I agree that it’s a bit of a stretch. What I think they’re getting at is that individualism as it’s pushed by imperialist media creates the toxic environment that fosters the cultural traits that you’re referring to.
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.
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.
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 didn’t know any companies still did that. I pay $25/month for unlimited and it’s only gone down over the years. I started paying $45/month about 15 years ago. I know of some companies that are cheaper, but I haven’t had any issues, so I haven’t bothered to switch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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