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.
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.
I am so sorry. That's devastating. You already have to struggle to fight your illness. But to have to fight that hard AGAINST YOUR DOCTOR when your doctor is supposed to be on your team? It's a betrayal.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Did someone say people should work for free? No where am I saying that. Massive profits are not necessary to cover overhead - expenses like overheard and salaries are paid for by revenue - what’s leftover is profit.
This thread is about whether the current US healthcare insurance industry is a scam or not. Scam means “a dishonest scheme” and insurance saying it’s going to provide healthcare coverage but actually just takes your money, doesn’t provide coverage, and only pays investors/executives could be considered a dishonest scheme by many.
Insurance companies have a natural tendency to become worse and worse over time. This is called the race to the bottom and is an incredibly well-known phenomena in insurance. Like monopolies, insurance is one of the rare situations where experts are in damn-near universal agreement that heavy regulation is necessary.
Right now, insurance companies are objectively very bad to the people they provide coverage for. This isn’t an opinion, this is a fact that’s easily verified and well understood. They are not being effectively regulated and as such, are racing to the bottom by providing absolutely terrible coverage while taking in massive premiums. This is not good for anyone and is not fixed by a free market in any way. You cannot effectively shop for insurance and their behavior is not rectified, unless prohibited by law (regulation).
I only posted what I did because your post read like you expected insurance to run by paying out 100% of what they get in. The thread started with general insurance but many zeroed in on health insurance. Yes there are problems, obviously, but certain things like denying claims comes about from many people trying to scam payments and the insurers tightening security too much without enough oversight.
Everybody seems to think there's huge payments going to investors and C level executives but that comes from market confidence. So the stock price rises and those bonuses of stock options appreciate without the company paying a dime.
United Healthcare pulled in $20 BILLION dollars in PROFIT in 2022. The ceo was given $24 million in compensation for that year. Denying claims because of scams? They can afford it.
How was that compensation structured? Was it cash or stock? And how much money would they spend if they didn't act paranoid about false claims? Would that dissolve the 80 billion because it's possible.
Aside from that, did you notice this is a 2 month old post?
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.
I've heard many a tale of contacting the billing department and telling them you don't have insurance and either they can get what money they actually need or none of it. They end up getting a much smaller bill.
I'm not in the US, but one of the issues I have with medical insurance is that, say you need medication, the doctor will provide you with a prescription, requiring a specific brand due to the efficacy compared to other brands. The insurance providers would reject claims for the prescribed brand, and suggest an inferior brand that doctors warned to avoid.
This happened to my older folks, and is baffling why insurances feel the need to override a doctor's recommendations.
Not necessarily. I'm on a daily medication that has a generic but is available in both extended release and immediate release forms. The extended release provides a more consistent dosage and has historically prevented me from getting sick. The immediate release causes inconsistent spikes and I have a history of getting sick on it. Insurance refused to pay for the extended release type for about 2 years before it made it onto their "formulary." In the meantime I was using GoodRx and paying $100/mo instead of my paid health insurance pharmacy plan to make sure I wouldn't get sick. The person I spoke to at the pharmacy management wing of the insurance company literally told me "you can get an app on your phone which will tell you when to take the immediate release medication."
Luckily, we don't have that with medical insurance in Switzerland, but car mechanics sure are that way.
Need a fix on insurance? Ooh, that'll take us 2 weeks of full time work - minimum 5000 bucks. Call them and tell them it's not insured? Ah, that'll be 500 bucks.
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.
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.
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.
Everying in your comment can be solved with regulation. A capitalist society can enact socialist policies to take care of the lower class or unemployed. It's not a "pick one" situation.
You're arguing against the unregulated capitalism we live in, but also comparing capitalism as it exists today to fuckin slavery is just a ridiculous false equivalence.
I didn't compare capitalism to slavery. I said the word slavery. The first paragraph wasn't demonstrating a comparison, it was demonstrating a principle (principles are universalized, comparisons aren't). The idea that every system has positives, but those systems can still be horrifically bad.
I don't know if it's emotion that's clouding your reading comprehension, I hope it is, because then you can calm down and have a reasonable conversation. If it's not, then this conversation isn't worth having because you won't understand half of what I'm saying. Literally 50% of your last message was you misrepresenting what I was saying.
A capitalist society cannot enact socialist policies. It can enact "social" policies. These policies are inspired by socialism, and often advocated for by socialists, but the policies themselves are not socialist policies. Capitalism is an economic system where the means of production are privately owned, and socialism is an economic system where the means of production are socially owned. If private (not personal) property exists, it's not socialism. It's not necessarily capitalism (you could have other systems with private property), but in our world it always is.
Welfare capitalism, where these social policies exist, is a well established ideology that has been around for about 80 years in any serious form, and yeah welfare can be used to address some of the negative tendencies of capitalism, but it doesn't fix them. It's applying a band-aid fix, not addressing the problem. In the real world what this means is there's a class of people always working to remove those regulations and welfare because their class interests are opposed to ours.
Class distinctions cannot be solved with a regulation, they have to be solved with a societal restructuring. Our legal system does not support the idea of abolishing private property and by extension classes.
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.
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.
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
Religions promise anything and everything but don't actually provide anything in return for time or money invested. It's the very definition of a scam.
It's no different than supplement scams or homeopathic pills.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've noticed this starting to break, i.e. more actually starting to compete with each other and enter each other's "turf". Part of that I think is municipal fiber.
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.
You're not wrong. Though I'll be leaving here soon enough, and I think the risk:reward ratio is good enough to continue until then. And if they've let me go this long I doubt they'll somehow retroactively figure it out after I'm gone.
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.
Company A owns the physical fiber, they also own the point-of-presence where all the fibers end up (basically a room with lots of rack space). Company A does not sell Internet service.
Company X, Y and Z provide internet service to consumers. They rent the physical fiber from company A, they also rent rack space in the PoPs where their customers fibers terminate. Cost for electricity, air conditioning, in the PoP is shared by all companies that use that PoP, by ratio of number of customers. (e.g. if company X has 100 customers connected to one PoP and Y and Z each have 50, company X pays 50% of the utilities bill and Y and Z each 25%).
In case of company X/Y/Z, all the infrastructure is theirs with the exception of the physical fiber and the PoP room, that includes the fiber 'modem' (mediaconverter) or router on each side of the connection, switches, any backbone connectivity from the PoP onwards, all services, etc.
Some of these ISPs also resell their services to smaller ISPs, so company Q could simply be reselling a package from company X. Often they resell only a part of the service, e.g. they resell Internet from company X but add their own TV package.
They can of course also change this later on. My current ISP started by reselling services from one of the bigger ISPs, this basically gave them national coverage with little risk. Once they got established and had a decent number of customers they started rolling out their own network, city-by-city. They would install their own equipment into the PoPs in a city, change everyone over to their equipment (and distributed new media converters and routers) and they were no longer dependent on the big ISP. When they did this they cut the price of my internet connection by half while at the same time upgrading the speed from 200/200 to 1000/1000. Within a year or so they moved most customers to their own infrastructure.
And how do you get in such a situation? Very simple: company A wanted to install fiber and asked for a permit from the government to start digging up the streets and sidewalks. The government basically said: you can get a permit. but we don't want a all this nuisance with digging up the streets every time someone wants to offer internet service, so you as a requirement for the permit you have to offer an open network with identical pricing to everyone who wants to use it.
Sure, but I live in 'socialist' Europe and I can already choose from 13 ISPs on fiber alone. I can only dream of the amount of choice people in 'free market' USA must have.
Sure, and that's great for you! I am, honestly, envious.
However, you said "you could switch." For many people, including me, we cannot switch while maintaining a reasonable connection. My options are my current ISP (really not too bad, for the first time in my life), an ISP that provides a maximum of 12Mbps, an ISP that still isn't quite sure if it can provide service to me, or satellite (which is pretty awful for a variety of services I use regularly). Even discarding reasonable expectations, this is not a "dozen or so."
While your proposal might be good for you and others in "socialist" Europe, many people (likely even outside of Europe and the USA) don't have that option and it probably doesn't help resolve the parent commenter's complaint.
Edit: also, while the USA is behind Europe in many ways, I suspect this is not so much a Europe vs USA issue as a rural vs not issue.
Edit: also, while the USA is behind Europe in many ways, I suspect this is not so much a Europe vs USA issue as a rural vs not issue.
On the contrary, here the rural areas got fiber way before the cities did. It's a lot less difficult to install fiber in rural areas compared to densely populated cities where the ground is already full of cables and pipes, and where the impact of having to close streets for digging are much bigger.
Even now, the fastest consumer internet is available in a small town in the middle of fscking nowhere, where they installed 10gbit fiber.
I am in the Communist country referred to as Italy, there are only 2 companies who actually have 4g infrastructures AFAIK, and the dozens of other carriers just rent the infrastructure from the tim/Wind3 duopoly
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.
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.
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.
I didn't mean it like that. My comment was about how a lot of billionaires, governments and politicians seem to believe that capitalism is the only system that can ever exist in a civilized society, and how there can be no alternative (some prominent influential figures that held this belief or something similar were/are Larry Kudlow, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Ronald Reagan).
There's also the fact about how in the 20th and 21st century there was a significant effort to undermine any alternative ideologies in the western liberal democratic world. The various anti-red campaigns by the US, Thatcherism that destroyed the significance of unions in order to completely remove any possibility of a revolution (and turn workers into free-market commodities), there was also this very recent event in 2021 where during Rosa Luxemburg peaceful memorial event in Germany, police suddenly came up to disrupt it, presenting false motives.
There might be something better, a society or a system that serves the many instead of the few, but such non-capitalist system would go against the interests of the rich and the ruling elite, so there's an active heavy pushback against it. Even when it comes to politics, the political left is definitely outnumbered at least in my country rather than political parties that lean to the center or the right, which are the parties that keep the status quo or even strengthen the elites further.
I'm approaching this from a leftist point of view, and my arguments are probably not perfect, but at least that's how I see it. Capitalism is definitely better for people than Monarchy/Aristocracy, but it could definitely be much better for the people.
Sure; nothing is ever set in stone, the future is always the future, and none of us can know what's in it.
Still, in the context of the current political climate, I think the "fuck capitalism" crowd leaves something to be desired. For instance, I'm all for nationalizing medical insurance as other capitalist countries have done.
However, the "no more private business ownership" crowd I think is asking for serious trouble. The preface is that if you get rid of capitalist influences democracy will not be as malleable and will always serve public interest without powerful capitalists to corrupt it... I think the case made by history is the opposite, without capitalistic forces the concentration of power in government leads to the destruction of consumer choice and inevitable corruption. In either system, the sticking point is an actively engaged and educated (and even more so, well informed -- degrees are not the goal, it's the information) public keeping an eye on the system, and I think that's where the 20th century United States failed itself leading to 21st century problems.
The problem is that current companies are authoritarian organizations as seen from the inside, there can still be competing companies and media without this internally authoritarian structure. Imagine every company was 51+% owned by it's workers, and they elected their senior/management staff. That would for what I understand capitalism as end it, but obviously would be vastly different from the few socialist attempts in history.
Here's the problem I have with that argument... Anyone arguing for this can go make such a company, but nobody has (or maybe few people have and it worked or didn't and I missed the memo). It's not a problem of large corporations or government suppression either. There are new successful small companies all the time, but they're not "51% owned by their workers."
So like... If you want any buy in outside of the bubble that already supports the idea, go actually do it. AFAIK, it's not illegal, there's nothing stopping such a company from existing other than A) nobody has sufficiently tried or B) it doesn't actually work.
Obviously they already exist and looking at cooperatives like that they mitigate most of the problems of private enterprise at least somewhat.
The argument I'm making is that Private companies (especially large ones) are extremely dangerous to any system that tries to be democratic and because of the danger they pose shouldn't exist at all. I mean look at how much of US government is just captured by private companies and what effect that has (had) on politics in the country and on it's foreign policy as well.
The lack of education and an informed public is not the cause of the problems, it's one of the many symptoms. It's not like Bezos bought WaPo for sport. It's not like de santis and trump get fossil super Pacs by accident. It's not like super Pacs exist because voters love companies throwing tons of money into political messaging....
This is what I mean with Private enterprise is dangerous to democracy
These side effects were written into every liberal governments constitution by Bourgeoisie to protect their wealth from before democracy even existed. Sure there always were some concessions made towards people that weren't wealthy but obviously it was always the wealthy who had the greatest influence.
I don't care what particularly replaces it but this system must be changed so much to get rid of these perverse incentives that it should probably be called something else too.
Marx obviously is a good way of analyzing these failings of liberalism but he certainly is not the be all end all. Did you know for example that North eastern Syria has a constitution actively building a direct democratic rule in the region Constitution and Principles . The principles are anarchist or libertarian socialist in nature and certainly address the issues you had in terms of state authority and rush toward corruption and monopolization.
Theory and even practice of socialism obviously doesn't stop at Soviet or CCP "communism".
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I love the fact that they just print too! No more "inkjet cleaning test prints", I've saved so much time, money, and frustrating switching to a brother black and white laser printer... For the average (?) "I just need to print official documents" kind of person, it's a great buy.
I have a dell 1350cnw which was made by Brother. Bought in 2010, survived an international house move. Still works great (only downside is the drivers are 32bit so I have to keep an old computer around to act as a printer share on my network!)
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.
Battle passes and most microtransactions in games. Day one patches, and GaaS games, always online games and expiring media licenses. VAC bans on Steam.
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."
Massage school. They say they’re teaching you a trade and will help with job placement but there is a glut of graduates and not enough jobs for them. Yet the school keeps signing up new students because that’s how they make money.
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.
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.
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.
Service as a subscription, for me. It used to be you bought a product and then you owned it. Now if you want practically anything from streaming media to freaking car washes, you have to "subscribe".
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 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.
There's so much inflation these days that pensions are impossible unless the pension money is invested to keep up with inflation. So it's the same thing at best out a worse option.
Like people don't lose their saving in the market anyway? But when your 401k goes in the tank, your broker doesn't have the legal obligation to fund your retirement.
If that happens to your 401k, that's your fault. As you get older you are supposed to shift things to be more conservative... You can even put your money in things that are guaranteed to not go down. There are target date funds that do this for you without you having to think about it (although I think target date funds are a little too conservative from the start).
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.
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.
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.
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.
The user you are responding to has an account on a .ca domain. In Canada (as well as UK) it is more common for the rate to only be locked in for 5 years.
Well that's lame... You guys should do something about that, as a US home owner, having a fixed rate mortgage is one of the best parts about owning vs renting.
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.
What they mean by that is if there is a newly created bank with no money in it, and you deposit 100 of whatever currency, then I come in and withdraw 80, which I will use to pay for the creation of a bakery. Then I give those money to you, after you have built the bakery for me. Then you go back and deposit those 80 back to the bank. Then the cycle continues: I take out another 80, for example, to pay for initial products, I pay them to Person 3, who deposits them in the bank. The bank just turned 180 into 260. If, at that moment, I, as the bakery owner, decide to refinance my loan, I can get 60 from the bank. If then we get you, with a balance of 160, and Person 3, with a balance of 80, to withdraw their deposits, what do we get? Think about it: the bank only had 100 in its reserves from the initial deposit, and all the other deposits were money that the bank had loaned out, so while you had 100 deposited, then 80, you technically have 180 in your bank account, but there's only 100 actual money in the system.
Person A's account is worth $100.
The Bank has $100 in its reserves.
Person B takes out a loan of $80 from the Bank.
The Bank now has only $20 in its reserves.
Person B pays the $80 to Person A for a service
Person A deposits the $80 to the Bank.
Person A's account is worth $180.
The Bank now has $100 ($80 deposit + $20 left from earlier) in its reserves.
2 days later, nothing's changed, except Person A needs some extra money quickly, so they go and try to withdraw the $180 in their account. The Bank only has $100 in its reserves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am so sorry. That's devastating. You already have to struggle to fight your illness. But to have to fight that hard AGAINST YOUR DOCTOR when your doctor is supposed to be on your team? It's a betrayal.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve always said that insurance companies will spend dollars to figure out how to cheat you out of dimes.
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.
Nobody works for free. In order to be a large effective and not out of business business you need to have a profit to cover overhead like staff.
Profit is revenue minus expenses
Did someone say people should work for free? No where am I saying that. Massive profits are not necessary to cover overhead - expenses like overheard and salaries are paid for by revenue - what’s leftover is profit.
This thread is about whether the current US healthcare insurance industry is a scam or not. Scam means “a dishonest scheme” and insurance saying it’s going to provide healthcare coverage but actually just takes your money, doesn’t provide coverage, and only pays investors/executives could be considered a dishonest scheme by many.
Insurance companies have a natural tendency to become worse and worse over time. This is called the race to the bottom and is an incredibly well-known phenomena in insurance. Like monopolies, insurance is one of the rare situations where experts are in damn-near universal agreement that heavy regulation is necessary.
Right now, insurance companies are objectively very bad to the people they provide coverage for. This isn’t an opinion, this is a fact that’s easily verified and well understood. They are not being effectively regulated and as such, are racing to the bottom by providing absolutely terrible coverage while taking in massive premiums. This is not good for anyone and is not fixed by a free market in any way. You cannot effectively shop for insurance and their behavior is not rectified, unless prohibited by law (regulation).
I only posted what I did because your post read like you expected insurance to run by paying out 100% of what they get in. The thread started with general insurance but many zeroed in on health insurance. Yes there are problems, obviously, but certain things like denying claims comes about from many people trying to scam payments and the insurers tightening security too much without enough oversight.
Everybody seems to think there's huge payments going to investors and C level executives but that comes from market confidence. So the stock price rises and those bonuses of stock options appreciate without the company paying a dime.
United Healthcare pulled in $20 BILLION dollars in PROFIT in 2022. The ceo was given $24 million in compensation for that year. Denying claims because of scams? They can afford it.
How was that compensation structured? Was it cash or stock? And how much money would they spend if they didn't act paranoid about false claims? Would that dissolve the 80 billion because it's possible.
Aside from that, did you notice this is a 2 month old post?
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.
I've heard many a tale of contacting the billing department and telling them you don't have insurance and either they can get what money they actually need or none of it. They end up getting a much smaller bill.
I'm not in the US, but one of the issues I have with medical insurance is that, say you need medication, the doctor will provide you with a prescription, requiring a specific brand due to the efficacy compared to other brands. The insurance providers would reject claims for the prescribed brand, and suggest an inferior brand that doctors warned to avoid.
This happened to my older folks, and is baffling why insurances feel the need to override a doctor's recommendations.
They were the same drug. The generic version is made after the original patent runs out and is an exact copy.
Perhaps, but this is what was advised by the doctor, so I don't know
Not necessarily. I'm on a daily medication that has a generic but is available in both extended release and immediate release forms. The extended release provides a more consistent dosage and has historically prevented me from getting sick. The immediate release causes inconsistent spikes and I have a history of getting sick on it. Insurance refused to pay for the extended release type for about 2 years before it made it onto their "formulary." In the meantime I was using GoodRx and paying $100/mo instead of my paid health insurance pharmacy plan to make sure I wouldn't get sick. The person I spoke to at the pharmacy management wing of the insurance company literally told me "you can get an app on your phone which will tell you when to take the immediate release medication."
Luckily, we don't have that with medical insurance in Switzerland, but car mechanics sure are that way.
Need a fix on insurance? Ooh, that'll take us 2 weeks of full time work - minimum 5000 bucks. Call them and tell them it's not insured? Ah, that'll be 500 bucks.
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
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.
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.
Tipping in restaurants…pay the workers.
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.
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.
Everying in your comment can be solved with regulation. A capitalist society can enact socialist policies to take care of the lower class or unemployed. It's not a "pick one" situation.
You're arguing against the unregulated capitalism we live in, but also comparing capitalism as it exists today to fuckin slavery is just a ridiculous false equivalence.
I didn't compare capitalism to slavery. I said the word slavery. The first paragraph wasn't demonstrating a comparison, it was demonstrating a principle (principles are universalized, comparisons aren't). The idea that every system has positives, but those systems can still be horrifically bad.
I don't know if it's emotion that's clouding your reading comprehension, I hope it is, because then you can calm down and have a reasonable conversation. If it's not, then this conversation isn't worth having because you won't understand half of what I'm saying. Literally 50% of your last message was you misrepresenting what I was saying.
A capitalist society cannot enact socialist policies. It can enact "social" policies. These policies are inspired by socialism, and often advocated for by socialists, but the policies themselves are not socialist policies. Capitalism is an economic system where the means of production are privately owned, and socialism is an economic system where the means of production are socially owned. If private (not personal) property exists, it's not socialism. It's not necessarily capitalism (you could have other systems with private property), but in our world it always is.
Welfare capitalism, where these social policies exist, is a well established ideology that has been around for about 80 years in any serious form, and yeah welfare can be used to address some of the negative tendencies of capitalism, but it doesn't fix them. It's applying a band-aid fix, not addressing the problem. In the real world what this means is there's a class of people always working to remove those regulations and welfare because their class interests are opposed to ours.
Class distinctions cannot be solved with a regulation, they have to be solved with a societal restructuring. Our legal system does not support the idea of abolishing private property and by extension classes.
Yeah bud, I'm not reading past your second paragraph. Go gaslight and be and be an asshole on Reddit.
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.
Arguably, socialism is a bigger scam given its history of failure.
What do you mean?
That socialism has always failed, but because it sounds good in theory, people like to argue for its use.
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
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,
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
Religions promise anything and everything but don't actually provide anything in return for time or money invested. It's the very definition of a scam.
It's no different than supplement scams or homeopathic pills.
I wouldn’t say anything. You could provide a sense of belonging, guidance etc but many cults also do that.
Now, many also promise eternal salvation and the like and that is 100% a scam. Literally the same as snake oil.
Anti-theist, thank you. Kill your god.
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.
Professors requiring their own, expensive textbook for their course.
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.
Soon? How about now:
https://a.co/d/ef52eEd
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.
Tipping
Private health insurance.
Banks.
Diamonds.
British royal family.
Religions that collect money from adherents.
Web 2.0 data harvesting.
The price for glasses. It's like this because of a stupid duopoly
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.
Capitalism and the 5 day 9 to 5 work week
Insurance (am American)
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.
Credit unions are a much better option.
Credit unions aren't always perfect either. I switched unions because one started adding fees.
Printer inkt. In our shop people are still buying them for a way to high price…
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.
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.
That is completely crazy to me. I guess the matter differs wildly based on location.
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.
Credit scores
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.
Real estate agents getting 6% commission from the seller.
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.
I've noticed this starting to break, i.e. more actually starting to compete with each other and enter each other's "turf". Part of that I think is municipal fiber.
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.
You're not wrong. Though I'll be leaving here soon enough, and I think the risk:reward ratio is good enough to continue until then. And if they've let me go this long I doubt they'll somehow retroactively figure it out after I'm gone.
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.
You could switch to any of their dozen or so competitors.
Wait until I tell who the "competitors" rent the infrastructure from
The way it works where I live:
Company A owns the physical fiber, they also own the point-of-presence where all the fibers end up (basically a room with lots of rack space). Company A does not sell Internet service.
Company X, Y and Z provide internet service to consumers. They rent the physical fiber from company A, they also rent rack space in the PoPs where their customers fibers terminate. Cost for electricity, air conditioning, in the PoP is shared by all companies that use that PoP, by ratio of number of customers. (e.g. if company X has 100 customers connected to one PoP and Y and Z each have 50, company X pays 50% of the utilities bill and Y and Z each 25%).
In case of company X/Y/Z, all the infrastructure is theirs with the exception of the physical fiber and the PoP room, that includes the fiber 'modem' (mediaconverter) or router on each side of the connection, switches, any backbone connectivity from the PoP onwards, all services, etc.
Some of these ISPs also resell their services to smaller ISPs, so company Q could simply be reselling a package from company X. Often they resell only a part of the service, e.g. they resell Internet from company X but add their own TV package.
They can of course also change this later on. My current ISP started by reselling services from one of the bigger ISPs, this basically gave them national coverage with little risk. Once they got established and had a decent number of customers they started rolling out their own network, city-by-city. They would install their own equipment into the PoPs in a city, change everyone over to their equipment (and distributed new media converters and routers) and they were no longer dependent on the big ISP. When they did this they cut the price of my internet connection by half while at the same time upgrading the speed from 200/200 to 1000/1000. Within a year or so they moved most customers to their own infrastructure.
And how do you get in such a situation? Very simple: company A wanted to install fiber and asked for a permit from the government to start digging up the streets and sidewalks. The government basically said: you can get a permit. but we don't want a all this nuisance with digging up the streets every time someone wants to offer internet service, so you as a requirement for the permit you have to offer an open network with identical pricing to everyone who wants to use it.
Hugely location dependent.
Sure, but I live in 'socialist' Europe and I can already choose from 13 ISPs on fiber alone. I can only dream of the amount of choice people in 'free market' USA must have.
Sure, and that's great for you! I am, honestly, envious.
However, you said "you could switch." For many people, including me, we cannot switch while maintaining a reasonable connection. My options are my current ISP (really not too bad, for the first time in my life), an ISP that provides a maximum of 12Mbps, an ISP that still isn't quite sure if it can provide service to me, or satellite (which is pretty awful for a variety of services I use regularly). Even discarding reasonable expectations, this is not a "dozen or so."
While your proposal might be good for you and others in "socialist" Europe, many people (likely even outside of Europe and the USA) don't have that option and it probably doesn't help resolve the parent commenter's complaint.
Edit: also, while the USA is behind Europe in many ways, I suspect this is not so much a Europe vs USA issue as a rural vs not issue.
On the contrary, here the rural areas got fiber way before the cities did. It's a lot less difficult to install fiber in rural areas compared to densely populated cities where the ground is already full of cables and pipes, and where the impact of having to close streets for digging are much bigger.
Even now, the fastest consumer internet is available in a small town in the middle of fscking nowhere, where they installed 10gbit fiber.
Gotcha, thank you for the edification.
I am in the Communist country referred to as Italy, there are only 2 companies who actually have 4g infrastructures AFAIK, and the dozens of other carriers just rent the infrastructure from the tim/Wind3 duopoly
Printer Ink and paying companies like Google and Spotify, who still collect your data as a paid customer.
Capitalism and religion, easily the top two scams.
Airlines charging for seat selection. I remember the days when that was just a right you got for "free" by purchasing the ticket 🤷
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
Diamond Scarcity
Cars=freedom
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
competition. You like Brand A? and dislike Brand B? both are owned by C
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.
The notion that capitalism is the end-all be-all of how society functions/works.
I didn't mean it like that. My comment was about how a lot of billionaires, governments and politicians seem to believe that capitalism is the only system that can ever exist in a civilized society, and how there can be no alternative (some prominent influential figures that held this belief or something similar were/are Larry Kudlow, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Ronald Reagan).
There's also the fact about how in the 20th and 21st century there was a significant effort to undermine any alternative ideologies in the western liberal democratic world. The various anti-red campaigns by the US, Thatcherism that destroyed the significance of unions in order to completely remove any possibility of a revolution (and turn workers into free-market commodities), there was also this very recent event in 2021 where during Rosa Luxemburg peaceful memorial event in Germany, police suddenly came up to disrupt it, presenting false motives.
There might be something better, a society or a system that serves the many instead of the few, but such non-capitalist system would go against the interests of the rich and the ruling elite, so there's an active heavy pushback against it. Even when it comes to politics, the political left is definitely outnumbered at least in my country rather than political parties that lean to the center or the right, which are the parties that keep the status quo or even strengthen the elites further.
I'm approaching this from a leftist point of view, and my arguments are probably not perfect, but at least that's how I see it. Capitalism is definitely better for people than Monarchy/Aristocracy, but it could definitely be much better for the people.
Like democracy, it's the best bad answer.
Sure; nothing is ever set in stone, the future is always the future, and none of us can know what's in it.
Still, in the context of the current political climate, I think the "fuck capitalism" crowd leaves something to be desired. For instance, I'm all for nationalizing medical insurance as other capitalist countries have done.
However, the "no more private business ownership" crowd I think is asking for serious trouble. The preface is that if you get rid of capitalist influences democracy will not be as malleable and will always serve public interest without powerful capitalists to corrupt it... I think the case made by history is the opposite, without capitalistic forces the concentration of power in government leads to the destruction of consumer choice and inevitable corruption. In either system, the sticking point is an actively engaged and educated (and even more so, well informed -- degrees are not the goal, it's the information) public keeping an eye on the system, and I think that's where the 20th century United States failed itself leading to 21st century problems.
The problem is that current companies are authoritarian organizations as seen from the inside, there can still be competing companies and media without this internally authoritarian structure. Imagine every company was 51+% owned by it's workers, and they elected their senior/management staff. That would for what I understand capitalism as end it, but obviously would be vastly different from the few socialist attempts in history.
Here's the problem I have with that argument... Anyone arguing for this can go make such a company, but nobody has (or maybe few people have and it worked or didn't and I missed the memo). It's not a problem of large corporations or government suppression either. There are new successful small companies all the time, but they're not "51% owned by their workers."
So like... If you want any buy in outside of the bubble that already supports the idea, go actually do it. AFAIK, it's not illegal, there's nothing stopping such a company from existing other than A) nobody has sufficiently tried or B) it doesn't actually work.
Obviously they already exist and looking at cooperatives like that they mitigate most of the problems of private enterprise at least somewhat. The argument I'm making is that Private companies (especially large ones) are extremely dangerous to any system that tries to be democratic and because of the danger they pose shouldn't exist at all. I mean look at how much of US government is just captured by private companies and what effect that has (had) on politics in the country and on it's foreign policy as well.
The lack of education and an informed public is not the cause of the problems, it's one of the many symptoms. It's not like Bezos bought WaPo for sport. It's not like de santis and trump get fossil super Pacs by accident. It's not like super Pacs exist because voters love companies throwing tons of money into political messaging....
This is what I mean with Private enterprise is dangerous to democracy
These side effects were written into every liberal governments constitution by Bourgeoisie to protect their wealth from before democracy even existed. Sure there always were some concessions made towards people that weren't wealthy but obviously it was always the wealthy who had the greatest influence.
I don't care what particularly replaces it but this system must be changed so much to get rid of these perverse incentives that it should probably be called something else too.
Marx obviously is a good way of analyzing these failings of liberalism but he certainly is not the be all end all. Did you know for example that North eastern Syria has a constitution actively building a direct democratic rule in the region Constitution and Principles . The principles are anarchist or libertarian socialist in nature and certainly address the issues you had in terms of state authority and rush toward corruption and monopolization.
Theory and even practice of socialism obviously doesn't stop at Soviet or CCP "communism".
Printers
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
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.
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
Capitalism
Car dealerships.
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.
Asking this question every single week.
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.
The gop
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.
"Disposable" electronics
Block chain - there's still no legitimate practical use for it
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
Health insurance.
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.
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.
Adobe
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.
Companies being the sole arbiters of OTA "Upgrades" and DRM "purchases".
Health insurance. Actually that probably doesn't really count since most of us know it's a scam.
Social media
Everything comes with a subscription
Paying high subscription fees for Autodesk products
Religion.
Organized religion.
Nothing comes even remotely close.
Speculative economic instruments. There's a reason why specific items, such as onions in the US, have been banned from being essentially bet on.
Religion. The all-time champion, no contest, just as George Carlin said:
https://youtu.be/2tp0UNcjzl8
Fashion
Mass Surveillance.
Companies and governments alike have successfully convinced most people that they have "nothing to fear".
Copyright
gacha game, paying premium money, an insane amount event just to see virtual character
Printers and printer ink
Get yourself a Brother printer and this annoyance will be cast away forever
I agree. Brother printer is the best purchase I made in a long time. They're reliable and printing with laser is so cheap
I love the fact that they just print too! No more "inkjet cleaning test prints", I've saved so much time, money, and frustrating switching to a brother black and white laser printer... For the average (?) "I just need to print official documents" kind of person, it's a great buy.
I have a brother dcn-7065 from about 2012 maybe. Still going strong. No issues.
I have a dell 1350cnw which was made by Brother. Bought in 2010, survived an international house move. Still works great (only downside is the drivers are 32bit so I have to keep an old computer around to act as a printer share on my network!)
Laser printers are an option
Religion.
The extra .9 cent we pay for every gallon of gas in the USA.
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.
Resort fees, especially in Las Vegas.
Battle passes and most microtransactions in games. Day one patches, and GaaS games, always online games and expiring media licenses. VAC bans on Steam.
Patents
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."
Toilet paper
Girl Scout cookies
Credit cards and everything to do with the debt trap.
ads
Paying for cellular data, in advance, regardless of whether or not you use it with no possibility of refunding any you didn't use.
Phone companies charging you for caller ID. It must cost them nothing.
@mastermind Software as a service
People who vote for conservatives
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.
Enclosure
Massage school. They say they’re teaching you a trade and will help with job placement but there is a glut of graduates and not enough jobs for them. Yet the school keeps signing up new students because that’s how they make money.
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.
Stores and restaurants increasing their base prices to promote discounts from data harvesting apps.
SaniFair is a scam that every German is aware of yet it's normalized.
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.
Insurance. A promise they try really hard to break.
Religion
Sleeping. You have to pay for shelter...
Religion Healthcare Insurance Tipping
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.
What about when you pay for the service but they still collect your data?
Well that's a whole different case. Then they indeed should either pay you or not collect the data.
That’s my point. Let people make that decision if they want it for free with no privacy or paid with privacy.
It’s a scam how much we are tracked without real consent and/or compensation.
Service as a subscription, for me. It used to be you bought a product and then you owned it. Now if you want practically anything from streaming media to freaking car washes, you have to "subscribe".
American Colleges.
Daily life
Most forms of insurance in the US
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.
Car insurance Health insurance Dental insurance
All insurance really
Also renewing license plates/licenses
Basically if you need to make a yearly or monthly payment to keep using something it's a scam in my eyes.
Extended warranties. Most defects are noticed during the first month of use, which is usually already covered by law.
Also many types of insurance, though mostly because actually getting it in case you need is a nightmare.
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?
Antivirus software
Getting paid every 2weeks (what the old times told me)
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.
There's so much inflation these days that pensions are impossible unless the pension money is invested to keep up with inflation. So it's the same thing at best out a worse option.
Every 401k account I've ever had comes with a "let us manage it for you" option.
Like people don't lose their saving in the market anyway? But when your 401k goes in the tank, your broker doesn't have the legal obligation to fund your retirement.
If that happens to your 401k, that's your fault. As you get older you are supposed to shift things to be more conservative... You can even put your money in things that are guaranteed to not go down. There are target date funds that do this for you without you having to think about it (although I think target date funds are a little too conservative from the start).
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.
Shampoo
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.
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.
Brake service
Printing money.
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.
The user you are responding to has an account on a .ca domain. In Canada (as well as UK) it is more common for the rate to only be locked in for 5 years.
Well that's lame... You guys should do something about that, as a US home owner, having a fixed rate mortgage is one of the best parts about owning vs renting.
As a US non-homeowner, I'm not sure what you think I should do about it.
I think it's pretty clear I was talking about the folks you're referring to... not you specifically if you're not in that group... but fair enough.
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.
The hell are you on about, reserve banks can create money, but a retail bank borrows it from someone else and loans it to you.
And if that "somewhere else" can get a better deal elsewhere, they won't loan it to the bank in the first place.
No retail banks create money while they grant a loan - it’s called book money creation https://www.geld-und-geldpolitik.de/en/banks-and-book-money-chapter-3.html#nav-vier If you wanna get rich, start a bank
What they mean by that is if there is a newly created bank with no money in it, and you deposit 100 of whatever currency, then I come in and withdraw 80, which I will use to pay for the creation of a bakery. Then I give those money to you, after you have built the bakery for me. Then you go back and deposit those 80 back to the bank. Then the cycle continues: I take out another 80, for example, to pay for initial products, I pay them to Person 3, who deposits them in the bank. The bank just turned 180 into 260. If, at that moment, I, as the bakery owner, decide to refinance my loan, I can get 60 from the bank. If then we get you, with a balance of 160, and Person 3, with a balance of 80, to withdraw their deposits, what do we get? Think about it: the bank only had 100 in its reserves from the initial deposit, and all the other deposits were money that the bank had loaned out, so while you had 100 deposited, then 80, you technically have 180 in your bank account, but there's only 100 actual money in the system.
What the fuck have you been smoking?
You know what? Let me simplify if for you:
Person A deposits $100 to the Bank
Person A's account is worth $100. The Bank has $100 in its reserves.
Person B takes out a loan of $80 from the Bank.
The Bank now has only $20 in its reserves.
Person B pays the $80 to Person A for a service
Person A deposits the $80 to the Bank.
Person A's account is worth $180.
The Bank now has $100 ($80 deposit + $20 left from earlier) in its reserves.
2 days later, nothing's changed, except Person A needs some extra money quickly, so they go and try to withdraw the $180 in their account. The Bank only has $100 in its reserves.
That's why we have a "fractional reserve" system in place pretty much everywhere.
And besides, they haven't created that money, as the first person has a balance of -80.
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)
Workplace benefits.
Really? What's the benefit? You're taking money out of my paycheck to restrict my choices?
And aren't you a business anyway--you know, an organization whose purpose is to MAKE MONEY, not coddle people.
Democracy. /s
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.
Fiat currencies like USD and Euro.
Liberalism.
Working from home, but not being payed rent for the space.
Tax
Government
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.