Chiropractors.
Even though this is top comment, this is an underrated answer.
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.
I was suffering from hyperemisis last year and it took 3 doctors before I finally found one to take me seriously, which I consider it lucky it only took 3. The last doc I was practically on my hands and knees begging them to take me seriously.
In the middle of all that I also ended up with pneumonia. Normally I never get sick so I was like wtf is going on. But anyways, a doctor finally took some chest x rays and 2 weeks later they call to tell me that my X-ray was clear. I. Went. Off. I ended up having to go to the ER 2 days after the doctor visit because I could no longer breathe, it was so painful. How is it possible that my x ray was clear??? Then another week goes by and the assistant calls to tell me that I do have pneumonia and a prescription has been sent in. I just hung up and filed complaints with everyone I could. That office was a hot mess.
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.
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."
Probably gonna anger both sides here, but I see both private insurance and single-payer healthcare as equally-evil scams. Why not focus on driving down costs of healthcare (i.e. EVERYTHING) so that you throw a couple bucks at the receptionist to cover your surgery then check to see if you have enough for a post-surgery soda?
One of the objectives of single-payer is to drive down the costs of healthcare by eliminating the overhead of an insurance bureaucracy. There are other aspects that can be considered like nationalizing hospitals to eliminate private run, for-profit hospitals. People like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCA_Healthcare are just as responsible for the high per-capita costs of healthcare we pay as are the insurance companies. And I agree with you, they shouldn't be getting a guaranteed government handout.
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.
If you invest in the stock market and expect companies to be making large profits all the time then you're going to be very disappointed. That's not how it works. There are financial reports, market regulators, analysts. History tells us that awful companies with shady practices would always get caught in the end, no matter how big they are.
Everyone should invest, but investors should always do their research.
This is not about small-time regular Joe investors, but about large institutional ones, who do exert pressure on companies to deliver strong profits and/or growth.
My personal top 3:
- insurance
- subscriptions
- 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.
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.
Insurance policies are many and varied, covering different types of risk.
Many policies are potentially scammy in some circumstances.
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
Yup, BandCamp all the way. Once you buy a song you own it, you can play it anywhere you darn well please. Even if BandCamp goes under, no worries, still got my music.
Same with DVDs. Yeah, I've definitely gotten movies I regret purchasing, but I think long-term it's more economical.
I’ve got a reminder on my phone to “cancel PBS” but I can’t figure out where I subscribed to it.
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.
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:
- 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.
IMO American style capitalism is completely broken, but that’s not the only way to run your economy and still call it capitalism. Particularly in the EU area companies don’t always have the upper hand. Consumers and employees have the kinds of rights Americans can only dream of.
Don’t really know much about communism, but clearly USSR didn’t survive, and that may have something to do with the system. ML-people here can probably tell me how China, Cuba and other communist countries are doing today.
A lot of people are saying Capitalism. Is it straight up capitalism that is the scam or the myth of financial mobility? (the American dream)
There's a lot of trouble with definitions regarding capitalism. (I'd call them intentional since muddying the waters serves the people who benefit from our current system.)
Pick any person who is complaining about "capitalism" right now.
If you proposed a system where everything was structured the same as it is right now, HOWEVER instead of shareholders and owners possessing companies, every, single company was a worker cooperative (owned and controlled by its workers) then I am 95% sure the anti-capitalist you picked would
- Not consider that capitalism, and
- Vastly prefer that over what we have right now
With some minor variation. (Tankies don't think it's possible to maintain such a system without monopolizing violence. Anarcho-communists wouldn't be too happy about the scope and financial power of state and federal governments, and would seek to pare them down. Democratic socialists would think it was perfect. Little disagreements like that.)
But I think most other people (people who aren't anti-capitalists) would think "that's just a form of capitalism" if I described the above.
In fact, if I said,
A free market system, but ownership and control of the means of production is only allowed collectively and democratically. No shareholders allowed, no transferable individual ownership allowed.
Most ordinary people would consider that a form of capitalism. (Even though calling it capitalism is, technically, highly inaccurate). So it's a difficult conversation to have. Because most "anti-capitalists" disagree with most "pro-capitalists" on the basic definition of what they are fighting or defending.
I'm actually convinced that a lot of "pro-capitalists" are more eager to defend the free market system than they are to defend transferable, stock-marketable, individual ownership of the means of production. I think they would compromise on the latter if they could safeguard the former.
How do you figure financial mobility is a myth? I’ve altered my own financial situation successfully. That wouldn’t be possible if it were a myth.
Religion. Whole cloth.
Username checks out.
Found the atheist
Sure a lot of people use religion as a business but just because some people take advantage of it doesn't make it a cult. The real scammers are the people who take adcantage of it and those people deserve the death penalty
What exactly is religion not as a business?
I think it’s the opposite of what you’re saying (mostly bad, with some good apples), and in my years and years in and around all sorts of church’s it’s been the opposite - the good ones stand out, can get persecuted for it, and have an uphill battle ahead of them.
The system is set up in a way that the Leadership and participants would have to actively push against it in order to not be exercising power over others inappropriately. The Bible makes the promises: invest 10% of your income to the church, listen to the men in charge, obey your husband.
First Past the Post voting at elections.
Approval Voting and multi-winner districts let's gooooooo!
A great alternative is majority judgment!
Welcome to Canada.
I'm still salty about that broken Liberal promise to reform our elections. None of the parties care about it and it seems no one wants to try to change it.
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
Just on a slightly grander scale. I feel like it's malicious in a different way. Instead of tricking the unaware consumer into thinking they are getting the same product they are getting people to buy what they can now whether it's due to distance or price
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.
I mean yeah, obviously they're profitable. It's the convenience though. Sometimes they have good deals if you don't want to buy a giant pack of something.
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
Private health insurance.
Banks.
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.
Bank fees
I see you have no money... I'm going to have to charge you for that
They are exceptionally shitty for cash accounts since they are absolutely using the money for their own profit.
If everyone took out all their liquid cash, the bank would crash (see; recent events.)
I don't know if it is quite as simple as that. Most recently the bank failures were because those banks got upside down on bond holdings due to rate increases. If everyone chilled out and took their money out in appropriate time, then the bank would have had all the money. They just couldn't get all the money immediately due to the duration of their bond holdings.
My bank wanted my to pay to have an account. I asked why and the answer was some bullshit about having access to their expertise on growing wealth. I told them, I would be growing wealth more quickly if I didn't have to pay monthly fees, canceled my account and took my money to a bank that doesn't charge for a basic money dump account.
It's ridiculous, banks make money by investing the trusted money of their customers. Why would I need to pay them in order to let them make money. They should pay me.
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.
Have you ever seen stuff like Occillococcinum or anything made by company Boiron? They don't advertise it as homeopathy, so even if you saw a homeopathic sugar pill you wouldn't necessarily know. That's a part of the scam
In Germany, a lot of medicine can only be sold in very regulated apothecaries. Those stores are allowed to recommend and sell homeopathy. There's even a state-exam for homeopath. Though for that you only have to demonstrate you won't kill your patients, not that you can actually help.
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.
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.
And different towns can be charged wildly different amounts for the same service
I've somehow been stealing internet from my ISP for like 2 years.
So I moved in to my new apartment. Go down to the local ISP monopoly's physical store and pick up a modem so I can just plug it in and not wait for a tech or anything. They tell me since it's been over 5 years since my address was connected they have to send a tech out anyway. Fine. But they let me pay my first month's service and give me the modem.
Well I get home and plug it in. It works perfectly. Call the ISP and tell them to cancel the tech appointment, they say no problem. An hour later my account to login to the ISP's website is made inactive. In the next few days I get a full refund for what I paid.
So I figure I'll call them once my internet stops working and resubscribe. But it has never stopped working. I keep getting mailings from them with deals to sign up for internet. They even knocked on my door once to try to sell me it.
This is a dangerous game you're playing (despite the Robinhood like dynamic -- trust me I hate ISPs too, though I will say AT&T fiber has been quite reasonable). You can be sued for all the lost payments plus interest, and likely will be when/if they find out.
It's the same thing as getting an unexpected raise on your paystub, if it's in error and a reasonable person would believe it's in error, they're within their legal right to take the money back.
That depends only on the competition.
20 years ago I payed €65 for 4Mbps. Now I m paying €25 for 200Mbps + a landline with unlimited local calls + an android box (that I use for PLEX and retro gaming) that provides 50+ channels through an app.That was the last renewal.
I also switched my cell provider. I used to pay €42 for unlimited calls, SMS and Data. Now I pay €25 for the whole package.
I'm lucky. For some reason after raising my rates from the introductory period they haven't gone up in 4 years or so and they increased my service from 100mbps to 300mbps.
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.
They all copy the "best" ideas from their international arms and their competitors
It's a tight run race to the bottom
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
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.
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.
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.
Car dealerships.
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
Asking this question every single week.
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.
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.
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.
I think people's feelings about subscriptions are warped. There's been a very popular take here on Lemmy lately towards piracy and not paying people for their work, and it's annoying to say the least (especially contrasting it with how they deserve to be paid for what they do).
Things that don't actively have operating costs, e.g. a text editor, I think it makes sense to be traditional purchases. However, things that do require ongoing expenses, be it live service games, lemmy servers, news organizations, etc, these things need money to function, and funding them with our data is not making the world a better place.
Considering advertisers expect to make money off their ads, and seem to have the data to back that up, I'm going to assume (on average) free services sure aren't saving folks money either.
Yup, I increasingly pay for things to not be a part of that system anymore, Proton, Kagi, B2 Cloud storage, Standard Notes, Ars Technica, The Atlantic, NYTimes, The Akron Beacon Journal, Feedly, Last.fm, Todoist, Telegram, Privacy while donating to things like KDE, Dark Reader, Lemmy, the EFF, Sunshine, the RuneScape wiki (and that's just Internet related stuff).
I'm grateful that things were free as a kid, because I had no money to pay for them, and I think that is something these services should account for. However, now that I'm an adult, I think there's an obligation to make sure the things I use and want to exist receive funding (and don't need to turn to selling my data).
"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.
Health insurance.
Companies being the sole arbiters of OTA "Upgrades" and DRM "purchases".
Social media
Organized religion.
Nothing comes even remotely close.
Religion.
Fashion
Mass Surveillance.
Companies and governments alike have successfully convinced most people that they have "nothing to fear".
Printers and printer ink
Laser printers are an option
Religion.
Religion. The all-time champion, no contest, just as George Carlin said:
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:
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My company pays for it
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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.
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Last time I rented a car I declined their insurance and they were able to just use my daily car's policy.
The last time I rented a car they tried to double charge me and tacked in an extra 200 in cleaning fees for good measure. I reversed the charge on the credit card as fraud, which the credit card company investigated and accepted as fraud, and reversed the charge. Now Hertz is threatening to take us to court over it. We disputed it and have essentially been ignoring them since.
The time before that, a "different company" tried to accuse me of stealing the car because they had the wrong car listed as the one we had rented.
If you are in NE Ohio, don't bother with a rental, they are likely to try to scam you.
Nice! For context for car rental: whenever I rent, it's a foreign country so my personal car insurance won't cover anything.
The insurance waiver is a gold mine for them. A good friend of mine works for a national car rental company in my country. He was telling me that they attempt to hard sell the waiver because they make a lot of profit on it.
My thoughts on it are, I'm a careful driver, I haven't had an accident yet. The waiver can be just as expensive as the car depending on what you rent and the period of the rental. I'm happy to 'take the risk' because in the long run I'll be less out of pocket even if I do have to pay the excess once in a while.
My insurance company will allow you to add a rental on to your existing policy for a couple of dollars a week.
most cheap things that fall apart after a short time
Video game trailers
Ha! This is a good one!
Anymore I just find them so frustrating. Like I want your trailer to show me what the game is... How does it play... Not show me a random cutscene of someone smashing something in half and sliding down a hillside while some narrator is telling me that "you don't stand a chance hero."
Credit cards and everything to do with the debt trap.
Paying for cellular data, in advance, regardless of whether or not you use it with no possibility of refunding any you didn't use.
I didn't know any companies still did that. I pay $25/month for unlimited and it's only gone down over the years. I started paying $45/month about 15 years ago. I know of some companies that are cheaper, but I haven't had any issues, so I haven't bothered to switch.
Phone companies charging you for caller ID. It must cost them nothing.
@mastermind Software as a service
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)
Do you mean non compete clauses? Cause, yes.
Yes, non compete clause. Thanks for the correction :)
The Mormons.
Individualism.
I thought individualism and collectivism were more like cultural traits than a specific thing you could call a scam.
No only that, but it's entirely possible to be an individual who can participate successfully in a collective. They're not mutually exclusive or contradictory things. You can have goals and aspirations that focus exclusively on you without negatively affecting your contributions and interactions within a group. Life is nuanced, things aren't as black and white as people often seem to think.
Just be yourself.
Who cares about the consequences.
God i hate that attitude.
Once you realize you arent special you will be more humble and willing to help all the others that are just like you. Collectivism leads to a peaceful mind for you the individual.
Enclosure
"The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common, But lets the greater felon loose Who steals the common from the goose."People who vote for conservatives
Stores and restaurants increasing their base prices to promote discounts from data harvesting apps.
Marketing and advertising. They show a huge, juicy, scrumptous nice quality burger. You go to buy it and it's a cold, limp, tiny, frail nothing burger.
There used to be a law about false advertising. But it doesn't seem to be enforced anymore. Marketing and advertising can lie straight to your face. Its not right and shouldnt be tolerated.
And Americans are so complacent about it, they say things like, "It's , what'd you expect?" Instead of demanding what was advertised. It's soul crushing. It's like we've given up.
Things used to be a lot simpler & cheaper in the US, but then we passed the War Revenue Act in 1917 which drastically increased the budget & helped to pay for the war. They probably saw all that money rolling in & got greedy. What was initially designed as a war-time fund raising effort is now just standard taxation, it has gotten worse, and the people being born & working & dying nowadays don't know anything different.
The government wastes so much money. Whose money? They don't have any money! They're wasting our money, that they extract from us via taxation.
We are financially raped into the ground, not allowed to enjoy the fruits of our own labor.
Sleeping. You have to pay for shelter...
Daily life
Religion
Insurance. A promise they try really hard to break.
American Colleges.
That we are not paid for our browsing data, app data, etc.
You are paying for the "free" service with that data. Why would they pay you? That makes no sense.
Getting paid every 2weeks (what the old times told me)
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.
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).
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.
Weekly payment was quite common in the past, the norm 100 years ago. But it is not anymore.
Honest questions. Why do you seem unable to change anything of this? If you leave in a democratic country, why the majority of people won't change the second amendment, the college tuition scam, swap to a free healthcare system, and vote people that won't start another war in the name of democracy?
EDIT: I reckon it's complicated, but you must have some opinions about the final motive(s) for this. Who/what is keeping things like this?
401k
Just curious why you think it's a scam? It's a type of account that has tax benefits.
401k plans are a scam not because of what they are, but what they replaced.
Companies used to offer pensions. These were retirement benefits that were handled by the company, and the company bore the risk of underperforming markets.
For a number of reasons, pensions were much better for workers. Now, only some unionized workers get them.
In my country, 401(k) is rare. My wife's company is one of the few that offers it, and it's way better than the government pension my dad is getting as a retiree, which is like less than $200 a month.
Food and shelter costing money, working.
Loan interest.
Specifically, compounding interest. I have no problem paying something extra back if I need to borrow a sum of money, but it should be a flat, fixed fee calculated as a percentage of the amount borrowed, up front.
Compounding interest is bullshit.
I quite like compounding interests but the difference is that I'm on the receiving end (index funds)
If it's a flat fee then it'd likely be higher. If it's compounding interest, it will automatically include any late fees if you pay on time.
Printing money.
Cites are like that BECAUSE they are not designed for people but for cars.
Design your city to be nice and people will come. Once people come, crime will go down. Of you design a shithole then don't complain about the shit.
Start when? Tomorrow. Start how? Anywhere. Being with new construction requiring design for humans first. Make streets smaller and single direction. Build bicycle roads.
Oh also, stop the car manufacturer's lobbyists because they don't give a fuck that US cities are shit holes, they want to sell you more cars.
The Netherlands did t listen to them and see what it looks like now.
Then start somewhere. Require new construction to be built for humans first. Then bit by bit change.
The Netherlands did this back in 1960 and look at it now. They too had to start somewhere and they did
It requires investment in your infrastructure which well, in the US that's a joke.
Brake service
Mortgages needing to be renewed every 5 years so that banks can jack the the interest rate. Cap residential mortgages at 25 years max and 2% interest for the duration.
Many people lock in interest rates for the life of the loan. Most often 30 years for mortgage loans. You don’t have to renew a mortgage’s interest rate unless you get an adjustable rate one.
This is the main reason why mortgage applications are down significantly right now. People with super low interest rates don’t want to move because they’d have to get a new loan to do so, and interest rates are much higher now. If they stay and they have a fixed-rate loan, nothing changes.
Why would any institution give you a mortgage on those terms?
Because it doesn’t matter the company. A bank creates money if you apply for credit. It just have to have a fraction - say 3% - real money to store at a central bank account. Then they literally type the numbers on your account. Money created!
So, for a bank, it doesn’t matter if you apply for 5.10.20 years. They get the interests anyway. May be there is some weird financial acrobatic behind the 5 years target. However, here in Germany it’s pretty common to get a 20 years credit.
College
Income tax
High tax on humans, low tax on companies and property
I used to think the same thing but it's not really a scam. It's a way to allow low income people to pay less to the government in taxes because they have less to give.
When you move things over to sales tax, high income folks don't end up paying as much as they could because they don't spend the money as aggressively, and low income folks can't afford the bare minimum so you have to either further subsidize them (so you took their money to give back to them?) or deal with the ensuing homeless problem/never ending poverty cycle.
I mean if you want to be all sensible about it, sure.
It’s just a tool. The real scam is that the 1% pay such a low share of their actual income (including capital gains)
Fiat currencies like USD and Euro.
Profit.
In the ideal situation, resources are transformed into goods with zero waste and with fair compensation for every person involved in that process. Any expense outside of costs and pay for the people involved is either inevitable inefficiency due to our imperfect technology or the laws of physics, or it is some sort of scam, and thus profit itself is a scam.
Liberalism.
Tax
Working from home, but not being payed rent for the space.
Government
Microsoft Windows. There are better operating systems that don't make you watch ads, that don't lock up your filesystem, that don't force you into upgrades before they're tested.
Probably not originally a scam but something about Tax, maybe it's just me but taxes are suppose for the betterment of society. Everyone suppose to pay their fair share of tax yet it's strange that we can't even see how are taxes were used to improve society. There is no breakdown like a receipt on how our tax was used. While we file taxes we have to be meticulus or we get ourselves in trouble.
