For-profit prisons and hospitals.
Not only they are bad ideas, but the incentives are horrible.
I could see the point of prisons if there was "warranty". If a person guess back to jail, the first sentence was useless and the prison should be financially punished. You'll see then how quickly therapy and quality job trainings are implemented.
Also education
Man, just reading this plain sentence. It's so glaring as to why this should be illegal.
Infinite return customers = infinite profit!
Using "tipping" as an excuse not to pay workers living wage.
Displaying prices without tax.
P.S. This is illegal where I live, but some places would be better off if it were illegal there also.
Displaying the price you will pay at the counter is my personal benchmark for civilized society. No price tags? You're a medieval backwater. Wrong price tags? Go see a shrink, USA. Correct price tags is the way to go.
Insider trading by Congress
Cheaters
Edit:
"they are cheating!"
Got elected to be congressman
"LET'S DO THIIISS"
Trading at all by Congress. They should be required to lock their money in a blind trust with heavy oversight. If a CEO has to publish their stock sales months in advance, congresspeople should too.
Churches backing and funding politicians.
It is illegal to a degree, it violates rules and regulations with the IRS. When they back a politician, they are supposed to lose their church non-profit status. But that doesn't happen because any move to it would cause a huge "the government is attacking out religious freedoms/churchs".
In fact it's now a religious event every year called "Pulpit Freedom Sunday" to purposefully break these laws.
That's true for the US but not everywhere else
Gerrymandering.
Some forms of it are illegal, but it's hard to define what exactly constitutes Gerrymandering. Rather than enumerating all of the ways the Gerrymandering is possible, we really just need to make it so only one specific policy for forming districts is used. I think mathematicians have been proposing models for this that attempt to create districts with roughly uniform distribution of population and isotropic borders.
Advertisements for prescription medication
Well that highly depends on location. I think that's illegal in most of Europe
Most places other than the US. I know it's illegal here in Canada.
That's only legal in like two countries.
I'm in one of them. I wish it wasn't.
Advertisements in general. Imagine world without ads and sponsored content.
I don't think that's realistic. Even the guy at the local market shouting "get your potatoes here" is technically advertisement.
What could work instead is to make both the company that advertises and the one that displays the ad liable for the ad itself. If it's inappropriate, contains malware or is in any way malicious, the company displaying it should also be liable for endangering the customers. Also outlaw tracking for advertisement purposes altogether
This one is pretty location specific but I agree that US law doesn't make any sense. Like, physician and pharmacist spend 10 years at university to learn all the details about prescription medication and then have to get yearly retraining, so how do you even do ad's for that
Two ways: first, you go to doctors offices and hospitals and give gifts to the person responsible for picking which version of this medicine to buy/prescribe.
Second, convince patients to ask for your version when they see their doctor by telling them on tv that it will make their life better or whatever
Something (almost) no one has mentioned: factory farming of livestock. I'm not gonna say a person who engages in subsistence farming shouldn't be able to keep a coop of chickens for eggs (as long as their chickens are well cared for), but large scale animal husbandry and livestock is devastating to the environment and genuinely cruel.
Kill it yourself and eat it? Fine by me. Circle of life, yadda yadda.
Send hundreds into an abattoir to be machine killed by robots or strangers and eat it? No. Own up to the process, or don't partake.
Lobbying and lobbyist groups.
Lobbying in and of itself isn't bad, it makes our politicians aware of issues and alternatives.
Unrestricted lobbying is the problem, I recently read that lobbyists from Amazon would no longer have access cards to the European parliament so they no longer could come and go as they liked.
I just wonder why lobbyists ever got that access in the first place...
God the nerds in here are annoying.
"Ackchually banning lobbying would mean nobody could talk to politicians anymore blah blah..."
Everyone knows what you mean when you say that lobbying should be illegal.
Owning shares when you are an elected official with jurisdiction over the industry you own shares in.
Also, any political figure owning shares in a media organisation, regardless of whether it is traditional media or “new media”.
Gonna overturn the 1st Amendment?
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
I'm sure there are ways to dial in the abuse, but what legislator is gonna vote for that?
Does that include unions?
Non-utilitized internet service.
Internet providers ARE UTILITIES. Regulate them like one.
Also utilities need to be regulated like utilities; make them publicly owned services, not for-profit companies.
At the very least, do so for the infrastructure. I don't mind companies trying to sell me the service competitively, but the infrastructure should allow for a competitive market.
Family vloggers
Child exploitation is already illegal
Let's give an example that is more uplifting.
A 16 year old who just got their motorcycle license being able to buy a 200hp superbike capable of doing 180+mph.
For all intents and purposes, this should be illegal, because the teenager (usually) doesn't have the skills and willpower to handle such a powerful motorcycle as a noob.
But it does feel awesome to be able to buy whatever motorcycle you can afford once you get your license in the US, rather than being forced to start on a 125cc that can't even hit 60mph.
It's wild that's legal there! Where I live learners and provisional riders are restricted by power to weight ratio (150kw per tonne/200hp per 2000lbs), and that honestly seems like it keeps them on reasonable bikes for the skill level without having them all stuck on 125cc bikes struggling to reach the speed limit
Your provisional rider laws are a lot more fair than Europe's, which limit teenagers to 125cc for the first two year of riding.
150KW/tonne (with the rider) is enough to get a Ninja 400 or Harley Sportster 1200, both of which are plenty powerful for the street. But maybe these calculations don't factor in a typical rider's weight.
Eh, I don't think the correlation of age is the causation of getting wounded or killed due to questionable decisions on powerful motorcycles. I'd venture to say the correlation is moreso in personality type, and aversion, or lack thereof to risk.
Like, you don't see complete straight edge 16 year olds getting bikes, and from my own anecdotal experience, my straight edge friends were scared of it. Though if there wasn't an inherent aversion to the risk, I'd bet those types would be incredibly safe motorcycle drivers.
The types that currently get them are the types that will take risks, regardless of their age, and we can't rightly outlaw something because some risk takers act dangerously on them. We'd have to outlaw cars too.
the extensive statistics correlate highly with age on the below 20 and above 75 with a plateau in between. risk aversion and personality could be great factors but how would you sample and test for that across large groups? i dont want my insurance company to give me some personality test or judge my social media. but maybe AI would help them to do it soon?
In India, minimum age is 18.
Smoking. It's literally a drug and causes lots of health issues like increased lung cancer risk, but the worst part is that if someone smokes near you then you also inhale some of the toxins even if you yourself don't smoke. And in my country it's common to see people smoking on the streets. Combine this with air pollution and yikes
And alcohol.
Reality proves enough that forbidding drugs doesn't work though, it just creates a lot of other problems. Forbidding some parts of it like ads about them, selling to minors etc do have effect however
Selling life-saving drugs at large multiples of the cost to manufacture + distribute. The most obvious example being insulin.
Switching political party in the same term that you were elected to office.
CEOs making 100x the median worker at the same company.
Assault rifles and other automatic or military-grade weapons. They have no practical purpose in the hands of a citizen. Pistols, shotguns, and hunting rifles should be sufficient for hunting and self defense.
Generic finance bro bullshit. Frivolous use of bank credit for speculative investment. Predatory lending. Credit default swaps. It's just a spectrum of Ponzi Schemes. Let's reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act.
Non-disclosure of expensive gifts to Supreme Court judges. Looking at you, Clarence.
Military recruiting at high schools.
Junk mail. You literally have to pay a company to stop sending it.
Automatic weapons for the most part are already illegal, assault rifle isn't a term that actually means anything and neither does military grade. In fact only 3% of gun deaths in the states are from rifles. The real issue is the illegal gun market and the endless supply of hi-points and other pistols.
You've been lied to.
An "assault rifle" is specifically a selective-fire rifle with detachable magazines and intermediate cartridges. AR-15s, AK-47s, and M16s meet this definition. You are likely thinking of "assault weapon," a term which is not well-defined.
And while it's true that most mass shootings and gun deaths in general are perpetrated by handguns, assault rifles are responsible for the deadliest mass shootings.
Because it is so challenging to pass gun control legislation in the US, the least we can hope to do is forbid ownership of the deadliest types of guns.
I agree that this is not sufficient though. We need to have more stringent requirements for acquiring any firearm. 28 states don't even require background checks for private sale of guns. Our laws fall way too short on gun trafficking.
The illegal gun market is just a symptom of the very legal gun market. The head of the ATF even said, "virtually every crime gun in the US starts off as a legal firearm."
We need background checks, and I don't think private unlicensed gun sales should be legal either.
What the fuck? You have to pay to stop getting junk mail? We in Australia just put a little sign on our letterbox saying 'no junk mail' and we stop getting it. That's insane. Same thing with the insulin comment and some of the stuff other people said like forced arbitration. America is crazy.
belonging to one particular political party or another doesn't necessarily dictate which way a politician votes.
payday loans
You know what would be really funny? Starting a payday loan business that isn't as nightmarishly exploitative just to upset the industry.
The sad thing is that the rates would still be pretty high just to cover the risk. People dont get a payday loan because everything is going fine for them financially.
One side changes on EULAs.
Hardware that requires a proprietary service to work.
Looking at you, nvidia.
Politic lobby.
Tipping.
Giving tips is okay. Paying your employees less because you expect them to be tipped is stupid. Culturally requiring tips to make up the majority of a position's income is ridiculous, but very difficult to change.
Yes exactly. And now every payment maybe has tipping options enabled it seems, and it takes more steps to skip tipping options than to tip. Ridiculous.
Capitalism
Forced arbitration
Definitely in a B2C context. If businesses want to force arbitration between themselves then fine.
Even worse in a Business to Employee context.
Killing animals forr pleasure.
I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding your comment, but killing animals for pleasure alone is already largely illegal in Western countries. And that includes hunting. You aren't allowed to just hunt an animal for fun and then leave it unharvested. It is hard to enforce, obviously. But you can definitely be charged for killing deer, moose, ducks, even fish, without a license and at least the intent to eat it. For example, you can't kill a bear, cut off its paws or gall bladder, and then throw the carcass in the bush. You also can be charged for killing or treating an animal inhumanely or in a way that causes it distress. That theoretically applies to all animals, including pets, livestock, aquariums, wildlife, and even small animals like mice and bats.
Landlords. Housing as a commodity in general.
I don't think owning your home is realistic in all scenarios. For example, let's say because you needed to leave your abusive partner, so you don't have the luxury of going through the whole process of saving money, then researching, and eventually purchasing a home. You need to get out, maybe live somewhere for a year or two to get your feet under you and save some money so you can purchase a home. If you couldn't rent a home, how could you possibly get out of this situation if you had no money on hand?
If you move to a new city that you've never visited before, sometimes you want to rent in a few areas to find the areas you like before commit long term to a place.
I really don't think buying a home should be your only option for living in a home. It's just not what's best for some people in some scenarios.
As a general rule, the amount of exploitation and fraud it takes to "become" a billionaire should probably be illegal.
Lying about what you do with peoples data and who you share it with.
Sentencing and punishment are affected by "caste"
There is no ethical way for an individual to possess a billion dollars. The amount of harm an individual would have to cause to attain and retain assets of that magnitude should not just be criminal; it should be a capital offense.
Capitalism
EDIT: also i read the other comments and hilarious amount of other things mentioned also boils down to "capitalism" or their illegalisation would basically needed for capitalism to be outlawed too.
Churches.
Tracking & profiting off it.
Forcing people to be tracked to use a product that they then sell that data should be illegal without your complete, informed consent, and you get to opt out and still use the product.
All tracking should be regulated. You own your personhood 100% and only you can make money off of that.How about we set a no tracking flag in our browsers for example and companies actually respect the choice? One can only dream...
Screwing over a large number of people to benefit a small number of people. Religion and corporations immediately come to mind.
That's very vague and sounds like it would mainly affect minorities in a negative way. Not that I think that's your intention of course.
Forced arbitration
Alcohol (beer, wine...).
Rather than downvoting, I'd like to ask why you think all forms of alcohol for consumption should be illegal
It's proven that is toxic for our organisms. It hurts our body and creates depressions.
More info: https://www.who.int/health-topics/alcohol
"No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health" https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-alcohol-consumption-is-safe-for-our-health
Also, thanks for asking and just not downvoting. 💖
USA tried banning these once...
Boobstreamers eroticizing themselves in front of kids and luring them to their onlyfans sites. Should be treated as pedophilia
Reposting things from reddit that have been posted there over 1000 times.
Oh shit! He's on to us.
Zero hour contracts in the uk don’t actually have to have an actual contract so if your boss says that something is in your job description you can’t argue otherwise because there was never a contract that said what your job roles were to start with.
Capitalism, Literaly all of capitalism.
Exploiting animals
Governments, businesses, corporations and all of us just normalizing and accepting that the majority of everything we own or buy at affordable prices are all based on taking advantage of as many poor people as possible in our home countries and most of the time in third world developing nations where people are paid pennies for their work.
We complain about China, yet everyone buys everything from them. We look down on third world developing countries yet we base our economies on manufacturing a ton of stuff from them because they all hire people for as little as possible. In America, Canada and Europe, we have agricultural workers we ship in from poorer countries to harvest our crops because we don't want to pay higher prices for labour to the people that live in our countries .... we would rather pay poverty wages for imported labour that we don't want to stay in our country.
Everything we do, buy and pay for is all based on exploitation ... our entire economy the world over is based on it ... yet it is perfectly legal ... but if we are all so moral, enlightened and intelligent then it should be illegal.
killing animals
Removing AUX ports, forcing people to throw away their headphones, because you ALSO nowhere sell your overpriced USB DACs.
Climate Destruction
Stealing already existing nature land, forcing people out of it, and "taking care of it" and get carbon credits for it like what?
Mine Coal or Oil in 2024. Same with building nuclear plants.
We had a thing in Germany, where nuclear industries needed to pay for the disposal of nuclear waste. Instead of calculating real numbers, they should invest ⅒ or less of the actually needed money into trust funds. Like... what? Money doesnt grow just like that, it comes from exploiting workers, and "magically" they didnt need to pay that much. And of course that was too little so now the tax payers have to pay for these horrible companies.
Nuclear energy is significantly greener than coal and oil, IIRC. As well, there are a lot of places where it can be hard to get enough energy from renewable sources like hydro and solar.
Nuclear energy is slow, which is why things like "night storage heating" where invented, which store the unneeded heat generated at night.
We have a constant electricity demand and a varying. Especially if we use "smart" devices (nothing IOT, just washing machines only washing during the day) the constant demand can be decreased a lot.
So as we are awake roughly around the time that we can produce solar energy, and have wind for the constant part, we dont need nuclear power, really.
Also building these plants takes years which we dont have.
And nothing is sustainable if it produces non-disposable nuclear waste that will likely live longer than humanity on this planet.
Individuals owning something you need many people to use, like a coffee shop, large tracks of land, or an apartment building.
Political parties and religions. All of them.
Parties? Why? What's the alternative?
I will quote George Washington to explain the why: "However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."
Alternatives:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition (we use this in 1/3 of our government today - juries)
Compound interest.
Let’s say you need to borrow 5000 € for your first car, but you have only 700 €. First, you’ll need to find a lender who is willing to share the risk with you. Then, you form a joint stock company (Tom’s Volvo C30 2008 incorporated), where you own 7/50 of the car and the other party owns the rest. When you have some more money, you can buy some more stocks. One day, you’ll own the whole car and the lender has all of their money back.
So...instead of loans, you're advocating that people form corporations where shares are bought over time instead?
You'll still have to pay some interest to motivate the other party to invest, all you've really done is generate a bunch of extra paperwork to spin up a corporation.
The idea is to avoid the expense spiraling out of control due to exponential growth.
In order to motivate your business partner, you should have a contract that defines the price of the stocks in a favorable way. It’s like buying and selling really. The lender pays 4300 € for the car, and sells it at a higher price, such as 4600 €.
Half of the things that go on with donations. People who are enlightened enough to know 90% of your money doesn't go to its intended place (whether you're donating to starving Africans, people with a medical condition, etc.) cannot effectively stand up to corrupt charity organizations in a culture where half of the people still think the Salvation Army is a literal branch of the army. Even the charity watch groups are compromised.
Smoking
Billionaires
Ads for medication
Campaign contributions greater than $n from people and greater than $0 from corporations
Civil forfeiture
Prosecuting attorneys withholding exculpatory evidence
Firearms which aren't single action for civilian use (police are civilians)
Receiving gifts greater than $250 USD as a supreme Court Justice or family member of the supreme Court Justice.
Campaign contributions greater than $n from people and greater than $0 from corporations
Super PACs?
Psych drugging children and psychiatry in general
Engaging your turn signal against traffic when the light turns green.
Alcohol
Didn't we try that and it was an absolute disaster?
actually, no, not a complete disaster. During american prohibition, domestic abuse all but disappeared, same went for a big part of self-harm due to alcohol abuse. It's normal to paint the prohibition as some complete mistake, but it has positive sides too.
And I say that as an enjoyer of alcohol and other fun stuff, disagreeing with banning it again
Yes but this time we legalise all the other drugs. Huge profits.
In all seriousness, no drugs should be illegal and healthcare and education should be freely available. Universal income. We would need to make conservatism, lobbying and billionaires illegal.
Owning more than one firearm
They have different uses. Like if you have a .22 pistol, generally you won't use that hunting deer. It would be cruel to the animal.
In addition they do have specific hunting seasons for specific types of hunting in my area.
I understand if you are going for a limit.
Personally I don't hunt. I sneak up on deer and tell them about Linux.
tell them about Linux
You monster.
*more than zero
I can get total ban but why a ban on amount?
All you people using the downvote button to disagree instead of saying something need to go outside and touch grass.
I disagree.
Now you're getting into the spirit.
I agree 👍
If it annoys you, you could consider moving to an instance without downvotes so your feed will act like they don't exist.
OP is not bothered by the downvotes, they are bothered that they are being used as nothing more than a "I personally disagree" or "I don't like your opinion" button and that the vast majority downvoters are too cowardly to put forward their own counter opinion.
Any comment that is making an honest contribution to the discussion shouldn't be getting downvotes. When comments are downvoted for no legitimate reason, the website becomes at risk of being an echo chamber.
Passive income.
Does that include a ban of UBI (universal basic income)? Because that is a idea I do indeed support
Going by the traditional definition, UBI is indeed passive income. I don't think it is as bad as other forms of passive income, but I would prefer subsidies over just giving people cash.
musicians in shambles
we already are
There were musicians far before passive income for creative work was a thing. And it's not like the €0.003 per play Spotify pays is making bank for most musicians.
Flying planes. A few months ago, I got to do take-off and pilot a bit in a tandem plane. Being in a small, single-engine 1969 plane instead of the typical jumbo jet--I realized it was literally just a shitty old RV inside, shag carpet, rickety little passenger window, and all. Except for one minor difference: we were soon IN THE FUCKING SKY. That's when I realized humanity has no place being up there, with all due respect to John F. Kennedy, NASA, etc. And a little sidenote to those same scientists: a giant metal object ascending into the sky makes no sense--I don't think it can last. It's the folly of man. Oh, and you can just have a plane!? That's allowed somehow!?
You have no clue how rediculously well regulated aircraft are. However aesthetically displeasing the plane you flew in was, it wouldn't be in the sky if it wasn't flightready.
You have no clue how rediculously well regulated aircraft are
While I'm broadly in agreement with you (and am certainly not in favour of banning flying), I think recent events have shown us pretty clearly: they are not nearly as well-regulated as the industry likes to claim, especially with the large commercial aeroplanes.
Planes are by far the safest way to travel due to the extremely strict regulations, regulations that don't exist for other means of transportation
Passing on the right.
Definitely illegal in Belgium, is that not the norm elsewhere?
Also camping out in the passing lane, causing ppl to dangerously pass elsewhere
Driving cars when babies exist in the world.
