I am an atheist and I believe the world would be much better without religions. Having said that, I don't conisder it as a scam in itslef. Instead they must have been something evolved over the time due to our ignorance, fear and helplessness. The very same factors that still keep them going.
But hell yeah, people are exploited in the name of religion. I'm from India, one of the largest so called democracies, currently under the governance of a fascist hindutva party that thrives on polarizing people in the name of religion.
BTW I was actually looking for specific instances of scams carefully plotted by known people, companies or even countries instead of broad answers like religion.
Religion was needed, but at some point logic and critical thinking should have been enough.
The issue is the wealthiest benefit when the masses don't have the tools to use that. They want people who won't question rules and blindly follow them.
Humans are just animals, we're not born with those abilities, we need to be taught.
So we see education outright cut or forced to focus on rote memorization rather than the process to understand and figure shit out on our own.
We should be past religion as a species, but it's not automatic, we have to continually teach the next generation to think for themselves
Having said that, I don’t conisder it as a scam in itslef
I think the more correct thing to say is that Organized Religion is a scam. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being religious (provided you don't force those views on others), but organized religion always winds up rotten at the top - and it's not surprising. Organized religion is one of the most powerful tools for controlling people, even if it wasn't (though it might have been) intended to be that way at the beginning. A king/president/dictator can threaten the lives of their subjects, but only a holy man can threaten their immortal soul (from the perspective of the devotee anyways).
Just imagine what could have been done in the last 300 years if every dollar that was donated to churches went to some other cause, or back into the pockets of the masses. There is an immense amount of wealth that is trapped in the collective real estate, bank accounts, etc owned by churches. I'm not even talking about megachurches or the mormon's giant stack of cash, just mom'n'pop little parishes that are everywhere across the US.
If ALL that money was still kicking around in the economy and in the pockets of people to spend on real things, building real businesses, etc...we'd be way better off.
Always makes me sad when I visit my in-laws who live in a particularly bible thumpy area and you go and there are spots there where churches outnumber normal businesses. It seems like it's just a huge drain on the local economy devoting that much money into propping up churches of various kinds...
Sometimes I mull over what state we'd be in as a society if instead of celebrating a man's deeds we had been celebrating nature and the environment that hosts us since the beginning.
I can't help but think there would be a lot less damage to the environment and less greed.
thrives on polarizing people in the name of religion
things have been like this for a long time, irrespective of the parties. but this has been going too far for the past two decades, especially after the current prime minister started his period.
BTW I was actually looking for specific instances of scams carefully plotted by known people, companies or even countries instead of broad answers like religion.
Lesson for next time, use the text part of your post to define what you are asking or are interested in hearing. Otherwise you get everyone giving glib answers that suck like the above.
BTW, I'm reading Smartest Guys In The Room, the book about Enron, you might be interested in looking up that company. They used very complex financial instruments to deceive shareholders and Wall Street and boost their stock price. Bunch of assholes, some of the shit they pulled was obscene.
Like the old joke, "What do you call alternative medicine that works?" "Medicine!"
If some herb, plant or extract has a proven effect it will be adopted by real medicine, and all that is left in alternative medicine is the scams that do not work.
You’re almost right. Modern medicine needs to synthesize natural compounds to profit fully from them. They can’t just use natural remedies and present them to patients because they can’t patent them.
I'm in Asia and a lot of traditional chinese medicine you can buy is just regular medicine with a marketing disguise hiding the fact. Why yes, this is a box of whatever the fuck extract, very interesting, old northern recipe to cure the shit, let me just check what's written on this paper, and, yep, there it is, it's just Loperamide but with an additive to make it taste like Ginseng. Got it.
I asked one of the other doctors. He wouldn’t touch it.
He told me he sees thousands of patients each year. Some number will get cancer, and some number of them will sue him.
If he prescribes a medication, he can defend himself by pointing to the medical studies showing the safety of the medication.
If he prescribes anything natural, there are no studies showing safety, because nobody can patent natural substances. Therefore there isn’t much money to be made, so nobody spends the money to do good studies.
Even if it was a miracle drug, he wouldn’t prescribe it.
Once I made a joke online about paying for homeopathy by dipping a dollar in a jar of water and giving them the jar, and like five people I know unfollowed me lol
Lol yeh a surprising amount of people believe in it.
I once trained to work in pharmacies, we had companies present on their products and one of them was selling homeopathic products. One of the other students asked if it actually worked and the rep's response was 'if it didn't do you think people would buy it?' I didn't say anything but I thought to myself yes, there absolutely are people who hand over money for dumb shit that doesn't work lol.
I have a pinched nerve. I went to many doctors, done many tests, went to months of PT and was still in pain. I went to my acupuncturist and she is able to release the muscles around the pinch enough that my right arm doesn’t feel constantly numb. I a man of science. I don’t believe in he Chi traveling my body etc but the physical result of the acuponcture cannot be denied.
I feel the same about chiropractic - many people call bullshit, but I’ll be damned if they don’t help me. Like you, I don’t believe “your spine is where all your problems originate” like some chiropractics try to peddle, but the dude pushes on my back and it pops and it feels better.
my statutory health insurance (germany) pays for acupuncture. so it seems to be proven that it works so well that they cover the costs for the treatment
Hey umm so ... homeopathy. There is a case to be made --hear me out here please-- that it might have been effective once, but now we've got millions of "practitioners" doing things that clearly do not work.
The reasoning is obvious.
The concentration of practitioners within the population is clearly too damn high (insert meme here). To show how effective it can truly be, all we need to do is to dilute the ratio ... by a lot.
A few weeks ago I got the flu and went to see my doctor. She wasn't in so I got sent to a substitute who examined my ear with a weird beeping device. I asked her what it was and she just said that she practices "Chinese medicine".
She told me her device indicated that I have huge problems with my thyroid and she said I should get some sort of crystal necklace that's good for that and that I should apply some essential oils daily. Of course, she happened to sell those at a good price.
I went to have a blood test and my thyroid was fine, my values were right in the middle of the acceptable range.
I used to get acupuncture with a tend unit attached to the needles as a kid for my chronic pain. Holy fuck did I feel better afterwards. It was probably the tens unit. I have a small one at home and it is great for relaxing my tight muscles.
Ponzi schemes, especially the insurance companies. They really are a Ponzi scheme.
Think about it, they promise you things asking for money, then when you need their services they decide where you go, how much they will pay (leaving the rest for you to pay as a deductible), then they turn around and increase your costs for their services, that they fight tooth and nail not to pay anything.
I argue insurance in and of itself is no ponzi scheme. Working together is the basis of all civilisation. Trying to make a business out of a social service however ... that's rife for abuse, yes.
Depends on how you define a Ponzi scheme. Personally I define it as pay us money in return for a service, then run with the money or come up with ways to deny that service, once again keeping the money or as much as possible by telling businesses how much they can charge for their services.
If I ran my own company, I would be damned if someone is going to dictate my prices to help their bottom line.
IMHO, that is what has caused health care cost to be untenable for someone who cannot afford health insurance or makes like $3 too much to qualify for the likes of Medicaid.
I work in the insurance industry and I 100% agree with this.
The only time it's wise to take out an insurance policy is when
A) It's legally required (though this is sometimes due to lobbying by the insurance companies themselves)
B) When you absolutely will not be able to actually pay for a potential, but necessary expense by yourself (cancer treatments and stuff like that)
So Health Insurance, Auto Insurance (even if your car is cheap and self-insurable, the car you hit may not be), Home-owners insurance and stuff like that are necessary and generally a good financial bet, even if they are crooked af.
Any "micro-insurances" though? All total scams. Travel insurance, phone insurance (or "Extended Warranties"), Apple Care, all that kind of shit is 100% going to cost you more money to have than it'll save you - unless you get really really lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it). You'd be better off spending what you'd pay on those insurance premiums on a hand of blackjack, I'll bet the odds would be slightly more in your favor that way
Ugh my parents both insist on travel insurance. What if you get sick?? Idk, I'll cancel the stuff I can and take the loss on what I can't, for all the travel I've done the amount of times that has happened does not even remotely come close to how much I would have paid each time for travel insurance.
No mom, I'm not going to insure our 2 night stay at the Hilton in (mid sized city). I'm sure it's going to be fine.
Last time I did was for a very very expensive flight across an ocean, just because it was like, 15 dollars on a 2000 flight for a few people. Fine, but everything else we took the risk. (And we did not use it)
Travel insurance is my big one. Why would you not get that? That seems like such a stupid risk not to get that.
Like if I get hit by a car in the middle of nowhere and they got to fly my home because the medical care there sucks. That's going to cost an absolute fortune. Even having to send my dead body home will cost my family loads.
That's not a Ponzi scheme. Sorry, but this misuse of the term really grinds my gears.
A Ponzi scheme is a specific scam promoted as an investment, but in reality the payouts made to early victims come from the incoming money paid by new investors.
Oh my god, thank you so much! I'm glad I'm not the only one that sees it. They get money, they invest that money in pension funds, and then they try not to pay that back. The only things stopping it from being one legally are some slight changes such as the investment part and the part where they pay back to people in need, not people at the top.
A large portion of art/artifacts are forgeries. Everyone is alright with it because galleries and collectors want to brag about having some unique old art piece and forgers are very good at making pieces that would fool anyone who is just looking at it.
My personal conspiracy theory is that almost all art the public is exposed to is a forgery. Why show the plebs the real thing? We wouldn’t notice a difference anyway.
Maybe whenever you hear those stories about a famous work of art being stolen and later recovered, they've actually just stolen the forgery and the galley just puts up a new fake one.
The robbers then can't sell it because they have a worthless fake and the 'real' one is clearly on display in the gallery, and they can't expose the fraud because then they'd out themselves and go to jail.
That's what they do with a lot more paintings that you would think. Not because they don't want the plebs to look at them but because being exposed to the environment would cause irreparable damage to it. So they have experts make recreations and display those.
This isn't really a conspiracy theory is it? I thought it was something they were open about that they often have replicas on display for security/preservation reasons
There was a fantastic interview on The Jordan Harbinger Show podcast with a professional forger. I'd recommend searching for it. I've been meaning to give it a second listen for a few years, but have too much other content.
I think most people buying a lottery ticket know that it's a loss on average. I think people buy it for the experience and the dreams that it represents. From that perspective, I don't think that it's a scam for most people but rather just buying a slice of fantasy
It wasn't McDonald's themselves that were scamming, it's more like the trusted 3rd party they engaged to run the promotion had a bad actor that used his position to fix the game.
I remember getting like 3 tickets for "part 1 out of 2 for a free car" a few months ago when they were doing the monopoly thing. I now realise that the employees probably just took all the part 2 ones for themselves.
printer ink, it costs them like 3 cents to make each cartridge and they sell it for so god damn much.
they also go out of their way to have chips in the cartridges and in the printers that make the printer not function if any ink is even running low, doesn't matter if you want to print something in black and white you had better fucking buy more cyan ink
The whole issue here is that people fall for the trick of buying the cheapest printer available, that is clearly way cheaper than what it costs to build. Then people get cranky for having to buy these proprietary cartridges which are way overpriced to cover the cost of the printer.
The easiest solution is to buy a laser printer (unless you need photo finish on your prints). It's a higher initial cost, but it never dries out. Would it cost me more that an ink printer in the long run? Maybe, but with my infrequent printing, i wouldn't have to replace dried out cartridges every year.
Anyone who buys a color laser printer should be aware that the initial cartridges, at least from HP, are not as full as refills, so you will have to replace them fairly soon and it is expensive. That being said, the refills will last a looooong time.
Also, and the main reason why I purchased one, the printer will just work, even if you don't print anything for a couple of weeks, or months even. I went through a couple of inkjets (not the cheapest ones), which would constantly get dried out, a head clogged, etc, before I said "fuck it," and sprung for a laser. My wallet isn't that happy, but it sure is nice not gambling on whether the damn printer will actually print.
You only need to squeeze out an amount the size of a pea on to the bristles of your toothbrush.
The image of squeezing along the entire length of the brush bristles was concocted by an ad agency, a la Mad Men, to make consumers use their toothpaste faster, hence buy more product.
I swear it's also why they made that newer garbage cap design that slowly leaks toothpaste and gums up unless you carefully clean the end and fully close it every time. I know y'all know what I am talking about!
I've never used that much. I just assumed it was to look nice since a pea sized about would look silly in a picture. I think it I used that much my mouth would be so full of foam it would be uncomfortable
in fairness the directions on the back of the tube still state you should use a pea sized amount. i feel like that's not all that helpful though, peas come in lots of different sizes.
You take small loans each month via a credit card that you have to pay back. This increases an imaginary number that lets you take out bigger loans in the furure.
This is all tracked by private companies that you trust with your personal data. That, or you'll not be able to take out a loan if you want to buy a house or start a business.
If you have a good credit score it means that you don't overspend or forget to pay, which you can also achieve with a regular debit card by default. This doesn't serve people, only the banks who expect that a number of people will overspend or not be able to pay their loans back.
Credit cards alone aren't the problem. Forcing them on people with the credit score system is.
Coming from a civilized country where the credit score is calculated by looking at income, taxes and property, I cannot fathom how the US credit score calculation is supported by anyone.
A lot of people actually like it because it really doesn't work the way OP said it did. They are partially correct, but you also get rewarded for perverse incentives. If you double pay your CC, it will actually slightly lower your credit score. If you have a lot of credit cards with no balance, that can also lower your score. The quickest way to buildup credit in the US is to get a card that has a 0% 18 Month introductory interest rate. Pay the minimum balance each month, and save the cash to pay it all off in 17 months. You will accumulate credit like crazy, holding a balance strangely increases your credit (until the balance gets too high or you start missing payments, then it will take a nosedive).
Interest, late fees, holding a balance, a lot of the bad stuff is actually weirdly good for your credit in the US. I mean it makes sense... they want to reward people who are stupid and pay interest, but actually have enough income to keep making payments forever.
When someone from the US remarks about their credit score, it always causes me to raise eyebrows. You can be poor and have a high credit score, it's incredibly common.
One way to make credit scores more consumer friendly would be to make it totally transparent what data is collected, retained and transmitted when calculating the score. If you want to open a new line of credit, instead of having businesses look up all this shit behind your back you'd request a letter of credit and provide it to the business yourself, knowing exactly what is in it.
But no, instead it's a total mystery how it is calculated and you just have to hope that they don't get confused and make a mistake because it can wreck your life if they do.
You can "game the system" by picking credit cards that offer some kind of cash back incentive, and don't carry balances month to month. For example the chase freedom card does 1% on all purchases and 5% on specific categories that change every quarter. I've had this card for like 9 years, I've never paid any interest because I pay it off monthly , and we make lots of "free" cash back. The key here is don't go get a credit card and buy stuff you can't afford, that should be hammered into youth from the beginning, just buy what you can afford, and if you're disciplined enough you can put all of your purchases on the card and benefit from the card incentives for basically free.
Transferring points earned to airlines can also net you some incredible deals on flights as well. I’ve booked several tens of thousands of dollars on business/first class travel over the years at a fraction of the cost. With the addition of free hotel upgrades and car rental upgrades, you can use credit cards to your advantage.
The caveat is that it takes some amount of expendable income to play.
In a society with capitalism at its core, externalities exist. That's a fact that everyone agrees with. Nonprofits help mitigate those gaps. Calling all nonprofits scams is misguided at best. I think OP is looking for something more specific. What nonprofits?
To be fair, there are some good ones out there. I worked for a drug-rehab company in the 90s as the IT head that got mostly government funding for a 6 month-rehab-program for non-violent drug offenders (mostly stuff like heroine, cocaine, etc.). We also had an in-prison program but I don’t think that was as effective. Of course to get government contact money we would have to meet lots of strict guidelines too.
I definitely more wary of ones that don’t get any public funding and therefore have practically no guardrails and less forced transparency.
calling capitalism a scam is moot, the other viable alternative, socialism is even worse.
also, no country on planet earth is pure-capitalism, not even in US. Northern European countries have proven that market economy with the right taxation policies can effectively distribute income. I wished more wokeist knew about this or at least bothered to do a bit of research.
I live in Norway. The system is fucked. The economy is full of monopolies and the solution is always to subsidise things that become unaffordable instead of putting a price cap on them. Private companies are allowed to charge whatever they want because they know that the government has their back.
You're mixing socialism and communism. Going from here, you see more than two options what make it a non-binary issue.
Communism itself has multiple variations. What we saw until today with fever exceptions wasn't communism either. It was dictatorship using communism. At the beginning, they may believe in the ideology but once in power, they took another path.
Surprising that no one noticed the double prime symbol for inches instead of the single prime symbol for feet. The scammer was like "well, I didn't lie, you weren't careful enough and it's not my problem!".
Oh yes, I've heard about this. Thanks for reminding.
Adding more details for others:
Founded in 2003 by then 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos raised more than US$700 million from venture capitalists and private investors, resulting in a $10 billion valuation at its peak in 2013 and 2014. The company claimed that it had devised blood tests that required very small amounts of blood and that could be performed rapidly and accurately, all using compact automated devices which the company had developed. These claims were later proven to be false.
You don't want to deal with the shit HR handles for you.
I'm sure there are plenty of bad, bureaucratic messes, but 3/4 of the HR departments I the last 10 years have been quite helpful.
The outlier was just not very communicative, but otherwise good.
Maybe it's the industry. I work in clinical so we're used to documenting the fuck out of everything. HR mandated documentation is just another step to cover all of our asses.
My experience with them is basically them trying to convince people to stay at the job when the job is overworking people underpaying people etc. Staying never payed off. More of a dead end job scenerio
Lottery's the expected value is always lower than the prize of a ticket. And even if you win it is on the back of other poor desparete people who lost. An then there is the fact winning often leads to a lot of other problems.
Lottery’s the expected value is always lower than the prize of a ticket.
I mean, of course it is? Zero-effort sources of income kind of have to have a net negative expected value. Or else nobody would have any reason to do anything.
Now you could definitely argue that the low-odds of winning aren’t made entirely clear to the customers, but I know a lot of people pay their $2 a week just for the high of fantasizing about what it would be like to win.
Phoebus Cartel, essentially the few oligopolistic light bulb companies got together and colluded and intentionally reduced the lifespan of light bulbs.
The rate at which our LED bulbs are failing (usually over-driven leds or garbage capacitors for the power supply), has me thinking it’s still a thing, only less formal and more profitable.
this one wasn't really that bad, yes they shortened the life span of the bulbs, but incandescent bulbs were a solved problem at that time, and longer lasting bulbs meant that they must produce less light. that bulb that's lasted a 100 years or whatever, is very very dim, and that's why it's still going. also, dimmer (longer lasting) bulbs are less efficient for the amount of light you get, and some of the lightbulb manufacturers were also power companies, which were struggling with energy and so had reason to want more efficient lightbulbs. here's a great video on the topic https://youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY
The Bernie Madoff investment scandal. Started in the 1970’s and continued into the 2000’s. It eventually dissolved in 2008 during the financial crisis. There’s a really great documentary on Netflix about it.
Today lack of insight or "anosognosia" was protested in massachusetts https://www.madinamerica.com/2023/08/fighting-outpatient-commitment-in-massachusetts/ September last year I was told by pro-perjury republican suffolk, new york judge I was not fit to decide. Whether to be assaulted with risperdal, haldol causing Nystagmus eye spasms blatantly against the Quran which northwell banned twice. Alaska Supreme Court acknowledges least restrictive (Olmstead) treatment must be tried first.
I never hallucinated nor self harmed and haven't defended my exes and dog for 3 years during no probable cause, sans investigation false arrests. For peacefully protesting the "delusion" I was invited 5 years ago twice on 90 Day Fiance by a Doomsday Preppers producer. Free charity 125 page lithography Google and 100 page quack Law books don't make me qualified, but a doctor silently passing by the hallway counts as an evaluation www.dropbox.com/sh/p4hbeqa7e74j4lk/AAAl2RN_pmlCDoeg9MXHVe4Ca?dl=0
thorazine, the first antipsychotic, was injected "in emergencies" of talking about fish, crickets, Jesus into an alabama senior citizen who felt safer in the worst state. nassau university medical center pharmacist said she was at the maximum dose but co-workers demanded increase. chemical restraint is illegal everywhere, these are not meant for falling asleep which "pacing" or benadryl, Ativan can help.
neuroleptic malignancy syndrome resulted in May 24, 2020 death perhaps a heart attack, multiple women there stopping menstruation, diabetes, sometimes did not cure the few who hallucinated; kidney, liver damage. Politely asking for FDA label printout and discussing experiences with peers gets your freedom of association revoked in contradiction of state patients' Bill of Rights. $25 billion/year False Claims Act defrauded from 25 million Americans.
I have taken an antipsychotic for insomnia at different times. Can you elaborate on what you're saying? It isn't clear to me. Severe side effects, however, have been extremely clear at different times. Are you saying those are downplayed to the point of gaslighting?
The side effects have been well known for a long time. I can see pharma companies downplaying them, but in modern times the risks are well understood. Do you have an example?
NGL, I've been on both ends: had a good friend give me 13 BTC when they were less than $0.10 apiece, and I've no idea what happened to them. On the other hand, I may've also sold near the ATH of 2017 and taken my entire family on a no-expense-spared Christmas trip fully paid by said profits. Still... 13 BTC at that latter moment would've been worth near a quarter mil. 🥹🤷🏼♂️
Unless they're referring to scummy mega-banks that exist by fucking over the little guy with random fees, hard to close accounts, and other scummy practices like Wells Fargo, BofA, etc.
look friend, they had to make laws outlawing bank runs. You know what that means? They don't have all your money. And not only that, but the state is willing to use violence on you if you threaten their right to not have all your money. This sounds cut and dry.
Yeah? What should back the currency? What would have happened to the dollar if it was still pegged to gold? What is the difference between an artificially scarce natural resource and a currency backed by a superpower?
It’s backed by the government. Yes, if the government falls apart the dollar will be worthless, but if the government falls apart a lot more will happen than just the currency dying.
That's my reasoning behind trusting banks with my money. If shit goes down to the point I can't get my money out of a bank then it won't have much value for long anyways and I have bigger issues.
They selling a dangerous (however is good for clening exhaust pipes🤣) overpriced penny shit, saying its refreshing, while making one of the biggest amount of garbage worldwide.
Ever since the 90's, almost every protest or riot that has been on TV in the past few decades has been based on circumstances everyone has been misled or lied to about. I say this generally, I'm not speaking about any specific ideology or any particular group. All the protests follow the same pattern of epiphany, yet they keep happening.
The ones that took place during covid scammed us all because covid required those in charge to say "don't worry, us being out in the open didn't cause the virus to spread, we took precautions". Today, covid commercials will say those same groups that those protests were made for were disproportionately affected by covid as if it's because of human right, and nobody is connecting it to the fact the protests happened during a time when every restaurant had plexiglass barriers. Again, not speaking for any group in particular, this was a fault for the Canadian truckers, BLM, those Trump-voting Libertarians, etc.
You say that like they wouldn't especially be included.
Climate change is an issue, I don't deny that. Nor do I deny it's accelerated by humanity. But it's incredibly inflated. Every decade has "a few decades into the future" as our day of doom, and nobody does anything about Asian countries polluting the Earth, they just ask Western nations to do things. In China, there are cities where you need a gas mask to go out onto the streets, maybe do something about that.
As for human rights, yeah that's the biggest contributor to false or misleading protests, and again I am not speaking in favor of either political wing here. The Tawana Brawley protests, based on a lie. The George Floyd protests (and its satellite protests), based on a lot of glorification and a generalization of their targets. The Harambe protests, not misleading but definitely overblown. The Cecil the lion protests, completely pointless. The White House protests with Q-anon, completely without evidence even if it "seemed" they were right (and was done by a white supremacist group). The pro-Trump protests before that, based on over-heroism. I could go on.
A scam is any ploy made for gain that isn't based on an honest foundation. Protests as of late would thus be scams on a grand scale.
This thread just opened my eyes. I really thought Lemmy being so young would mean the average users would be pretty saavy and intelligent. Nope, same idiots as Reddit and everywhere else.
You're free to have your own opinions. But please note that your tone is not helpful and you may be just doing what exactly you're speaking against. Let's keep the discussions civil and healthy instead of labelling people.
Like anywhere on the internet, it really comes down to doing your best to exude the kind of energy you want to receive back (and moderation/filtering). There are all types of people around and the key is to just do your best to stay positive. Moderation tools are also more primitive on Lemmy, so, as traffic grows, users will have a larger role to play in reporting and manually curating their feeds via blocking.
If it ever feels like too much, I also recommend taking a break from social media. You may also want to consider other instances like beehaw.org, which goes to great lengths to maintain its particular atmosphere.
Why would you even assume that? It's all just random people. If you have nothing constructive to say, you can fuck off and start your own intelligent community and stop being a toxic shitstain.