Georgia will likely run into more problems like this. Their RICO case against Trump and his gang of bandits is massive, involving 19 defendants charged with racketeering, 41 predicate offences split across the 19 defendants in order to prove they were involved in racketeering. Not every predicate offence involves every defendant. Most of these predicate offenses involved many more people than the 19 defendants and happened entirely outside of Georgia. Several of the predicate offenses focus on speech and political activities which is going to be incredibly difficult to argue isn’t protected by the first amendment.
This case is massive and messy which means it’ll probably be a very long time until it ends.
I also had the pleasure of working for Service Corporation International. Thankfully solicitation of funeral services is banned in Ontario, Canada. So no cold calling or bugging people at cemeteries. Their way around it was to hold seminars about Last Wills at places like retirement homes. If someone had a funeral related question the staff would get them to sign a form agreeing to a phone call or visit from a sales person.
The pre-arrangement sales people were all on commission and it made them very pushy. The pitches were so manipulative I couldn’t listen to them. Our government is throwing around the idea of banning commissioned sales in funeral services as well because of it. Some other Canadian provinces have already banned it.
The minimal services are essentially transportation, government documentation, and disposition (cremation, burial, entombment, etc). Some funeral homes won’t charge for a private viewing by immediate family, some charge a small fee. Typically there’s a cap on number of people and amount of time, something like 10 people total for 30 minutes.
Anything more than that will require you pay thousands of dollars extra. Hours of receiving guests, a published obituary, a mass or ceremony, musicians, clergy/celebrants, reception. All of those are pushed as “traditional” or expected but they’re incredibly expensive.
While I do think expensive caskets are a waste of money, they’re actually one of the least marked up products sold at a funeral home! Typically, caskets and urns are sold for twice what they’re bought for wholesale. This is mostly because anyone can sell caskets and urns so they can’t have ridiculous markups or people will go elsewhere for them. Urns for example are almost always bought off Amazon instead of at a funeral home.
The products with the highest markups were insurance based. Estate Fraud insurance (if someone steals the dead person’s identity, the insurance company will pay any costs involved in correcting it) and Travel insurance (if you die on vacation, the insurance company will pay any costs involved in bringing the body home). Both of these insurance policies had real costs of about $10 or $20. They’re often sold for $300 to $500.
I used to be a funeral director. The majority of outsiders were unaware of pretty much everything we did. Often on purpose because thinking of death is uncomfortable.
The biggest “secret” is probably that the modern funeral was invented by companies the same way diamond engagement rings were. For thousands of years the only people who had public funerals were rich and famous. It was the death of Abraham Lincoln that sparked the funeral industry to sell “famous people funerals at a reasonable price”. You too could give your loved one a presidential send off! The funeral industry still plays into this hard, and I’ve found many people are simply guilt tripped by society to have a public funeral.
This. I feel the drop in users are the people who came here thinking it was a place for “free speech” and are upset for being downvoted for shit comments.
In reality it’s probably people who checked out the site, saw its mostly software/tech and political communities, a handfull of communities for trans people and reposted memes, and a dash of “the West will fall and China will prevail” communist communities, and decided to leave.
Also the porn is hidden too well, and even when you figure out how to find it, the porn that exists is 90% furry and hentai. Reddit has a huge amateur porn community that I’m certain keeps much of their users coming back.
I once had a chemistry professor who used to work as a senior drug researcher at a major pharmaceutical company. He often joked about how the company treated the monkeys used for testing far better than the PhDs. If a monkey suffered a negative reaction there was a major investigation. I’m incredibly surprised Musk can be killing monkeys left and right and hasn’t been thrown in jail.
I know you said you don’t want to watch videos where people explain the problems with carbon offsets while citing sources, but for those that do want to know, here’s another video: The Carbon Offset Problem - Wendover Productions
There are little regulations surrounding who can sell offsets meaning many companies vastly overstate their offsets (typically the ones selling the cheapest offsets, which are typically the ones major corporations buy).
Even legitimate companies can overestimate how much help they’re doing by accident. Say a company pays to plant an entire section of forest. It’s calculated that section of forest will absorb 10 tonnes of carbon over 20 years. Nice! A year later that section of forest is destroyed in a forest fire. Does the company that bought the offset need to pay to replant it? Nope! They still get to say they bought 10 tonnes of carbon offsetting even when that’s objectively wrong.
The video I linked also talked about a company that tried to improve energy use in developing countries. Most places burn wood for cooking but often do it in open air. That’s really inefficient! So this company provided efficient wood ovens to these communities (by charging others for carbon offsets). They then calculated how much carbon they’ve reduced, only to find out that these ovens increased the amount of wood burned since the communities loved using them so much! However, once again everyone who bought the offset still gets to claim they reduced carbon!