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.
You’re free to look into the budgets of governments you pay taxes toward and see a breakdown of where every dollar you spend in taxes goes by doing some simple math. Some countries will even do this work for you and send you a breakdown of where your money went. IIRC Australia does this. But even without that you can easily figure it out yourself.
Taxes go to “the betterment of society” in many ways. They pay for all kinds of shit. Don’t be silly.
You’re free to look into the publicly available budgets of governments you pay taxes toward and see a breakdown of where every dollar you spend in taxes goes by doing some simple math.
Doubt it’s that simple as asking for those kind of information are usually behind red tapes and some are even confidential. Most people are not motivated enough to do that.
Some countries will even do this work for you and send you a breakdown of where your money went. IIRC Australia does this.
That’s interesting was not aware of that. Only if my country does that.
Taxes go to “the betterment of society” in many ways. They pay for all kinds of shit. Don’t be silly.
Yeah agree they do I guess the way they are like blackbox makes a huge disconnect to those who are paying.
In Australia when you pay your land rates it tells you where your money goes. Information about where your income tax goes is available online. Your country is no doubt the same, you just haven’t looked.
I’ve heard the IRS can actually send this information to you if you ask. I can’t find much about it online though. I do think it should be standard to help people understand where their money is going though.
worse than that is professors being required by the school’s contract with the textbook company to tell you to buy a book that they have no intent on using because it’s awful. that was way way more common for me.
I loved getting my math degree. Almost every professor provided us with copies of the book. One went so far as to hand out flash drives with the pdfs on them on day 1. For the few classes I did buy books for, I went online and found the international edition, which was generally around 30 bucks instead of 300.
Fuck text book publishers and fuck school bookstores.
One of my professors had a textbook that was shockingly out of date for the subject. Like we’re talking using scientific data from 1995 at the latest, and I took this class 2 years ago. He sent a bunch of emails to the textbook author and eventually he came out with a “Fourth Edition” in response that changed NOTHING. The book was exactly the same except for a different cover.
The professors I have known with text books for their own courses hate this, too. They would always put it on the board for the entire course how to translate page numbers given for the current edition of the book to page numbers for older pages. One in particular was like “Take the page number. Subtract the difference between the current version and your version. That’s the page you need to start on”
This! My English teacher in my first year required us to buy a specific book that she wrote from a specific book store for $250. You had to bring it and the receipt in proving you bought it and aren’t just sharing with someone else.
We then opened the table of contents to “go over” the book and never touched it again.
She then said “you should probably leave those here so you don’t forget them”. Never fucking touched it again.
I had a hero of a physics professor who figured out that new editions of textbooks just mixed up the number of the exercises, so he advised students that they could just order previous versions of the textbooks and he’d provide the “key” for how the questions were shuffled.
I agree with this so much. Political parties should just be given one tv ad and one pamphlet. Only allowed to talk about their own policies and nothing else. Exclusively government funded. Any extra donations and you’re no longer representing the people’s interests so you’re murdered or something idk.
The “one ad/one pamphlet” concept is a horrible idea. Reactionary political platforms rely on regressive ideas that have remained in the popular political consciousness for centuries - meanwhile, the positive development of society requires an understanding of complex things that won’t be adequately expressed in such a brief format. Think economic planning, human ecology, etc.
This is a recipe for a cruel, inhumane, and backwards society. In short, bourgeois democracy.
I don’t understand how that addresses campaign finance.
Even under socialism it will still be essential for the people to keep a close eye on their chosen representatives (and also other leaders such as those in the leading revolutionary party), but it will no longer be virtually impossible for those representatives to truly represent the interests of the people
How will these representatives be chosen? Well they be able to campaign and will there be a limit to how much they can spend on a campaign?
If direct democracy is what you’re advocating, how can that work? Does every citizen have to spend an hour reading legislation every day then vote through an app on their phone?
Haha I thought it would be funnier to say that and not elaborate further. But yeah, even though I use it, essentially it’s a western thing - a large portion of the population use bidets or “bum-guns” that are installed into toilets. It’s actually a lot cleaner, environmentally friendlier, cheaper, but arguably at first hard to get used to from a western perspective. But yeah toilet paper has huge industry and money behind it so capitalism perpetuates it.
Bidets are amazing. I had one for years until I moved (current toilet would be rather difficult to install an attachment to) and holy crap do I ever miss it.
I went to Thailand for a holiday, came back a bum-gun convert. For ~$50, we installed one onto our toilet and haven’t looked back - there’s no need when everything’s spotless.
My dad used to buy disposable vapes. I decided to take them apart just to find rechargeable li-ion batteries. By the way, in many of them there were quite thin wires and some of the insulation was visibly burned, looks quite dangerous.
Similarly there are some single use power banks. DiodeGoneWild made a video about those and also how to recharge them.
Just a stupid waste of batteries.
I like to tinker with things. I wanted to see if I could hit a weed cart powered by my phone so I bought a bunch of cheap 510 batteries with temp select from DH gate. They were all the same brand, same seller, same packaging. Inside was a different story though. All the batteries were from different manufactures with capacities different from what was listed.
Some homeopaths solve problems that allopathic doctors are unable to. Still it may be a placebo thing, but it is a valid option because it can work, and it is less quacky than quacks.
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.
Not even gonna weigh in on things like how medicare can’t negotiate prescription drug prices (nytimes.com/…/medicare-drug-price-negotiations-la…), or how dental, vision, and hearing are treated separately from general healthcare, or how med school is prohibitively expensive, or how the residents after med school are overworked because the guy who institutionalize that practice was literally a cokehead. Those are all just bonus topics. The point is we are getting fleeced.
Private 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 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.
People pay every month but most don’t use the sub to it’s full value, and forget how expensive expensive it becomes over the years. And you don’t own anything on a subscription, you just borrow it.
Also trial periods that prolong automatically into subscriptions.
I was really surprised when I shipping forwarder I use after I upgraded from the “free” tier to the $10/month tier to save a few hundred dollars of state taxes, when I downgraded back to their “free” tier five days later once the package was out of their hands, the answer was “Your subscription will end at the end of your current paid month”
Yup, BandCamp all the way. Once you buy a song you own it, you can play it anywhere you darn well please. Even if BandCamp goes under, no worries, still got my music.
Same with DVDs. Yeah, I’ve definitely gotten movies I regret purchasing, but I think long-term it’s more economical.
For-profit housing is a massive racket. Investment firms posing as housing developers get tax breaks for buying up properties, inflating the market, pricing out families, and renting those same homes back to the community to pay the mortgage on their investment, plus profit. What fucking purpose do they serve society? Pure predatory capitalist greed at the expense of our housing. For-profit housing needs to be banned. Investment real estate needs to be regulated until all our citizens can afford to buy homes in their localities.
Is it though? You get the same home and get to own it if you had enough down-payment. The only thing landlord has the renter doesn’t is the capital for down-payment.
There are people who can’t save up for a down payment and therefore wouldn’t be able to responsibly take care of a house even if they were given one.
There’s people who don’t want to own a house. A house comes with a bunch of costs and responsibility.
Your furnace goes out in winter, bam, that can be an expensive service call or several thousands of dollars to replace.
Your sewer line backs up because of tree roots on a Sunday or holiday and now it’s several hundred dollars to get a drain company out there.
Need a new roof? That’s a $5,000+ expense all at once.
These are just a few examples. There’s quite a number more. Some people like knowing that expenses like that are covered by someone else.
In the grocery store example, there’s people who like growing their own food. For others, they’d rather someone else do that even if they’re paying a markup to buy it from a grocery store, because they can get everything in one place.
60-65% of households in the USA are homeowners, either outright or through a mortgage. 80-90% of households in Eastern Europe are homeowners. It’s pretty clear that people who are perennial renters are mostly people who cannot clear the financial hurdle of a down payment. I don’t think the “some people don’t want to” line is a solid argument. It’s the exception thata proves the rule.
The repairs and property taxes and mortgage all add up to a total that is less than the rent, on average. Otherwise, landlords would have a disincentive, and every landlord would be operating at a loss.
The points you made are points that landlords use as justification for their occupation/position. Are you a landlord?
I paid for an extended warranty for my TV, because the TV was expensive (83 inch LG OLED C2), the extended warranty was only $100, and it extended the warranty from 1 year to 5.
Check your credit card perks too - A lot of credit cards give you one year extended warranty for free.
US warranties are the real scam. Only one year for a $3500 TV? They don’t get away with that in countries with proper consumer protection… In Australia, products have to last as long as “a reasonable consumer” would expect them to last, for example 10-15 years for a fridge. The company must repair or replace the product if it breaks down during that time frame, regardless of how long they say the warranty is for. If it’s a large appliance, they must pick it up and drop it off for free. You must be able to return a product to the store you bought it from for warranty issues - they can’t say that you have to go to the manufacturer. Saying “no refunds” is illegal (except for on second-hand products). Companies that violate these rules get fined hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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.
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.
Imagine the array of mobile internet of shit devices we would have if phone companies had a reasonable payment plan based on only the data you actually use.
I’ve never prepaid my phone by credit. Anytime I prepaid a phone it was an unlimited monthly deal. Eventually I switched to post pay and it’s about the same. Either way it’s fairly cheap for me.
The best part is it didn’t really start as a scam. It started as “health assurance” in which you paid a membership fee and they covered all your medical expenses.
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