Social media data only works for WhatsApp, but not for Signal. But who uses Signal anyways?"
"Use our customer friendly support chat. Conveniently it uses data. 'Hello, I am your smart bot speaking. How can I help you? I might understand you if you type one of the three questions I have been programmed to answer. Do you want to know more about our products?'"
Edit: added point 2, minor corrections for clarity
Is this some kind of prepaid nightmare? I'm across the pond, and what you're describing sounds vaguely familiar. But it was almost half a lifetime ago that I turned 18 and switched to unlimited postpaid.
Cars = getting a job to pay for the gas, the taxes, the repairs, the taxes, the annual state inspection, the taxes, the (usually) annual registration fees, and the taxes!
(Although, you are still able to go places further away without having to get a ride from someone else. In that sense, you are still more free.)
The other half of this scam is the piss-poor public transport in a lot of countries, here in the UK if you’re not a Londoner the government could not care any less about carrots only sticks to get people out of cars.
It's hard to pick just one because, duh, capitalism is inherently a scam.
But if I were to pick just one, it'd have to be the airlines. They're beyond necessary yet every year they pull some insane shit and no one bats an eye. And no matter what they're always crying poor and merging merging merging. Can't you see, they have to - they have no choice.
First the food costs extra. Then the drinks. Then the bags you check in. Then they charge you to sit in the exit aisle because you get an extra 3 inches. They literally say now it's "impossible" to book two tickets seated together unless you pay an extra fee. Impossible, you say? How the fuck were you able to do it for so long up until 2022???
competition. You like Brand A? and dislike Brand B? both are owned by C
And brand C is called Nestle
Shampoo: Washing away the natural oils in our hair, causing the body to produce them in higher volume, causing our hair to get greasy, creating a need for shampoo.
Recycling: Only about 10% of plastic is actually recycled, the rest is sold to countries without environmental laws, and they are dumped irresponsibly. Composting is simple, effective, and would reduce landfill use by about 30%, not to mention creating a useful end product. Yet it is rarely promoted.
Mattresses and box springs: They are worse on our spines and end up causing neck and back issues. Sleeping on a firmer surface, even a thin mattress or pad on the ground, alleviates these issues.
Lawns: Turning a useful piece of land on which we can grow food into a barren wasteland and making it into a chore that requires expensive equipment and encourages chemical use.
Sales tax on food: Some countries and US states have them. It's a tax on existence. Also, taxes on gym memberships and personal protective equipment. The government simultaneously claims it wants healthy, safe citizens, and charges them when they try to be healthy and safe.
If I don't use shampoo my scalp turns into the Sahara desert with 100% chance of snow showers.
The only purpose of lawns was originally to flaunt wealth: "see how much land I can waste and how many people I can employ maintaining it for no purpose whatsoever".
Why this continues and is even encouraged in places, to this day, is a mystery to me.
Car centric cities. Cities can and should be designed for people, keeping cars mostly out. The result is beautiful cities designed for people that make governments lots of money but the car companies will be earning a little less, ooffff
Make cities walkable, create actual safe roads for bikes, create 15 minute cities.
Look at the Netherlands, it damn works awesome
Average fuckcars poster.
Montreal is great because I think it has a good balance.
The "Covid is over" propaganda. Covid is not over. It is still killing people, still disabling people, still giving people lifelong autoimmune conditions and other long-term health problems. "Covid is over" Is code for "Go back to work so the capitalist class can reap the rewards of your labor, no matter how dead or disabled you become in the process."
I've been struggling with long COVID since I got it a second time in April. It's destroyed my body.
I don't really know what to make of it to be honest. I always knew it would be "over" before all of the circumstances that made it an emergency were over. Actually I was very surprised it continued to be taken seriously for as long as it did at least here in Australia because I assumed political and economic interests would kick in after only a very short while I guess because of my usual cynicism.
However, part of the trouble with the whole thing is that there's no agreement on what over would really mean and no acceptable set of preconditions that could reasonably be set to define it. It's very unlikely we'll ever eradicate the virus, so we need to become endemic, but it's also very contagious and frequently mutates. We can set the threshold of the point at which health services can keep on top of cases but that's dependent on different contexts in different countries and regions and also politics. We can help that along tremendously with vaccines but that has to keep going and be taken by whopping majorities of people forever. Take up was good, but helped in large part by being an emergency and if it needs to be an emergency to achieve that then it will never be "over". It's also difficult because while critics and conspiracy theorists kept pointing out how the mortality rate was comparatively low against other infections diseases, the comparatively heavy (albeit with a shaky start) public measures to combat the disease could be justified by both the numbers of people vulnerable to it making the total number of deaths high and the fact that we posessed means we previously didn't to respond to such a pandemic scenario which made us ethically obliged to do so. That's all entirely reasonable justification for being in a state of varying forms of "emergency" which allowed for temporary and extraordinary measures but it begins to wear away with time as the consequences of the measures begin to manifest their own harms and ironically as our measures begin to see some success.
It's a hell of a problem because diseases just don't fit with the way we go about solving problems which is more like a project with an end date and a budget and a tally of easily identified harms and benefits. Unfortunately it means COVID will inevitably be "over" because we say it is before it ever actually can truly be and it kind of puts us on track for more waves of it and also for forgetting about and leaving behind people still contracting or suffering lasting consequences from it.
But I don't really see a solution. It really does have to be over at some point. People genuinely can't be expected to be worrying about this forever and eventually will tire of caution and tire of restrictions and as well they should since we'd consider it madness to still be in a state of health emergency with temporary restrictions to freedom of movement and business and mandatory medical procedures and constant news broadcasts with the latest case numbers for the Spanish Flu pandemic, it even the 2003 SARS virus.
There are better vaccines and antivirals coming out of the research pipeline. There are generics for Paxlovid coming on the market. In the short-term, mask and ventilate.
I agree with this so much. Political parties should just be given one tv ad and one pamphlet. Only allowed to talk about their own policies and nothing else. Exclusively government funded. Any extra donations and you're no longer representing the people's interests so you're murdered or something idk.
DLCs: Games are expected to have DLCs nowadays, so game devs purposefully hold back some ideas for potential DLCs, often crippling the main game as a result.
Subscription services: For pretty much anything, but especially those automated monthly payments, which you won't bother cancelling, even if you feel like you're not using the service to its fullest.
National pension is a ponzi scheme and as our population declines it will be impossible to pay it back.
With private insurance, you are given worse options and they will do anything in their power not to pay it. For the average person, you will also have paid more in the long run with insurance than without it, even if you had an accident.
Chiropractors are harmful for your body even if your issue is spine-related. Go to an orthopedist.
For pensions, it is a ponzi scheme but I wouldn't call it a scam. It's designed to work that way, there's nothing secretive about it.
Not sure what the solution is either. You want to invest it? That's just a 401k. More taxes? That still hurts the younger working generations.
In some respects, the problem is population decline. Immigration can fix that.
I also just really hate the idea of applying financial logic to something like this. Like, are we just gonna go and label the entire human race as a Ponzi scheme? Grandpa's not able to pull his weight lately so fuck him? That's a rhetorical question, obviously. The reality is that old people are going to cost what they cost and everyone else just has to suck it up because the alternative is way uglier.
Most orthopaedic procedures have barely any basis in evidence but at least they're not just blaming everything on musculoskeletal gremlins
Rent
Herbalife, fucking herbalife.
This weekend, I went into what looked like an indie smoothie shop and dropped an ungodly amount of money on a delicious sounding shake... only to watch the lady drop a scoops of powder and ONE freeze-dried strawberry into a cup with ice. Tasted like ass.
Yet they do have regulars to that shit, and nobody is taking them out of business. I want my fucking $11 back. So anyone reading this doing a class action against Herbalife, I want in...
But I doubt it, since it's a scam that's so normalized we don't realize it's a scam anymore.
I'll try to list things that aren't in the typical internet echo chamber. Bring on the controversy. These are just my opinions.
50% of the shelf space at the grocery store is just different forms of corn syrup, sometimes with some trans fat mixed in, generationally twisting our idea of what food is in a race to the cheapest, most addictive product.
The only way it's profitable for someone to knock on your door to sell ANYTHING is if they are obscenely inflating the price (think 100-600% markup)
Most supplements, especially expensive ones with TV ads
Dr Scholl's and the goodfeet store
Genuine leather is just about the opposite of what you'd think
Bamboo fabric which is pretty much just a different way to say rayon but is pitched as a revolutionary and environmentally friendly cloth
Most bladeless fans just hide fan blades in the base
Many cleaning products don't do better than diluted soap and water (even for sanitizing) especially the ones with TV ads
Financial planners who are actually financial product salespeople
Most single-purpose kitchen gadgets, especially as-seen-on-TV
The realtors racket: I just paid $30k for an internet posting and mediocre advice
Many personal hygiene products are just repackaging the same two or three active ingredients by the same one or two megacorporations
Essential oils (even ignoring mystical claims) big names charge an order of magnitude higher than they should
Your list makes me realize just how far we peddle bullshit in our society. Virtually everything is lying to you, if only by omission or by being misleading. If you don't know about cars, finance, food, technology, laws, housing, virtually anything, you will be taken advantage off, if only a little. Pretty much your whole list is spot-on, and it could go on for pages. Toothpaste? They're lying about the quantity. You think your orange juice is healthy because it is very, very heavily suggested? Nope, it is old oranges with a lot of sugar. Anyway, I am not gonna type the entire comment I want to because it would become very rant-y.
My dad used to buy disposable vapes. I decided to take them apart just to find rechargeable li-ion batteries. By the way, in many of them there were quite thin wires and some of the insulation was visibly burned, looks quite dangerous.
Similarly there are some single use power banks. DiodeGoneWild made a video about those and also how to recharge them.
Just a stupid waste of batteries.
I like to tinker with things. I wanted to see if I could hit a weed cart powered by my phone so I bought a bunch of cheap 510 batteries with temp select from DH gate. They were all the same brand, same seller, same packaging. Inside was a different story though. All the batteries were from different manufactures with capacities different from what was listed.
I swear 8 hours 5 days is so dumb unless you don't actually work through the shift. I'd be so much more efficient if I worked 4-5 days 6-7 hours just because I'd burn out less.
Retirement savings connected to the stockk market. Gives a perverse incentive for everyone to continue the wealth transfer upwards, since the stock market is largely based on the vibes of a handful of very rich people.
And no I don't mean every single part of it. But somewhere along the line there became an expectation that the internet be free. That continued for sites that rapidly grew well beyond the point where it was reasonable for them to be maintained for free, but instead of a natural progression where we pay for things we use, we simply became the product of the internet at large in the form of data about every aspect of our lives.
We now live and exist in a world where very little of what we do is private in any way, our preferences and relationships and tendencies are digitized and correlated and used against us largely without our active, conscious knowledge. And it's all so Gmail, Facebook, and YouTube can be free. Or rather..."free".
It has always felt like the biggest scam ever to me, that everything I do and think online should be bought and sold without me really ever having much of a chance to have a say in that.
This contrasts interestingly with the current top comment, Subscriptions.
Land enclosure. Screwed everything up for everyone stg
Microtransactions in video games. Remember when everyone got pissed over horse armor?
Trading Card Games. The whole trading card thing is about psychologically manipulating you into buying shit you don't need, shoulda been stamped out as soon as cigarette companies started doing it, but if you think about it the ideal capitalist institution sells you literally nothing and selling people heavy paper with little pictures on it is damn close to that ideal.
Software. Should be free, isn't. Blame Bill Gates.
Advertising. We all know about propaganda (even though we might disagree on what is and isn't propaganda at times) and we all know it's bad, but we literally let rich people propagandize us every single day in every single orifice.
Software. Should be free, isn’t. Blame Bill Gates.
lol...
that's just some dumb take. Some software can and should be free (operating systems, for example) but all software? lol
You like your free Android kernel? How about your free browser. Or MF'er, do you like this lemmy shit that you're using?!?!?!? What about all the network architecture so you don't have to pay dozens of owners so that you can send a packet of data from your the open-source router software to the Linux server that is hosting your game.
Make no mistake Microsoft has been at war with open source since its business model requires people to pay for software. It would destroy open source if it could, it it probably will after it acquires enough enough market share.
Let's take android for example. There are legitimate security implementations like SELinux, full disk encryption but something like samsung's knox is useless outside of enterprise use and kills OS level modifications
The only reason I haven't rooted my phone is because of the Knox circuit. Rooting it trips the circuit, and it can't be reset. Once the circuit is tripped, my bank won't ever recognize my phone again, because it's "insecure".
Penny auction apps like dealdash, they always have bots that will outbid you so you can never actually win one of their auctions. If you do win an auction, you're not actually guaranteed to ever the see the product you won.
Both this, and that winning an auction doesn't get you the item but the ability to pay for the item. The "penny" refers to the fact that you pay to buy bids in the auction, not that you pay pennies for items.
College. The learning is fine, the cost is freaking out of hand. I never went and have no regrets. My daughter is going now and I feel like I'm supporting a scam.
Anything you take out loans for is a scam. I doubt the cost of houses or college would be anything like it is today if people weren't enabled to pay it by banks.
Car rental - I'm 95% sure I don't need any of those extra insurances but due to pressure and fear tactics (you do want to be covered if x happens, right?), it's hard to know in the moment.
I rent a car very often through work, and I always get those extra insurances, because:
My company pays for it
More than once the car rental companies have found some nano-scale damage to the car that I couldn't have caused (must've been there when I picked it up), and they try to pin it on me, something my job wouldn't cover. And unsurprisingly, those claims only happen when I don't have that extra insurances.
The very first time I rented a vehicle, I got done for a scratch that I didn't make. It was a scratch from underneath the front bumper. When I got the car they never checked that area but it was the first place they looked when I returned it.
Since this incident, I go over the car with them with a very keen eye. I get them to mark down every little mark. Including underneath the bumpers. I even get them to write it down if the car was wet since that can mask scratches.
Battle passes and most microtransactions in games. Day one patches, and GaaS games, always online games and expiring media licenses. VAC bans on Steam.
They're a fund raising tool for the troop, which is very transparent. Nobody is forcing you to buy them, but people love them and do so voluntarily. Where's the scam?
So much shit around bicycles is a scam because barring some major inventions like shocks for mountainbikes or maybe carbon frames it's very much a solved problem, but it doesn't fit into a capitalist economy if everybody just buys one bicycle and then occasionally parts for it to fix it.
Phone companies charging you for caller ID. It must cost them nothing.
Proprietary (nonfree) Software.
People still peddle the "muh intellectual property" and "I gotta feed my kids in this fast-paced economy" even though these are irrelevant to software freedom.
An alarming majority (at least in the US) are ignorant of this conflict at all. The money is so distorted in the IT industry that it's tantamount to theft. The skeletons in Congress don't have a single clue.
Getting paid every 2weeks (what the old times told me)
I'm going to shock you:
In Germany and Austria being paid per month is the norm. All the laws are defined for that. So pretty much everyone who works gets paid just once a month, that's it (Well, in Austria you get 14 salaries, so you get an extra salary every 6 months). It makes zero difference if you get your money one time a month or half your money two times a month, it's the same amount in the end.
Getting paid more often would just complicate things, as it can depend on how much overtime you did in a month. Or how often you went into the office (you get lessened taxes based on how far the office is away and how often you have to drive there and if there is suitable public transport to get there).
What's the better alternative and why is that a scam?
I don't know if it's so much a scam as it is banks and companies and such being stuck in the past.
You could be getting paid every week or even every day, it's your money, you already earned it, why should you have to wait for it?
Especially in this day and age where everything is computerized. You punch in, you punch out, the computer knows how long you worked, somewhere in their payroll system they know how much you earned, what needs to be withheld, etc. It takes fractions of a second for a computer to do that math, they could send that transaction the moment you clock out.
When things were more manual, it made sense, you had to have someone adding things up, and doing math, computers were bigger, slower, less user friendly, more expensive, and not all hooked up to the Internet up to the Internet to talk to each other. It used to make a lot of sense to do things in big batches at the end of the day, every week, every 2 weeks, 2 or 3 times a month, whatever.
But now you could put in your 8 hours work, and walk out with your days wages already in your account ready to be used for whatever you need it for immediately, no more being broke until payday, payday is every day. But that's not how it works because as far as the banks and such are concerned everything is working fine for them, so no real need to update their shit.
Couldn't this be switched around too? I'm only paying some of my bills every other month or twice a year. Why shouldn't I be paying those off every week or even every day?
Really? Is that a thing? Where I live getting paid per month is the norm. Some people get paid per 4 weeks instead of per month. But I don't know of any trade where payment per week or twee weeks is the norm.
Stuff like rent, mortgage, water, gas and electric etc. is all done per month. So it makes sense to match the income cycle to the bill cycle.
Puts living paycheck to paycheck in perspective. I can image not getting ends to meet on a monthly basis. But if you can't afford the next week, you have basically nothing.
I know there is a lot of overhead with payroll where I live, so if companies would have to do it more often, that would be pretty expensive. There are a lot of rules and regulations, so it takes a lot of work to do it right.
Chiropractors.
Even though this is top comment, this is an underrated answer.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/chiropractor-neck-adjustment-caitlin-jensen-b2363357.html
People always chime in with stories about how chiropractors helped them with XY and Z problem they were having.
And overall I don't doubt them. There's a lot of things that can go wrong with your spine or other joints, and I'm certain that some of them can be addressed by physically manipulating and adjusting it.
But the basic premise of chiropractic treatments is that basically all human ailments can be fixed in that way, which should sound like total bullshit to anyone with half a brain. And that's before you get into all spiritual nonsense that pervades a lot of the field.
Now some of them understand that that's a load of bullshit and may even be realistic about the things they can treat, but it can be pretty damn hard to sort them out from the ones who think that your pancreatic cancer is caused by ghosts in your spine and they know how to get them out or some bullshit like that.
Now if you have a good idea what your issue is and what needs to be done to fix it, take the time to carefully vet your chiropractor to make sure they're not going to try some crazy bullshit on you, you very well may be able to get a decent treatment from them. Maybe you'll even be able to save some money going with that.
But for most of us who aren't doctors and so only have kind of vague ideas what exactly the issue is and that the treatments we're doing actually make any sense, and don't necessarily have time to do all of that research and carefully vet that the person treating them isn't secretly a quack, you could just get the same sort of treatments from actually physical therapists, orthopedists, physiatrists, etc. with the added benefit of them actually understanding the issues and how to fix them properly.
Chiropractors are kind of like the rednecks of the medicine world. Some of them know exactly what they're doing with that harbor freight welder, they may not do things by the book but they know for certain what works and what doesn't and more importantly know when something is beyond what them and their buddies can accomplish on a free Saturday with a case of beer and when they need to suck it up and limp their truck to the shop and let a professional deal with it. Others know just enough to be dangerous and while they can get the job done 90% of the time or at least not make things worse, that 10% of the time something is literally going to blow up in someone's face. And still others are just meth heads looking to make a quick buck and it's a miracle they're not behind bars. And when you see them hanging around the local watering hole, it may not be totally clear which is which until it's too late.
Also homeopathy.
The entire industry is built on catering to the vast swaths of women who get ignored by doctors and need somewhere to turn.
I highly suspect doctors are taught in medical school, "women are over emotional and prone to exaggeration."
Hell, "hysteria" was considered a valid diagnosis until the 1950s.
This guy gets it. Chiropractors are a scam, but scammers are drawn to people who "fall through the cracks" because they're treated like their problems don't actually exist. Finally, they meet someone who takes their pain seriously. It's too bad the person who takes it "seriously" is a fucking charlatan.
It falls harder on women, who have more instances of pain that are ignored by the medical community, partially from the history mentioned above, claiming women must be experiencing "hysteria."
It absolutely happens because of the failings of the medical community.
Not all chiropractors are the same, but not knowing who's who is dangerous
There are physical therapists who know the actual manipulations that work and use them as needed for treatment. It's the best of both worlds.
I agree. Physical therapists have to get a doctorate to get licensed, so they definitely know what they’re doing.
Private health insurance is the biggest fucking scam ever. The private insurance companies benefit by getting the aggregate healthiest population into their plans (working adults). The most likely to be expensive people, i.e. old people (on medicare) or poor people (on medicaid, or not even on an insurance plan) are on government, tax payer insurance plans. There is literally no reason except for corporate profiteering that Medicare should not be expanded to cover all people.
Also all those conversations, especially in the 2020 election period, were totally bullshit. You say something like M4A will cost 44 trillion dollars or whatever, which sounds like an insane amount of money. What is often left out of the discussion is that estimated cost was 1) over 10 years and 2) has to be weighed against the current costs we already pay for insurance. So the deal was very simple: the overall costs would go down because the overall spending would be less, and at the same time millions of people without coverage would be covered, and at the same time you don't have to contemplate stupid bullshit like in network, out of network providers. Or ever again talk to your insurance about why something is or isn't covered. Boils my blood when I think too much about this.
Not even gonna weigh in on things like how medicare can't negotiate prescription drug prices (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/23/us/politics/medicare-drug-price-negotiations-lawsuits.html), or how dental, vision, and hearing are treated separately from general healthcare, or how med school is prohibitively expensive, or how the residents after med school are overworked because the guy who institutionalize that practice was literally a cokehead. Those are all just bonus topics. The point is we are getting fleeced.
Private anything is a scam because it doesn't exist to resolve an issue or fulfill a need and instead pursues profit over any logic.
Welcome to the US
Private insurance (for the average person) in general is dumb. We have a collective need to insure various things against disaster, and realistically the federal government shells out huge amounts for most disasters anyways (after the so called insurance companies go bankrupt).
So why the heck are we paying a premium for all of the overhead of the insurance companies?! It's this massive inefficient system that doesn't work, while the "government as insurance" system works great, and doesn't require nearly as much overhead. There's no room for private sector insurance to inovate, because there's nothing to inovate on; IMO, the private insurance industry contributes nothing of value to society except jobs that it pays for by forcing everyone to engage with it.
The insurance industry in general is betting you'll be fine, and you're betting "maybe I won't." It's extra bad for medicine because they stick their head even into the small stuff, not just "I need a 10,000 unexpected hospital bill covered."
The stock market and publicly traded companies. The idea that a business that is making consistent profits isn't good unless those profits are increased each quarter is asinine. This system of shortsighted hyper focus on short term quarterly growth for the sake of growth is the cause of so much pain and suffering in the world. Even companies with amazing financials will work to push workers compensation down, cut corners and exploit loopholes to make sure their profits are always growing. Consistent large profits aren't good enough.
Instapot. Instapot made too good of a product, most people buy one and its good for years. That's good for consumers but terrible for investors. The company that bought them out and took them public saddled them with a ton of debt from other sectors and now they're bankrupt.
Diamond Sports is suing Sinclair for doing the same, minus the "good product" part.
Sinclair bought up the Fox RSNs a few years back, renaming the company as Diamond Sports and the channels as Bally Sports. Not too long afterwards, they went bankrupt. Diamond is claiming that Sinclair has saddled them with massive debts and extraordinarily high management fees. Sinclair also kept the funds from the sponsorship agreement with Bally.
https://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bs-bz-sinclair-broadcast-sued-by-diamond-sports-20230722-ndvdj6btfreovbsyo7gk7eeony-story.html
Google stock is literally worthless and does not represent an actual stake in the company for example
My personal top 3:
Technically insurance only works if everybody pays in. Wouldn't work as a concept if every tom dick and harry could pay them $100 then a week later need $100,000. They'd basically be out of business right quick with nothing to provide for anyone. Maybe as some believe it should just be provided through taxes, but it's certainly not a scam.
The scam part comes when you are forced to fight tooth and nail to get money from them even when you are clearly covered
This. For non trivial claims they basically won't lift a finger until you take them to court.
This. I got a detailed bill for a minor surgery, every single value was under the value of their own detailed coverage, and they still didn't pay back around 12% of the value and never justified what the difference was about. They did it because they know I won't fight them on it and they do it to everyone. That objectively and legally makes their detailed coverage a scam.
It’s true insurance companies need to take in adequate premiums in order to have the money the money to pay claims. And when done in balance, insurance is a great thing. Not all insurance in a scam, no doubting that.
But the current state of insurance, especially health insurance in the US, shows that these companies are making massive profits. How does this happen? Literally one way: They take in more premiums than they pay out in coverage. How? By either knowingly overcharging people or skirting out of paying covered claims through other means (such as baseless rejections).
That’s the problem with the entire insurance industry and why it must be properly regulated in any industry: It is a race to the bottom. The worse the insurer treats the people that buy insurance from them, the better the company does financially (charge a lot, pay out a little). Mix in the fact that (1) you cannot shop around at the time you need a claim and (2) the contracts are so intensive only a sophisticated legal team can interpret them, and it’s a recipe for disaster.
So you’re right that all insurance isn’t necessarily a scam. But if you can’t see that the US health insurance industry raking in profits shows serious dysfunction that could be considered a scam, it’s worth taking a second look.
But the problem is that medical costs are only as high as they are because of insurance. Hospitals started making up fake, artificially high prices because insurance companies wanted a discount for referring patients to their hospital.
Hold up don't forget that in the US, healthcare providers base their pricing on what they will receive after insurance discounts. This creates a massively overinflated market where most of the value is made up and a large portion of actual payments goes to insurance and corporations
Subscriptions.
People pay every month but most don't use the sub to it's full value, and forget how expensive it becomes over the years. And you don't own anything on a subscription, you just borrow it.
Also trial periods that prolong automatically into subscriptions.
I was really surprised when I shipping forwarder I use after I upgraded from the "free" tier to the $10/month tier to save a few hundred dollars of state taxes, when I downgraded back to their "free" tier five days later once the package was out of their hands, the answer was "Your subscription will end at the end of your current paid month"
I expected worse
Unpaid overtime.
Framing "fulfilling your contract" as "silent quitting".
In what other context would be "delivering what's in the contract" anything less than satisfactory?
When I buy a litre of milk and the box contains exactly a litre of milk it isn't "silent stealing" either.
Unpaid overtime is usually illegal too. Highly depends on your position though. A lot of software engineers are marked as exempt when they shouldn't be.
The annoying thing is, depending on your job and financial situation, it hardly matters whether it's illegal or not. I'm not talking about my comfortable situation as a software engineer, but rather people working crap jobs and not having alternatives.
If you know, you'll be out of work for longer if you get fired, you basically cannot report any illegal stuff your employer is doing.
Car based infrastructure
the stock market
capitalism
Unregulated capitalism imo. I don't buy the idea I've seen around here that capitalism itself is the problem and switching to communism would solve all the problems. Both are systems that have merit, but when left unchecked all the power and money will go to the few, like we have now.
If by "have merit" you mean "has some positive aspects", sure. Every system has merit. Slavery had merit (slave owners got cheap cotton). The Holocaust had merit (antisemites felt better). The issue is weighing the merit against the negatives. You can't just say two systems have positive aspects and call it a day.
Are you a fan of democracy or authoritarianism? Capitalism is a system where productive forces are driven undemocratically, in the name of profit instead of by worker democracy. The commodification of everything exists in a world of private property:
These things being commodified and privatized are ridiculous in any democratic, non-capitalist system.
However, these ridiculous conditions are absolutely necessary in a capitalist society. Without them the system falls apart. And as society continues to progress, the situation gets more and more ridiculous.
What about when AI "takes away" jobs for 50% of Americans (as in capitalists fire humans in favor of AI)? That'll collapse our society. Less work would be a good thing in any reasonable system, but not in capitalism. Less work is an existential threat to our society.
If we ever have an AI that is as capable as humans are intellectually, the only work left for us will be manual labor. If that happens, and robots get to the point of matching our physical abilities, we won't be employable anymore. The two classes will no longer be owners and workers, they'll be owners and non-owners. At that point we better have dismantled capitalism, because if we don't then we'll just be starving in the street, along with the millions who die every year from starvation under the boot of global capitalism.
Wedding rings/diamonds in general.
The tradition isn't as old as people think and was literally started by a jewelry company to sell more jewelry. Specifically diamonds, which are not as rare as commonly believed and if not for the false scarcity and misinformation, would be dirt cheap.
It's crazy that even when people are told about this, they usually still defend it. I don't get why the heck any normal person would like the idea of spending a few months salary on a ring. It's such a terrible way to start a new marriage, especially with wages being what they are these days.
Diamonds were fairly rare when we used to mine them in Asia and America. And it's a nice shiny stone which is also very durable.
Then, we found out Africa is actually full of diamonds and DeBeers said "we can't have that!" and started buying all the African diamonds to keep them away to artificially inflate the price and scarcity.
Then we found out we can make them in labs better than the mined ones and DeBeers sai "that's not a natural diamond, you don't want that!" and so on.
The whole marketing about "A diamond is forever!" is to make you think you'll never want to sell your diamon ring, so you don't find out your precious gift paid $2,000 is actually wortth $50.
An EA spokeperson would say "it's all about the experience".
"Don't you want to give your significant other a feeling of pride and accomplishment?" - DeBeers.
We can literally make perfect diamonds in a lab, there is literally no reason we are still mining them
Professors requiring their own, expensive textbook for their course.
worse than that is professors being required by the school's contract with the textbook company to tell you to buy a book that they have no intent on using because it's awful. that was way way more common for me.
And the versioning of those textbooks to make sure it can sell for exactly nothing.
I loved getting my math degree. Almost every professor provided us with copies of the book. One went so far as to hand out flash drives with the pdfs on them on day 1. For the few classes I did buy books for, I went online and found the international edition, which was generally around 30 bucks instead of 300.
Fuck text book publishers and fuck school bookstores.
This! My English teacher in my first year required us to buy a specific book that she wrote from a specific book store for $250. You had to bring it and the receipt in proving you bought it and aren't just sharing with someone else.
We then opened the table of contents to "go over" the book and never touched it again.
She then said "you should probably leave those here so you don't forget them". Never fucking touched it again.
Tipping in restaurants…pay the workers.
This one, every time. Imagine buying a product or service for an agreed price, and then being guilt-tripped into having to pay 20%, or more, on top because the owners don't pay their staff enough salary to survive on. It should be fucking illegal. Pay your staff a proper salary and charge your clients the price you published on your menu/price-list etc. Running a business isn't a god-given right, and if you can't do it without screwing your employees over, then you're not capable of running a business period. You should bugger off and let someone who is capable, and who isn't an empathy vacuum have a go.
First Past the Post voting at elections.
Approval Voting and multi-winner districts let's gooooooo!
Religion. Whole cloth.
Dollar stores. A lot of the time they are profiting by selling you a smaller quantity at a slightly lower price. They target low income communities.
Well nowadays that's every store. Shrinkflation dude
At this rate, toothpaste will soon be sold in tiny single-use tubes.
Exactly. It's the opposite of the Costco model.
Absolutely targeted towards people who can't afford regular sized/priced items, let alone bulk-for-discount.
Car dealerships. They are awful on purpose. In many places car manufacturers are not legally allowed to sell their cars directly to customers, in order to create what is essentially legally mandated car dealerships, which all suck.
My younger coworker was just super stoaked that he only paid $3000 over MSRP for his new car. They gave him a year of oil changes and undercoat for free though!
Yeesh.
Man, I am so tired of feeling broke all the time... But I'd still rather get a used car than do that.
Cars in general are a scam
I want to hear the excuse they made for this
The price for glasses. It's like this because of a stupid duopoly
And the person selling you out glasses out front is for legal reasons a separate business from the doctor who prescribed you the glasses in the back. They don't at any point make it clear to you that you are legally entitled to not buy glasses there, you can ask for your prescription, take it home with you, and find a good deal online. Its a dark UI pattern in real life. Its the exact same psychological thing that's going on when a retailer defaults the "sign up for promotional emails?" tickbox to enabled
I got some cheap glasses from zenni, the've held up for a few years now
Buy from China.
I took the gamble because I had the money to spare and never looked back again.
The money I would pay for a set of glasses in my country goes easily over €300. With that amount, I can pay an ophthalmologist appointment, have my eyes checked by a doctor, properly, get the prescription, order two sets of glasses (one as a backup) and still have money to spare.
Private health insurance.
Banks.
Insurance (am American)
In some ways, Australia is actually worse than America. Not like, in terms of how "good" the overall system is. We've got you way beat there. But in terms of it being "a scam".
We have a really good public healthcare system called Medicare. But, if you're over 30, you're required to take out private health insurance anyway, or you pay the "Medicare Levy Surcharge" if you have above certain thresholds of income. This levy is not marginal, so you could theoretically take home less pay after getting a pay raise if it puts you over the next threshold.
Additionally, if you later do sign up for private health insurance, you pay an addition levy of 2% on top of the normal premiums for every year you waited. So sign up at 40 and you pay 20% more for insurance than you otherwise would have.
All this means more funding being funneled into the private health sector, taking resources away from the public system, increasing wait times for non-urgent procedures—except for those willing and able to pay to cut the queue. If that's not a scam, I don't know what is.
Totally. Make a claim and suddenly your rates skyrocket. I’m trying to figure out what I have been paying for.
Diamonds.
This is pretty common knowledge these days.
Real estate agents getting 6% commission from the seller.
Printer inkt. In our shop people are still buying them for a way to high price…
Tipping
Homes as wealth-creators.
Americans take it as received wisdom that homes are meant to generate income through higher valuations over time. We just assume home prices go up over time and if it's not actively increasing in value, the home was a failure.
Many other countries don't treat homes this way. They are dwellings, invest what you want to your liking, but it's not a retirement account.
This focus on wealth generation creates lots of perverse incentives, such as exclusionary zoning, building on lots that are overly large, and suburban sprawl. These don't reflect people's actual, desired form of housing but rather maximize wealth for homeowners at the expense of everyone else.
We have a completely warped view of housing that causes us to be preyed upon by real estate agents, landlords, HOAs and the like.
You make good points, and it is a perverse line of thinking. However I do think that homes and land are the only real investments we can make. Not in a sense of trying to make a profit on it, but as something to put our money into.
The United States health insurance system. It's such a for-profit racket that more taxpayer money goes into it per capita than any other system out there and its outcomes are worse and shittier.
It was so disheartening that the ACA just funneled billions more to insurance companies, only it was taxpayer money.
It would be like trying to fix broadband internet by forcing everyone to have a Comcast plan, and using taxpayer dollars to pay for those plans.
And still letting Comcast set the prices
Windows. You pay ~100€ just to give your personal data to MS and get a bloated OS that will use all of your resources. Even MacOS is a more fair deal than this.
I agree that it's not great that telemetry is shared, but to say that you buy it "just" to share your data is an exaggeration. I am sure you do useful things with it.
That said, yes, it is bloated and I wish you could really turn off all telemetry. Am totally with you on that.
And then it shows you ads, too!
Linux distros:
Wait... You paid for Windows? And it was version 8 or newer?
Capitalism and the 5 day 9 to 5 work week
British royal family.
Religions that collect money from adherents.
Web 2.0 data harvesting.
Homeopathy?
Is it normalized? I very rarely hear anyone taking homeopathic medicine or advocating for it. But I live in Norway, so maybe this is a thing elsewhere?
I agree that I never ear anyone I know tell me they use it, but they are sold in every drug store here in Canada so people must buy them, otherwise they would be bankrupt.
Maybe there's better examples. Maybe glasses. Like 500$ for plastic. More people are buying online though these days.
It is very normalized in the south of Germany, but generally Germany is very pro homeopathy so so it is even subsided by the public health care system.
Landlording
For-profit housing is a massive racket. Investment firms posing as housing developers get tax breaks for buying up properties, inflating the market, pricing out families, and renting those same homes back to the community to pay the mortgage on their investment, plus profit. What fucking purpose do they serve society? Pure predatory capitalist greed at the expense of our housing. For-profit housing needs to be banned. Investment real estate needs to be regulated until all our citizens can afford to buy homes in their localities.
Bank fees
I see you have no money... I'm going to have to charge you for that
Credit scores. It goes up when you have more debt and goes down when you pay your debt off, but it goes down if you ask for a loan and it goes down if you even try to check what it is.
Absolute nonsense.
It doesn't usually go down when you pay debt off. In fact, paying off all your credit card debt every single month is a great strategy that will get you a good credit score. And is ideal, because that way you avoid the high interest rates that credit cards have.
It also doesn't go down if you check it with sites like Credit Karma. I believe what you're thinking of is hard checks, which loan issuers use and they can slightly ding your score as they represent you about to get a new line of credit. Though honestly that part is pretty sketchy, since it applies even if you don't get a new loan.
I've got dings on my credit report for no debt lol. I get dings for not using enough of my credit limit and also for using too much. It's a stupid system that exists to measure how easily banks can fleece you.
It does go down if you pay things off early, though
Yes that's not my experience. It's a measure of how responsibly you utilize your debt. They like to see you use your debt. But they like to see you pay it off. They don't like for you to sit at a high percentage of debt. And they like to see that you've used your debt responsibly for an extended period of time
They want you in debt so you're forced to work, and so that they can grift interest money off you. According to their system it's irresponsible to not have debt, and it's also irresponsible to ask what their magic number is.
It's so stupid, in a state with a communist vanguard party a social credit system is unironically better since it marks a step towards a classless moneyless society that the American credit score system is antithetical towards.
capitalism
This is the third post I’ve seen on Lemmy recently where people seem to overwhelmingly think the word “scam” just means “something I don’t like”. To be a scam, something needs to be dishonest in its representation, usually either by falsifying the true cost to the buyer, or lying about what is being provided in return.
Commoditized bottled water.
Water should be safe to drink from taps. Holy shit. I have a 1 liter bottle, I fill it a couple of times a day at home and it's great...
Your ISP is suddenly asking for more money. What are you gonna do? Disconnect from the internet?
The ISP have probably made careful calculations of how much they can increase the price before people start looking for alternative ISPs. So if we could collectively lower our thresholds to look for alternatives, we could probably achieve lower prices.
Here's what happens. Say you have three businesses providing roughly the same service in your area. They know you are going with one of them.
If they compete too much on price is a race to the bottom. There's a point at which one or more companies are losing money to compete. The ones with deeper pockets starve everyone else out then start raising prices.
Now, let's assume these three are the ones that made it.
They are not allowed to collude on price. That's illegal, they would be acting like a monopoly. Can't have that so they passed a law.
What's allowed? Publishing your pricing online. What's crazy is the other companies can see this so it's kind of light all three can still meet and compare pricing.
Because of this, you'll be paying about the same no matter where you go. You might be able to find a reseller that provides the connection but no real service. That's fine, but most people aren't using that.
You might find services bundled with other services like a mobile phone plan, tv packages, etc. That's even worse since they call use "price confusion" to make it look like price diversity but no one is letting anyone else eat their lunch.
All of this should be yelling at you full volume that this business is a de facto monopoly so therefore should be regulated heavily or run as a government utility.
The absolute failure to enforce antitrust laws is possibly the single biggest contributor to all problems in the western world right now.
That only works in a competitive market. A lot of places, even in the developed world, have just a single provider in some of the areas people live in outside of major cities. And even in major cities there’s often not enough competition to find reasonably cheap internet, all the prices are within stone throw of each other. Essential utilities being privatized is a scam, especially when infra is funded by the public dollar.
Credit scores
Printer Ink and paying companies like Google and Spotify, who still collect your data as a paid customer.
Paying Spotify and still getting adverts.
At that point I decided that Spotify wasn't for me anymore.
You get ads?
Capitalism and religion, easily the top two scams.
The way mobile providers charge. The likes of Vodafone, any random Telecom, T-Mobile and so forth. It's a huge scam, bordering theft sometimes. Want samples? Here we go:
"Your credit expires in x days. Better recharge now to not lose it!" (Banks should start doing this /s)
"Your credit has expired. Better give us more money within our generous deadline, or else we are forced to delete your number. We love you."
"Your data has expired. We now charge you a horrendous amount every minute, because we are too greedy to warn you in time. For technical reasons we also cannot stop you from using data after your allowance has been used. Fortunately you still have credit, huh?"
"Your data expires today. We don't insult your intelligence by telling you when. Surely you remember when you bought the package, right? It's not hard to count 24 hours. We also do not send any SMS anymore to save the environment."
"Your data has expired. You need data to buy a new bundle. Our app charges data for our convenience."
"Social media data only works for WhatsApp, but not for Signal. But who uses Signal anyways?"
"Use our customer friendly support chat. Conveniently it uses data. 'Hello, I am your smart bot speaking. How can I help you? I might understand you if you type one of the three questions I have been programmed to answer. Do you want to know more about our products?'"
Edit: added point 2, minor corrections for clarity
Is this some kind of prepaid nightmare? I'm across the pond, and what you're describing sounds vaguely familiar. But it was almost half a lifetime ago that I turned 18 and switched to unlimited postpaid.
Cryptocurrency
Cars=freedom
Cars = getting a job to pay for the gas, the taxes, the repairs, the taxes, the annual state inspection, the taxes, the (usually) annual registration fees, and the taxes!
(Although, you are still able to go places further away without having to get a ride from someone else. In that sense, you are still more free.)
The other half of this scam is the piss-poor public transport in a lot of countries, here in the UK if you’re not a Londoner the government could not care any less about carrots only sticks to get people out of cars.
Airlines charging for seat selection. I remember the days when that was just a right you got for "free" by purchasing the ticket 🤷
Airlines charging for EVERYTHING including carry on.
It's hard to pick just one because, duh, capitalism is inherently a scam.
But if I were to pick just one, it'd have to be the airlines. They're beyond necessary yet every year they pull some insane shit and no one bats an eye. And no matter what they're always crying poor and merging merging merging. Can't you see, they have to - they have no choice.
First the food costs extra. Then the drinks. Then the bags you check in. Then they charge you to sit in the exit aisle because you get an extra 3 inches. They literally say now it's "impossible" to book two tickets seated together unless you pay an extra fee. Impossible, you say? How the fuck were you able to do it for so long up until 2022???
Diamond Scarcity
Capitalism
Capitalism seems to be going great in 2023, I don't know where you're getting this from.
That’s not REAL capitalism, that’s crony capitalism. Real capitalism is when I get rich. Crony capitalism is when I don’t.
competition. You like Brand A? and dislike Brand B? both are owned by C
And brand C is called Nestle
Shampoo: Washing away the natural oils in our hair, causing the body to produce them in higher volume, causing our hair to get greasy, creating a need for shampoo.
Recycling: Only about 10% of plastic is actually recycled, the rest is sold to countries without environmental laws, and they are dumped irresponsibly. Composting is simple, effective, and would reduce landfill use by about 30%, not to mention creating a useful end product. Yet it is rarely promoted.
Mattresses and box springs: They are worse on our spines and end up causing neck and back issues. Sleeping on a firmer surface, even a thin mattress or pad on the ground, alleviates these issues.
Lawns: Turning a useful piece of land on which we can grow food into a barren wasteland and making it into a chore that requires expensive equipment and encourages chemical use.
Sales tax on food: Some countries and US states have them. It's a tax on existence. Also, taxes on gym memberships and personal protective equipment. The government simultaneously claims it wants healthy, safe citizens, and charges them when they try to be healthy and safe.
If I don't use shampoo my scalp turns into the Sahara desert with 100% chance of snow showers.
The only purpose of lawns was originally to flaunt wealth: "see how much land I can waste and how many people I can employ maintaining it for no purpose whatsoever".
Why this continues and is even encouraged in places, to this day, is a mystery to me.
The notion that capitalism is the end-all be-all of how society functions/works.
Car centric cities. Cities can and should be designed for people, keeping cars mostly out. The result is beautiful cities designed for people that make governments lots of money but the car companies will be earning a little less, ooffff
Make cities walkable, create actual safe roads for bikes, create 15 minute cities.
Look at the Netherlands, it damn works awesome
Average fuckcars poster.
Montreal is great because I think it has a good balance.
If you live outside the city, how do you commute to your workplace in the city? Park and ride?
The "Covid is over" propaganda. Covid is not over. It is still killing people, still disabling people, still giving people lifelong autoimmune conditions and other long-term health problems. "Covid is over" Is code for "Go back to work so the capitalist class can reap the rewards of your labor, no matter how dead or disabled you become in the process."
I've been struggling with long COVID since I got it a second time in April. It's destroyed my body.
I don't really know what to make of it to be honest. I always knew it would be "over" before all of the circumstances that made it an emergency were over. Actually I was very surprised it continued to be taken seriously for as long as it did at least here in Australia because I assumed political and economic interests would kick in after only a very short while I guess because of my usual cynicism.
However, part of the trouble with the whole thing is that there's no agreement on what over would really mean and no acceptable set of preconditions that could reasonably be set to define it. It's very unlikely we'll ever eradicate the virus, so we need to become endemic, but it's also very contagious and frequently mutates. We can set the threshold of the point at which health services can keep on top of cases but that's dependent on different contexts in different countries and regions and also politics. We can help that along tremendously with vaccines but that has to keep going and be taken by whopping majorities of people forever. Take up was good, but helped in large part by being an emergency and if it needs to be an emergency to achieve that then it will never be "over". It's also difficult because while critics and conspiracy theorists kept pointing out how the mortality rate was comparatively low against other infections diseases, the comparatively heavy (albeit with a shaky start) public measures to combat the disease could be justified by both the numbers of people vulnerable to it making the total number of deaths high and the fact that we posessed means we previously didn't to respond to such a pandemic scenario which made us ethically obliged to do so. That's all entirely reasonable justification for being in a state of varying forms of "emergency" which allowed for temporary and extraordinary measures but it begins to wear away with time as the consequences of the measures begin to manifest their own harms and ironically as our measures begin to see some success.
It's a hell of a problem because diseases just don't fit with the way we go about solving problems which is more like a project with an end date and a budget and a tally of easily identified harms and benefits. Unfortunately it means COVID will inevitably be "over" because we say it is before it ever actually can truly be and it kind of puts us on track for more waves of it and also for forgetting about and leaving behind people still contracting or suffering lasting consequences from it.
But I don't really see a solution. It really does have to be over at some point. People genuinely can't be expected to be worrying about this forever and eventually will tire of caution and tire of restrictions and as well they should since we'd consider it madness to still be in a state of health emergency with temporary restrictions to freedom of movement and business and mandatory medical procedures and constant news broadcasts with the latest case numbers for the Spanish Flu pandemic, it even the 2003 SARS virus.
There are better vaccines and antivirals coming out of the research pipeline. There are generics for Paxlovid coming on the market. In the short-term, mask and ventilate.
Printers
Giving money to politicians.
I agree with this so much. Political parties should just be given one tv ad and one pamphlet. Only allowed to talk about their own policies and nothing else. Exclusively government funded. Any extra donations and you're no longer representing the people's interests so you're murdered or something idk.
Private insurance
In-game shops
DLCs: Games are expected to have DLCs nowadays, so game devs purposefully hold back some ideas for potential DLCs, often crippling the main game as a result.
Subscription services: For pretty much anything, but especially those automated monthly payments, which you won't bother cancelling, even if you feel like you're not using the service to its fullest.
Lemmy just made a suggestion
Eww, light mode. burned my eyes
Capitalism
National pension is a ponzi scheme and as our population declines it will be impossible to pay it back.
With private insurance, you are given worse options and they will do anything in their power not to pay it. For the average person, you will also have paid more in the long run with insurance than without it, even if you had an accident.
Chiropractors are harmful for your body even if your issue is spine-related. Go to an orthopedist.
For pensions, it is a ponzi scheme but I wouldn't call it a scam. It's designed to work that way, there's nothing secretive about it.
Not sure what the solution is either. You want to invest it? That's just a 401k. More taxes? That still hurts the younger working generations.
In some respects, the problem is population decline. Immigration can fix that.
I also just really hate the idea of applying financial logic to something like this. Like, are we just gonna go and label the entire human race as a Ponzi scheme? Grandpa's not able to pull his weight lately so fuck him? That's a rhetorical question, obviously. The reality is that old people are going to cost what they cost and everyone else just has to suck it up because the alternative is way uglier.
Most orthopaedic procedures have barely any basis in evidence but at least they're not just blaming everything on musculoskeletal gremlins
Rent
Herbalife, fucking herbalife.
This weekend, I went into what looked like an indie smoothie shop and dropped an ungodly amount of money on a delicious sounding shake... only to watch the lady drop a scoops of powder and ONE freeze-dried strawberry into a cup with ice. Tasted like ass.
Yet they do have regulars to that shit, and nobody is taking them out of business. I want my fucking $11 back. So anyone reading this doing a class action against Herbalife, I want in...
But I doubt it, since it's a scam that's so normalized we don't realize it's a scam anymore.
I'll try to list things that aren't in the typical internet echo chamber. Bring on the controversy. These are just my opinions.
50% of the shelf space at the grocery store is just different forms of corn syrup, sometimes with some trans fat mixed in, generationally twisting our idea of what food is in a race to the cheapest, most addictive product.
The only way it's profitable for someone to knock on your door to sell ANYTHING is if they are obscenely inflating the price (think 100-600% markup)
Most supplements, especially expensive ones with TV ads
Dr Scholl's and the goodfeet store
Genuine leather is just about the opposite of what you'd think
Bamboo fabric which is pretty much just a different way to say rayon but is pitched as a revolutionary and environmentally friendly cloth
Most bladeless fans just hide fan blades in the base
Many cleaning products don't do better than diluted soap and water (even for sanitizing) especially the ones with TV ads
Financial planners who are actually financial product salespeople
Most single-purpose kitchen gadgets, especially as-seen-on-TV
The realtors racket: I just paid $30k for an internet posting and mediocre advice
Many personal hygiene products are just repackaging the same two or three active ingredients by the same one or two megacorporations
Essential oils (even ignoring mystical claims) big names charge an order of magnitude higher than they should
Your list makes me realize just how far we peddle bullshit in our society. Virtually everything is lying to you, if only by omission or by being misleading. If you don't know about cars, finance, food, technology, laws, housing, virtually anything, you will be taken advantage off, if only a little. Pretty much your whole list is spot-on, and it could go on for pages. Toothpaste? They're lying about the quantity. You think your orange juice is healthy because it is very, very heavily suggested? Nope, it is old oranges with a lot of sugar. Anyway, I am not gonna type the entire comment I want to because it would become very rant-y.
Video games having microtransactions and "chests" or otherwise with random rewards.
In the past few years I've seen "turns out printer ink is a scam" videos trending at least three times on YouTube, so I'm assuming printer ink.
"Disposable" electronics
My dad used to buy disposable vapes. I decided to take them apart just to find rechargeable li-ion batteries. By the way, in many of them there were quite thin wires and some of the insulation was visibly burned, looks quite dangerous.
Similarly there are some single use power banks. DiodeGoneWild made a video about those and also how to recharge them.
Just a stupid waste of batteries.
I like to tinker with things. I wanted to see if I could hit a weed cart powered by my phone so I bought a bunch of cheap 510 batteries with temp select from DH gate. They were all the same brand, same seller, same packaging. Inside was a different story though. All the batteries were from different manufactures with capacities different from what was listed.
Chiropractic.
I'd wager fewer than 25% of Americans know that it's quackery invented in the 1890s.
capitalism
🏆 🏆 🏆
We have a winner!
🏆 🏆 🏆
Full time work.
I swear 8 hours 5 days is so dumb unless you don't actually work through the shift. I'd be so much more efficient if I worked 4-5 days 6-7 hours just because I'd burn out less.
Retirement savings connected to the stockk market. Gives a perverse incentive for everyone to continue the wealth transfer upwards, since the stock market is largely based on the vibes of a handful of very rich people.
Land speculation
In 2021 I would have said Crypto. Now everyone but the most dense people see it for the scam it is.
Crypto as an investment, and NFT for digital art, sure it's a scam.
Crypto as an extralegal means of moving money is totally useful.
Car dealerships.
The internet.
And no I don't mean every single part of it. But somewhere along the line there became an expectation that the internet be free. That continued for sites that rapidly grew well beyond the point where it was reasonable for them to be maintained for free, but instead of a natural progression where we pay for things we use, we simply became the product of the internet at large in the form of data about every aspect of our lives.
We now live and exist in a world where very little of what we do is private in any way, our preferences and relationships and tendencies are digitized and correlated and used against us largely without our active, conscious knowledge. And it's all so Gmail, Facebook, and YouTube can be free. Or rather..."free".
It has always felt like the biggest scam ever to me, that everything I do and think online should be bought and sold without me really ever having much of a chance to have a say in that.
This contrasts interestingly with the current top comment, Subscriptions.
The gop
Asking this question every single week.
Land enclosure. Screwed everything up for everyone stg
Microtransactions in video games. Remember when everyone got pissed over horse armor?
Trading Card Games. The whole trading card thing is about psychologically manipulating you into buying shit you don't need, shoulda been stamped out as soon as cigarette companies started doing it, but if you think about it the ideal capitalist institution sells you literally nothing and selling people heavy paper with little pictures on it is damn close to that ideal.
Software. Should be free, isn't. Blame Bill Gates.
Advertising. We all know about propaganda (even though we might disagree on what is and isn't propaganda at times) and we all know it's bad, but we literally let rich people propagandize us every single day in every single orifice.
lol...
that's just some dumb take. Some software can and should be free (operating systems, for example) but all software? lol
You like your free Android kernel? How about your free browser. Or MF'er, do you like this lemmy shit that you're using?!?!?!? What about all the network architecture so you don't have to pay dozens of owners so that you can send a packet of data from your the open-source router software to the Linux server that is hosting your game.
Make no mistake Microsoft has been at war with open source since its business model requires people to pay for software. It would destroy open source if it could, it it probably will after it acquires enough enough market share.
Why should software be free?
Most security on consumer hardware
Let's take android for example. There are legitimate security implementations like SELinux, full disk encryption but something like samsung's knox is useless outside of enterprise use and kills OS level modifications
The only reason I haven't rooted my phone is because of the Knox circuit. Rooting it trips the circuit, and it can't be reset. Once the circuit is tripped, my bank won't ever recognize my phone again, because it's "insecure".
Social media
Health insurance. Actually that probably doesn't really count since most of us know it's a scam.
Religion.
Block chain - there's still no legitimate practical use for it
Health insurance.
Everything comes with a subscription
Would be far easier to name things that are not a scam and assume the rest is just a scam in waiting.
Libraries, Pets, Sunrises/sets, Nigerian princes needing loans, Mr. Rogers
Everything else is probably looking to take money from you in some fashion.
Penny auction apps like dealdash, they always have bots that will outbid you so you can never actually win one of their auctions. If you do win an auction, you're not actually guaranteed to ever the see the product you won.
Both this, and that winning an auction doesn't get you the item but the ability to pay for the item. The "penny" refers to the fact that you pay to buy bids in the auction, not that you pay pennies for items.
College. The learning is fine, the cost is freaking out of hand. I never went and have no regrets. My daughter is going now and I feel like I'm supporting a scam.
Anything you take out loans for is a scam. I doubt the cost of houses or college would be anything like it is today if people weren't enabled to pay it by banks.
The extra .9 cent we pay for every gallon of gas in the USA.
You have about the cheapest gas in the western world and you complain about a few extra cents?
The United States of America
Adobe
Paying for airplane luggage
Car rental - I'm 95% sure I don't need any of those extra insurances but due to pressure and fear tactics (you do want to be covered if x happens, right?), it's hard to know in the moment.
I rent a car very often through work, and I always get those extra insurances, because:
My company pays for it
More than once the car rental companies have found some nano-scale damage to the car that I couldn't have caused (must've been there when I picked it up), and they try to pin it on me, something my job wouldn't cover. And unsurprisingly, those claims only happen when I don't have that extra insurances.
The very first time I rented a vehicle, I got done for a scratch that I didn't make. It was a scratch from underneath the front bumper. When I got the car they never checked that area but it was the first place they looked when I returned it.
Since this incident, I go over the car with them with a very keen eye. I get them to mark down every little mark. Including underneath the bumpers. I even get them to write it down if the car was wet since that can mask scratches.
Last time I rented a car I declined their insurance and they were able to just use my daily car's policy.
Real estate agents
Paying high subscription fees for Autodesk products
Speculative economic instruments. There's a reason why specific items, such as onions in the US, have been banned from being essentially bet on.
Companies being the sole arbiters of OTA "Upgrades" and DRM "purchases".
Organized religion.
Nothing comes even remotely close.
Mass Surveillance.
Companies and governments alike have successfully convinced most people that they have "nothing to fear".
Copyright
Resort fees, especially in Las Vegas.
most cheap things that fall apart after a short time
Fashion
Printers and printer ink
Get yourself a Brother printer and this annoyance will be cast away forever
Airline ticket prices.
Patents
gacha game, paying premium money, an insane amount event just to see virtual character
Battle passes and most microtransactions in games. Day one patches, and GaaS games, always online games and expiring media licenses. VAC bans on Steam.
Individualism.
Girl Scout cookies
They're a fund raising tool for the troop, which is very transparent. Nobody is forcing you to buy them, but people love them and do so voluntarily. Where's the scam?
Video game trailers
So much shit around bicycles is a scam because barring some major inventions like shocks for mountainbikes or maybe carbon frames it's very much a solved problem, but it doesn't fit into a capitalist economy if everybody just buys one bicycle and then occasionally parts for it to fix it.
Toilet paper
Credit cards and everything to do with the debt trap.
Religion. The all-time champion, no contest, just as George Carlin said:
https://youtu.be/2tp0UNcjzl8
Paying for cellular data, in advance, regardless of whether or not you use it with no possibility of refunding any you didn't use.
ads
Phone companies charging you for caller ID. It must cost them nothing.
Proprietary (nonfree) Software.
People still peddle the "muh intellectual property" and "I gotta feed my kids in this fast-paced economy" even though these are irrelevant to software freedom.
An alarming majority (at least in the US) are ignorant of this conflict at all. The money is so distorted in the IT industry that it's tantamount to theft. The skeletons in Congress don't have a single clue.
401k
@mastermind Software as a service
Getting paid every 2weeks (what the old times told me)
I'm going to shock you:
In Germany and Austria being paid per month is the norm. All the laws are defined for that. So pretty much everyone who works gets paid just once a month, that's it (Well, in Austria you get 14 salaries, so you get an extra salary every 6 months). It makes zero difference if you get your money one time a month or half your money two times a month, it's the same amount in the end.
Getting paid more often would just complicate things, as it can depend on how much overtime you did in a month. Or how often you went into the office (you get lessened taxes based on how far the office is away and how often you have to drive there and if there is suitable public transport to get there).
What's the better alternative and why is that a scam?
I don't know if it's so much a scam as it is banks and companies and such being stuck in the past.
You could be getting paid every week or even every day, it's your money, you already earned it, why should you have to wait for it?
Especially in this day and age where everything is computerized. You punch in, you punch out, the computer knows how long you worked, somewhere in their payroll system they know how much you earned, what needs to be withheld, etc. It takes fractions of a second for a computer to do that math, they could send that transaction the moment you clock out.
When things were more manual, it made sense, you had to have someone adding things up, and doing math, computers were bigger, slower, less user friendly, more expensive, and not all hooked up to the Internet up to the Internet to talk to each other. It used to make a lot of sense to do things in big batches at the end of the day, every week, every 2 weeks, 2 or 3 times a month, whatever.
But now you could put in your 8 hours work, and walk out with your days wages already in your account ready to be used for whatever you need it for immediately, no more being broke until payday, payday is every day. But that's not how it works because as far as the banks and such are concerned everything is working fine for them, so no real need to update their shit.
Couldn't this be switched around too? I'm only paying some of my bills every other month or twice a year. Why shouldn't I be paying those off every week or even every day?
Really? Is that a thing? Where I live getting paid per month is the norm. Some people get paid per 4 weeks instead of per month. But I don't know of any trade where payment per week or twee weeks is the norm. Stuff like rent, mortgage, water, gas and electric etc. is all done per month. So it makes sense to match the income cycle to the bill cycle.
Puts living paycheck to paycheck in perspective. I can image not getting ends to meet on a monthly basis. But if you can't afford the next week, you have basically nothing.
I know there is a lot of overhead with payroll where I live, so if companies would have to do it more often, that would be pretty expensive. There are a lot of rules and regulations, so it takes a lot of work to do it right.
Intelectual property and patents. (Copying ideas and modifing them was always a part on how societies advances.)
Non disclosure agreements. (Allows company to monopolize on your knowledge and force you out of the industry altogether)
Lottery (a way to extract money from the poorest/dumbest members of the society)
Enclosure
People who vote for conservatives
The Mormons.
Stores and restaurants increasing their base prices to promote discounts from data harvesting apps.