Asklemmy

Chiropractors.

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 (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/23/us/politics/medicare-drug-price-negotiations-lawsuits.html), 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.

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.

My personal top 3:

• insurance
• subscriptions
• Google and similar data hungry companies (while not a financial scam but moreso a privacy scam, companies like Google and Meta profiteering on our personal data without our knowledge or awareness)

Subscriptions.

People pay every month but most don't use the sub to it's full value, and forget how 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.

Unpaid overtime.

Framing "fulfilling your contract" as "silent quitting".

In what other context would be "delivering what's in the contract" anything less than satisfactory?

When I buy a litre of milk and the box contains exactly a litre of milk it isn't "silent stealing" either.

Car based infrastructure

the stock market

capitalism

Professors requiring their own, expensive textbook for their course.

First Past the Post voting at elections.

• college tuition
• housing
• credit scores
• for-profit healthcare
• right to work legislation
• rugged individualism/grind culture
• voting (vote for the lesser of two evils...only two choices that are actually allies when the press isn't around to help them pretend to disagree on social issues)
• taxes (I have no problem with taxation if democracy actually existed and our tax funds weren't being funnelled directly to the military industrial complex and corporate handouts without anyone having a say in the matter)
• democracy (what the United States and British are trying to pass off as democracy is a complete sham)
• sports (the distraction of the masses, anti-intellectualism incarnate)

Religion. Whole cloth.

Tipping in restaurants…pay the workers.

Dollar stores. A lot of the time they are profiting by selling you a smaller quantity at a slightly lower price. They target low income communities.

Wedding rings/diamonds in general.

The tradition isn't as old as people think and was literally started by a jewelry company to sell more jewelry. Specifically diamonds, which are not as rare as commonly believed and if not for the false scarcity and misinformation, would be dirt cheap.

Car dealerships. They are awful on purpose. In many places car manufacturers are not legally allowed to sell their cars directly to customers, in order to create what is essentially legally mandated car dealerships, which all suck.

The price for glasses. It's like this because of a stupid duopoly

Diamonds.

Insurance (am American)

Private health insurance.

Banks.

Printer inkt. In our shop people are still buying them for a way to high price…

The United States health insurance system. It's such a for-profit racket that more taxpayer money goes into it per capita than any other system out there and its outcomes are worse and shittier.

Capitalism and the 5 day 9 to 5 work week

Tipping

British royal family.

Religions that collect money from adherents.

Web 2.0 data harvesting.

Landlording

Windows. You pay ~100€ just to give your personal data to MS and get a bloated OS that will use all of your resources. Even MacOS is a more fair deal than this.

Real estate agents getting 6% commission from the seller.

capitalism

Bank fees

Homeopathy?

Credit scores. It goes up when you have more debt and goes down when you pay your debt off, but it goes down if you ask for a loan and it goes down if you even try to check what it is.

Absolute nonsense.

Your ISP is suddenly asking for more money. What are you gonna do? Disconnect from the internet?

Commoditized bottled water.

Credit scores

Printer Ink and paying companies like Google and Spotify, who still collect your data as a paid customer.

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

Homes as wealth-creators.

Americans take it as received wisdom that homes are meant to generate income through higher valuations over time. We just assume home prices go up over time and if it's not actively increasing in value, the home was a failure.

Many other countries don't treat homes this way. They are dwellings, invest what you want to your liking, but it's not a retirement account.

This focus on wealth generation creates lots of perverse incentives, such as exclusionary zoning, building on lots that are overly large, and suburban sprawl. These don't reflect people's actual, desired form of housing but rather maximize wealth for homeowners at the expense of everyone else.

We have a completely warped view of housing that causes us to be preyed upon by real estate agents, landlords, HOAs and the like.

Cryptocurrency

Airlines charging for seat selection. I remember the days when that was just a right you got for "free" by purchasing the ticket 🤷

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???

Capitalism and religion, easily the top two scams.

Cars=freedom

Car centric cities. Cities can and should be designed for people, keeping cars mostly out. The result is beautiful cities designed for people that make governments lots of money but the car companies will be earning a little less, ooffff

Make cities walkable, create actual safe roads for bikes, create 15 minute cities.

Look at the Netherlands, it damn works awesome

The notion that capitalism is the end-all be-all of how society functions/works.

Diamond Scarcity