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.
Both this, and that winning an auction doesn’t get you the item but the ability to pay for the item. The “penny” refers to the fact that you pay to buy bids in the auction, not that you pay pennies for items.
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.
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.
Things used to be a lot simpler & cheaper in the US, but then we passed the War Revenue Act in 1917 which drastically increased the budget & helped to pay for the war. They probably saw all that money rolling in & got greedy. What was initially designed as a war-time fund raising effort is now just standard taxation, it has gotten worse, and the people being born & working & dying nowadays don’t know anything different.
The government wastes so much money. Whose money? They don’t have any money! They’re wasting our money, that they extract from us via taxation.
We are financially raped into the ground, not allowed to enjoy the fruits of our own labor.
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.
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.
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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