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.
Retirement savings connected to the stockk market. Gives a perverse incentive for everyone to continue the wealth transfer upwards, since the stock market is largely based on the vibes of a handful of very rich people.
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.
They have 2 (3?) types of shares, and the one most people buy ($GOOG) is a class C share which comes with no voting rights and doesn’t give you a share of the company profits.
While class A shares ($GOOGL) come with voting rights, class B shares which are held by Google’s founders and insiders get 10x voting power and so they still hold the majority vote. Class A also does not pay dividends.
Google’s shares are divided into two types, Class A and Class C. Class A shares, traded as GOOGL, confer one vote per share as a typical stock would. Class C shares, traded as GOOG, confers no voting privileges. This dual shares system was done to raise more money selling less useful Class C shares (intended for mutual funds and the like) while keeping control of the company in the hands of those held on to Class A shares (i.e. longtime executives).
Ah, thanks for the info. That’s actually what I suspect is happening with the new fractional shares thing, but the brokerage is the one retaining control.
This type of thing might be more common than just the famous Google example - apparently lots of valuations reported in media just assume that all shares in a company are equal (fungible, interchangeable).
If you invest in the stock market and expect companies to be making large profits all the time then you’re going to be very disappointed. That’s not how it works. There are financial reports, market regulators, analysts. History tells us that awful companies with shady practices would always get caught in the end, no matter how big they are.
Everyone should invest, but investors should always do their research.
Instapot. Instapot made too good of a product, most people buy one and its good for years. That’s good for consumers but terrible for investors. The company that bought them out and took them public saddled them with a ton of debt from other sectors and now they’re bankrupt.
Diamond Sports is suing Sinclair for doing the same, minus the “good product” part.
Sinclair bought up the Fox RSNs a few years back, renaming the company as Diamond Sports and the channels as Bally Sports. Not too long afterwards, they went bankrupt. Diamond is claiming that Sinclair has saddled them with massive debts and extraordinarily high management fees. Sinclair also kept the funds from the sponsorship agreement with Bally.
The lawsuit accuses Sinclair of receiving about $1.5 billion as a result of alleged misconduct, including fraudulent transfers of assets, unlawful distributions and payments, breaches of contracts, unjust enrichment and breaches of fiduciary duties.
“Diamond Sports Group is seeking to vindicate its rights and protect the value of the Diamond bankruptcy estate, including by recovering value from Sinclair Broadcast Group that was improperly transferred from Diamond prior to its filing for bankruptcy in March 2023,” a spokesperson for Diamond said in a statement.
I’m still salty about that broken Liberal promise to reform our elections. None of the parties care about it and it seems no one wants to try to change it.
It’s hard to pick just one because, duh, capitalism is inherently a scam.
But if I were to pick just one, it’d have to be the airlines. They’re beyond necessary yet every year they pull some insane shit and no one bats an eye. And no matter what they’re always crying poor and merging merging merging. Can’t you see, they have to - they have no choice.
First the food costs extra. Then the drinks. Then the bags you check in. Then they charge you to sit in the exit aisle because you get an extra 3 inches. They literally say now it’s “impossible” to book two tickets seated together unless you pay an extra fee. Impossible, you say? How the fuck were you able to do it for so long up until 2022???
There’s next to no difference in regards to payroll processing on a week by week basis. Companies want to push this to a fortnight or month so it’s easier on their finances. There’s very little reason it couldn’t be paid weekly.
The employer basically gets an interest-free loan for that extra week; whereas the employee might need to pay interest to a third party to make up for any shortfall on their end (e.g. credit cards, payday loans). Majority of people live paycheck-to-paycheck and can’t cover an unexpected $1000 expense.
Technically every day you are not paid is an interest rate free loan to your employer. That said, being paid once a month is fine for me since all my fixed expenses are also paid on a monthly basis.
I don’t know if it’s so much a scam as it is banks and companies and such being stuck in the past.
You could be getting paid every week or even every day, it’s your money, you already earned it, why should you have to wait for it?
Especially in this day and age where everything is computerized. You punch in, you punch out, the computer knows how long you worked, somewhere in their payroll system they know how much you earned, what needs to be withheld, etc. It takes fractions of a second for a computer to do that math, they could send that transaction the moment you clock out.
When things were more manual, it made sense, you had to have someone adding things up, and doing math, computers were bigger, slower, less user friendly, more expensive, and not all hooked up to the Internet up to the Internet to talk to each other. It used to make a lot of sense to do things in big batches at the end of the day, every week, every 2 weeks, 2 or 3 times a month, whatever.
But now you could put in your 8 hours work, and walk out with your days wages already in your account ready to be used for whatever you need it for immediately, no more being broke until payday, payday is every day. But that’s not how it works because as far as the banks and such are concerned everything is working fine for them, so no real need to update their shit.
Couldn’t this be switched around too? I’m only paying some of my bills every other month or twice a year. Why shouldn’t I be paying those off every week or even every day?
Paying on your mortgage every week can drastically reduce your interest, depending on how your interest is calculated. Even if you pay the same amount at you would per month, paying it every week could save thousands of dollars.
It absolutely could, everyone manages their money in their own way. If that’s something that works for people I think they should have that option.
Personally when possible, I do like to do things that way. If I owe, say, $100/month on my car payment, I will tend to pay $50 with each paycheck instead of $100 once a month, and if I got paid every week, I would probably choose to pay $25 a week instead. For me and how my brain is wired, it’s just easier for me to mentally keep track of things when they’re in smaller, more frequent increments. I don’t know if I would quite break it down to ~$5 a day if I got paid every day, but i’d consider it.
Really? Is that a thing? Where I live getting paid per month is the norm. Some people get paid per 4 weeks instead of per month. But I don’t know of any trade where payment per week or twee weeks is the norm. Stuff like rent, mortgage, water, gas and electric etc. is all done per month. So it makes sense to match the income cycle to the bill cycle.
Puts living paycheck to paycheck in perspective. I can image not getting ends to meet on a monthly basis. But if you can’t afford the next week, you have basically nothing.
I know there is a lot of overhead with payroll where I live, so if companies would have to do it more often, that would be pretty expensive. There are a lot of rules and regulations, so it takes a lot of work to do it right.
Hell yeah, they’re recording my time by the second, they should pay me by the second. If I’m clocked in you can be depositing a penny every 6 seconds into my bank account. If we started charging interest for the time between your paycheck being earned and being paid out they would figure out how to make that happen.
In Germany and Austria being paid per month is the norm. All the laws are defined for that. So pretty much everyone who works gets paid just once a month, that’s it (Well, in Austria you get 14 salaries, so you get an extra salary every 6 months). It makes zero difference if you get your money one time a month or half your money two times a month, it’s the same amount in the end.
Getting paid more often would just complicate things, as it can depend on how much overtime you did in a month. Or how often you went into the office (you get lessened taxes based on how far the office is away and how often you have to drive there and if there is suitable public transport to get there).
How in the world is that a scam? I’ve been paid once a month to every day in my career and I far prefer the once a month situation but every 2 weeks is fine with me. Every day is just tedious. Once a week has the same problem but different scale. Once a month means I can actually plan out my bills easily.
Yeah, well, I have to disagree with you on this one.
A few years after I met my wife, we had to sell her apartment so we could move to another city together for jobs. We tried to be cheap and sell the place ourselves to save money. We teamed up with a lawyer that specialised on selling real estates privately. We had a few viewings, but people were hesitant to bidding. We got a lot of questions about why we didn’t use an agent.
After a few weeks, we contacted a real estate agent, and sold the place after just one viewing for a better price even after paying the agent fee.
I think it is important to leave the job to professionals when selling thing with high risk and high value.
It’s now been a while since I used Spotify, so no idea what it’s like now. I started to get Spotify inserted adverts when listening to podcasts. After a month or so of getting adverts I stopped my subscription and moved to other sources of audio entertainment.
I paid for Spotify primarily to get away from adverts, secondly it was more convenient than being on the wavey seas with my parrot, black flag, and wooden leg.
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.
Yep. Totally insidious. Everyone accepts it like fish in water. But the banks don’t own the money they are lending into existence it’s created out of this air. If a bank has 1 dollar savings they can leverage that to create 30 dollars for a mortgage. As in almost no minimum liquidity reservation requirement.
It artificial drives up the cost of housing. It consolidates wealth upward and it should be illegal.
The bank ik a place for people to store their money, and I have 15K on my account. The chance that I’ll need that in full is pretty low and like me are 99 other people.
What the bank does is give someone else part of that stored money as a loan. If someone else loans 30K, they get that money out of the banks reserves (made with the 100x15K). However, I still see 15K on my account, and not 14.7K. So essentially making money out of thin air.
This is also why bank runs are so dangerous to the bank, because if everyone start funneling out their savings eventually the bank doesn’t have enough money in stock to pay everyone causing them to fall.
The bank makes money on the mortgage through the interest rate, so while 30K was loaned, 40K has to be paid back.
The best part is the money does not exist they are literally lending it into existence. Click of a keyboard. Now you have debt, they have assets, the cost of housing goes up because everyone is doing the same thing
I know it sounds insane. And that’s because it is. Study it, mind will be blown I guarantee
Not OP, but the normalization of something necessary requiring to borrow a lump sum and take 20-30+ years to pay off plus interest. Even the valuation of homes is ridiculous in itself, since those numbers are somewhat based on subjective values or “how much can I get away with charging?”. Sure, you have a baseline of materials and labor but the subjective part is just what’s around that property. Even if you lived in a shed and someone builds a mansion next door, now your value magically goes up? It’s a gimmick that only further drives inflation with fluff being added to demand. The shift of practically all US housing markets from the pandemic (people changing employment, vacancies created from those who died) went into a boom because companies or those with extra money started buying the excess supply so fast that it inflated demand. I’ll stop ranting but I think it’s all ridiculous and unsustainable and would like to mention that renting is just a subscription of residence.
But what’s the alternative? Houses are going to be expensive no matter what. I only paid 100k for mine which is relatively cheap for a house but I still couldn’t have afforded to buy it without taking a loan. My friends are now paying higher rent than I pay off my mortage every month. After 15 years or so I no longer need to pay the mortage AND I have a house I can sell but my friends are still paying rent and have nothing to show for it.
A mortgage where, for instance, 90% of each payment goes to repaying the capital of the mortgage, and 10% to the interest. There’s no way it’s fair that you should need to pay 2x the value of your house over 25 years.
But if I’m a lender and I have spare money to invest I can always just put it into the stock market where I’m on average getting a 7% yearly return. It only makes sense to lend that money to an individual if I’m getting a better rate. Otherwise I’m just losing money.
Then someone else will take that lender’s place. Mortgage lending will, at whatever percentage, produce a stable rate of return. If anything, preventing exorbitant interest rates mitigates much of the risk involved in lending.
Why would anyone do that when they get better return for their money elsewhere? You’re basically expecting people to do charity or simply just be incompetent and make bad financial decisions thus effectively making you the scammer.
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 love 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 where, 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.
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