Working from home, but not being payed rent for the space.
and working not from home without being paid for the parts of the process you don’t deal with if did.
Enclosure
"The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common, But lets the greater felon loose Who steals the common from the goose."Shampoo
Shampoo a scam?
That original commentor smells like shit, guaranteed.
I smell like shit, correct. But at least my hair looks great.
Daily life
Would be far easier to name things that are not a scam and assume the rest is just a scam in waiting.
Libraries, Pets, Sunrises/sets, Nigerian princes needing loans, Mr. Rogers
Everything else is probably looking to take money from you in some fashion.
Libraries are gradually moving along the scam spectrum. They now have a single vendor that they are obligated to buy from at a set (high) price, and if the vendor doesn’t have the book or item they can’t buy it anywhere else. They also don’t accept donated books for circulation, so even if you donated a new book they wouldn’t put it on the shelf. This is based on my experience in several US states.
And agreed, most things in everyday society are scams.
I can’t comment on how they get books and the nonsense that is involved, but at least no one expects you to buy anything and even late fees have been thrown out in favor or people just having access to knowledge. Giving people knowledge for free just because we can. What a concept
Agreed, not to mention they are a public place where you can relax without being pressured to spent money. But since we are in a post about scams it felt relevant to mention.
Dolly Parton! The woman is a living, classy, saint!
What’s that about Nigerian princes being legit?
Wait, what did Mr. Rogers do?
Capitalism
Too easy, but true.
Capitalism seems to be going great in 2023, I don’t know where you’re getting this from.
That’s not REAL capitalism, that’s crony capitalism. Real capitalism is when I get rich. Crony capitalism is when I don’t.
Commoditized bottled water.
Goodness, that needs to stop. I’ll concede it’s a life saving tool during natural disasters or in places where tap water is unavailable, but the rest of the time it’s a symbol of waste and ignorance. On my walks I see at least one half full bottle of water every day on the ground. Some dummy paid real money for it, then couldn’t be bothered to even dispose of it properly.
Water should be safe to drink from taps. Holy shit. I have a 1 liter bottle, I fill it a couple of times a day at home and it’s great…
if you haven’t already, consider getting a reusable bottle not made of plastic, over time it degrades significantly and sheds a lot more microplastics in the water
Asking this question every single week.
Printers
Which part the ink cartridges?
I think that instead of saying
printerswe should sayhp printers.HP is just the poster child but lots of the manufacturers are scummy.
I feel like that’s a pretty widely recognized one…
Diamond Scarcity
The otherway around actually lab grown ones are too perfect. Natural ones have some impurities that make them precious and one of a kind
Cars=freedom
The other half of this scam is the piss-poor public transport in a lot of countries, here in the UK if you’re not a Londoner the government could not care any less about carrots only sticks to get people out of cars.
Cars= people soon to be death
Cars = getting a job to pay for the gas, the taxes, the repairs, the taxes, the annual state inspection, the taxes, the (usually) annual registration fees, and the taxes!
(Although, you are still able to go places further away without having to get a ride from someone else. In that sense, you are still more free.)
It is now a minimum of, $1,000 in gas, $1,200 in insurance, and maintenance for a single year. At $2,200 a year, and I road a bus for 3 years at $28/mo or $336/year. I saved that $6,600 and purchased a car. Now I’m fucked with $2,200 year in expenses again. BUT I can drive to the beach if I wanna at a moments notice, so I guess I have that going for me.
(You still need a road, large, firm and plane enough. These don’t build themselves.)
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Not sure that there is many ground types that turn onto proper, flat and wild road when hundreds of kilos of vehicules roll over two small tire-large paths. But who knows ? Maybe that’s just that my region soil that’s not car-friendly compared to other places.
Car insurance Health insurance Dental insurance
All insurance really
Also renewing license plates/licenses
Basically if you need to make a yearly or monthly payment to keep using something it’s a scam in my eyes.
Also renewing license plates/licenses. Basically if you need to make a yearly or monthly payment to keep using something it’s a scam in my eyes.
Not sure about where you live, but where I live, that money goes towards road upkeep. That money has to come from somewhere.
Car bad. Train good
Exactly; it’s a targeted tax.
The Ur-Scam.
“Pay money into this big pool, and if you have an emergency then we miiiight pay you some back. We keep any extra btw”
It makes a lot more sense to me to just keep an emergency fund and a few close friends.
I can tell you’ve never needed insurance or some kind of licensing system.
This changes.
I will say insurance companies can be very quick to fight you when it comes to giving out money. Keep at it and you’ll get something, but considering how long you can pay them month to month without using it, it’s obnoxious.
Except health insurance. Health insurance is a fucking racket, the medical industrial complex it ties into is a racket, and the United States would be a better place if it gutted this system
Quite the contrary
I have all of these things. I just wish i didn’t need them in the first place. Not sure how my comment made you think that.
So by saying you need them you are saying they’re not a scam
I need them because if I don’t have car insurance for example i get a fine. I need health insurance otherwise i have to pay out the ass. 2 stupid things made by some money hungry old fuckers that just want to collect even more money. This is just 2 examples of all kinds of insurance. The whole system is in place to make the rich richer for something meaningless.
In 2021 I would have said Crypto. Now everyone but the most dense people see it for the scam it is.
Crypto as an investment, and NFT for digital art, sure it’s a scam.
Crypto as an extralegal means of moving money is totally useful.
No it isn’t. Every single person has a complete record of every transaction. It’s the opposite of secure. It’s only useful insofar as intelligence agencies want tall grass to hide in for their own illegal transactions. Same as .onion btw
Don’t confuse crypto for Bitcoin
Monero is the only torelable crypto currency for communists before revolution. After it is a liability.
Crypto as an extralegal means of moving money is totally useful.
How is another way for billionaires to avoid paying taxes not a scam?
Zabadoh is talking about drugs I’m pretty sure
Police and banks don’t care about drug users. Crypto only makes things easier for dealers. I bet more crypto gets used for trading CSAM than for drugs.
It’s true that crypto is commonly used in online drug transactions, but there are other justifiable uses, such as moving money out of countries with repressive regimes like China and Russia.
Also paying for certain genres of porn that major credit card banks like Visa and MasterCard have somewhat arbitrarily designated as unacceptable, such as certain types of BDSM e.g. consensual nonconsensual, anything that shows blood, kinky hypnosis and mind control, vampires, etc.
Of course obvious child porn and bestiality should be banned period, so some regulation is needed. But I’m not sure that the government delegating responsibility for regulation to the credit card banks is the best way to do it. The rules and enforcement are completely arbitrary and cannot be appealed.
My parents still believe in crypto and got sulky when I told them that only scammers peddle crypto as the big thing. My Stepmom wastes like her monthly earrings on failed crypto schemes and my dad has to bail her out and basically pay every medical procedure/bills/gifts/groceries lol and give her an allowance, which she further throws out of the window with silly investments.
Dude! that sucks. Have you tried telling her that gold and realestate are the only sure bet? Start telling her lies about a guy you talked to on the internet who invested in actual physical gold and used the profits to buy his house outright.
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.
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.
This is not about small-time regular Joe investors, but about large institutional ones, who do exert pressure on companies to deliver strong profits and/or growth.
Google stock is literally worthless and does not represent an actual stake in the company for example
Wait what?
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).
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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.
It’s worse than that, because a company bylaw also gives every GOOG stock a set value of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a cent and a binding part of their issuance is the clause that they can demand to buy them back for that price at any time. Google can drop like pocket lint and instantly buy all GOOG stock back.
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.
Yup. Great article about that and many other failures of capitalism here if anyone wants something to share with a fence sitter in their life.
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A bad quarter isn’t what this is about. It’s about the idea that constant percentage growth is good or realistic. Any stock with flat growth over a decade will not be a good long-term investment. Your comment proves the point here.
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I think a major problem with the stock market is the lack of long term planing. And we see that clearly with what’s happened to Boeing with their planes falling apart
