Agreed! I miss my Samsung CLP. That was a real battle horse!
Yet, the talk was about printer ink and it is really hard to beat the price for that much ink, for those machines.
Fun fact: I don’t even own one of those machines. I have a Canon. Still cheaper than HP cartridges but those assholes tie the entire machine operation to the cartridges.
Those ink tank printers are their own kind of scam though, they clog if you dont use them frequently enough, and they use a non-replaceable dump pad when cleaning and purging that effectively bricks the printers when it is considred full, which is usually just a timer, not an actual sensor.
They’re not referring to the federal road tax , but the $0.009 in the price.
The US actually has a legal denomination that is 1/10 of a cent, called a mill. It’s 1/1000 of a dollar. It’s very rarely used, and was never actually minted. The closest we had were 1/2 cent coins (5 mills), but those were short lived coin denominations in the 1700’s.
So, why do gas stores get to use mills in their prices? I don’t know, but I’m sure they do it either for a legal reason that outdated, because they get to derive extra profit per transaction, or because it’s an extreme form of the ¢99 advertising trick.
Well the federal gas tax is 18.4 cents per gallon, and the state gas tax where I am is 28.5 cents per gallon, for a total of 46.9 cents per gallon, that’s where the $0.009 comes from.
It’s not the figure that’s the problem, but the fact that Americans have been forced to accept this sort of casual deception in how the price of a standard good is advertised. Why is it okay that getting gas for “$3.50” per gallon (to quote the most visible price, which everyone will mention in conversation and mentally reference for comparison) is actually very slightly less than $3.51 per gallon? Just post the correct bloody price, in a clear and unambiguous manner, without faffing around with extra decimals that everyone mentally filters out anyway. It’s stupid.
Same deal with American businesses consistently citing pre-tax (and where relevant, pre-tup) prices. Just tell people what the fuck they are actually going to pay, instead of agreeing that literally everyone has to make their pricing an exercise in consumer deception or be beaten out by everyone else’s smaller-looking-but-actually-identical prices.
This whole thing is just another tiny window into why unregulated markets suck.
Personally, I like the pre-tax amounts displayed. I should know that I am paying 10 dollars for a shirt and that the government is taking an extra dollar. Rather than just being told, the shirt costs 11 dollars. Price tag saying 10+1 would be fine, but tax should always be displayed. Taxes shouldn’t be hidden.
Making cars mandatory fucks over working class people.
The government should stop subsidizing driving and put that money into a form of transportation that doesn’t require 10k a year for citizens to participate.
Ebike subsidies take no time. Increaseing bus frequencies is a bit faster (depending on local job markets). Painting bike gutters is pretty fast. Putting some traffic cones for modal filters is pretty fast.
It’s true that this change will be tough for poor people who bought cars in the short term. But it’s good for poor people who didn’t buy cars in the short term (which is a lot of people with the most need). And good for all poor people in the long term.
If you want to help poor people, subsidizing an antisocial form of transportation that some poor people use is not a good choice.
I need them because if I don’t have car insurance for example i get a fine. I need health insurance otherwise i have to pay out the ass. 2 stupid things made by some money hungry old fuckers that just want to collect even more money. This is just 2 examples of all kinds of insurance. The whole system is in place to make the rich richer for something meaningless.
I will say insurance companies can be very quick to fight you when it comes to giving out money. Keep at it and you’ll get something, but considering how long you can pay them month to month without using it, it’s obnoxious.
Except health insurance. Health insurance is a fucking racket, the medical industrial complex it ties into is a racket, and the United States would be a better place if it gutted this system
Their prices have gotten completely out of control. I’m just a home user though, so I use FreeCAD. It’s a little janky, but I can work at about 80% of my previous speed after about a month.
This is the real answer to this question. Not just an invention to unfairly evaluate folks (and charge them originally to see it!), but nothing more than a “how much we can fleece you for” score that has become so widely embraced you can’t ignore it.
Credit scores are at least significantly better than the system that preceded them. On the other hand the system that preceded credit scores was so broken and so racist that pretty much anything would be a significant amount of progress in the right direction
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.
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. This 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.
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
They’re a fund raising tool for the troop, which is very transparent. Nobody is forcing you to buy them, but people love them and do so voluntarily. Where’s the scam?
In some ways, Australia is actually worse than America. Not like, in terms of how “good” the overall system is. We’ve got you way beat there. But in terms of it being “a scam”.
We have a really good public healthcare system called Medicare. But, if you’re over 30, you’re required to take out private health insurance anyway, or you pay the “Medicare Levy Surcharge” if you have above certain thresholds of income. This levy is not marginal, so you could theoretically take home less pay after getting a pay raise if it puts you over the next threshold.
Additionally, if you later do sign up for private health insurance, you pay an addition levy of 2% on top of the normal premiums for every year you waited. So sign up at 40 and you pay 20% more for insurance than you otherwise would have.
All this means more funding being funneled into the private health sector, taking resources away from the public system, increasing wait times for non-urgent procedures—except for those willing and able to pay to cut the queue. If that’s not a scam, I don’t know what is.
Their logic is “it gets people out of the public system to take burden out of the public system”. Neglecting completely the economies of scale that would be involved if the public system got all of that funding.
conservative governments in Australia have been trying to kill off medicare and other public services for a long time. the problem is our progressive governments have refused to push back hard enough as it always results in election losses.
Basically the people are stupid, the media influences them, and the government is too spineless to take the risk needed to fix things.
Credit scores. It goes up when you have more debt and goes down when you pay your debt off, but it goes down if you ask for a loan and it goes down if you even try to check what it is.
It doesn’t usually go down when you pay debt off. In fact, paying off all your credit card debt every single month is a great strategy that will get you a good credit score. And is ideal, because that way you avoid the high interest rates that credit cards have.
It also doesn’t go down if you check it with sites like Credit Karma. I believe what you’re thinking of is hard checks, which loan issuers use and they can slightly ding your score as they represent you about to get a new line of credit. Though honestly that part is pretty sketchy, since it applies even if you don’t get a new loan.
I’ve got dings on my credit report for no debt lol. I get dings for not using enough of my credit limit and also for using too much. It’s a stupid system that exists to measure how easily banks can fleece you.
It’s not about paying it off, it’s about closing an account. When you pay a loan off the account closes, and that’s where you get dinged. Paying off a credit card isn’t a problem, because the account is still active.
Yes that’s not my experience. It’s a measure of how responsibly you utilize your debt. They like to see you use your debt. But they like to see you pay it off. They don’t like for you to sit at a high percentage of debt. And they like to see that you’ve used your debt responsibly for an extended period of time
They want you in debt so you’re forced to work, and so that they can grift interest money off you. According to their system it’s irresponsible to not have debt, and it’s also irresponsible to ask what their magic number is.
This person is passionately against something they have convinced themselves they fully understand without having any real idea wtf they are talking about. Reading his comments is reminiscent of my mother arguing to me that cost of living isn’t real, such pointless garbage and she gets upset unless you just nod your head and act enlightened somehow. Reading his comments, he’s convinced himself of how the credit rating system is bad, likely reinforced by misunderstood anecdotal evidence and other ignorant people sharing their anecdotal misunderstood experiences, or even made up hogwash. So much so that he digs his heels in and refuses to learn anything that would even allow him to form a valid critique against the credit rating system, preferring instead to be convinced he is infallible and enlightened while loudly spewing confidently incorrect bullshit.
It’s so stupid, in a state with a communist vanguard party a social credit system is unironically better since it marks a step towards a classless moneyless society that the American credit score system is antithetical towards.
Our credit system must work differently here in Australia, because the only thing I think brings it down is not paying, defaulting, bankruptcy, etc. I have an excellent credit rating and I’ve had debts for years.
I remember a time when i bought a printer and it came with refillable ink cartridges which worked out significantly cheaper and better for the environment.
The next printer i bought had microchips that identified the cartridges as being genuines so the cheap off brand ones didnt work anymore.
That was easily 15 years ago. Why is this only just coming back up now. Its beena scam for over a decade. Maybe longer.
Let’s not forget HP making an “update” that effectively self-destructed the printer for use if you don’t use their cartridges. Evem after the public outcry and back pedaling by the company with a new bios update, my printer still “manifested” the same problem they intentionally introduced.
Replaced parts, tried other things, then just said “forget it” and replaced it with a more expensive color laser from a competitor. Happiness and reliable printing ensued.
And the person selling you out glasses out front is for legal reasons a separate business from the doctor who prescribed you the glasses in the back. They don’t at any point make it clear to you that you are legally entitled to not buy glasses there, you can ask for your prescription, take it home with you, and find a good deal online. Its a dark UI pattern in real life. Its the exact same psychological thing that’s going on when a retailer defaults the “sign up for promotional emails?” tickbox to enabled
I took the gamble because I had the money to spare and never looked back again.
The money I would pay for a set of glasses in my country goes easily over €300. With that amount, I can pay an ophthalmologist appointment, have my eyes checked by a doctor, properly, get the prescription, order two sets of glasses (one as a backup) and still have money to spare.
I’ve had two pair of glasses from China… and I have to say: never ever again.
I’ve only bought them because money was tight back then… the quality was ok for what I paid but that’s about it.
I like my optician around the corner that’s been there for over 35 years. :) They have glasses priced from around 180€ up to what you’re willing to pay. 😂
I get all the service I need for free there - if something small is broken they fix it immediately and give your glasses a deep clean…
If my money lets me I will always choose to support small businesses.
You had a bad experience. I respect that. I have not.
Unless we can force a certificate of origin from your local optician for the lenses and the frames, there is a good chance we are actually purchasing material made in PRC.
Regarding service, I’ve used glasses for so long I learned how to maintain, fit and fix minor damage to my glasses.
And regarding quality, even when I paid a lot more money, a pair of glasses would last for about a year, give or take a couple of months. I get the same time from a cheaper set of glasses. So, no gain in spending more.
This one, every time. Imagine buying a product or service for an agreed price, and then being guilt-tripped into having to pay 20% or more on top because the owners don’t pay their staff enough salary to survive on. It should be fucking illegal. Pay your staff a proper salary and charge your clients the price you published on your menu/price-list etc. Running a business isn’t a god-given right, and if you can’t do it with fucking your employees over, then you’re not capable of running a business period, and you should fuck off and let someone who is capable, and who isn’t an empathy vacuum have a go.
Recently went on a flight and paid 30 USD for seat selection online. Then when we go to the airport our friends who didn’t check in online could select it free at the airport anyways…
If you’re flying as a family or with friends, some cheap airlines actually “randomly” puts your seats all across the airplane if you don’t buy the seats.
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