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.
Antivirus software
Most forms of insurance in the US
Service as a subscription, for me. It used to be you bought a product and then you owned it. Now if you want practically anything from streaming media to freaking car washes, you have to “subscribe”.
Chiropractors.
First Past the Post voting at elections.
Approval Voting and multi-winner districts let’s gooooooo!
A great alternative is majority judgment!
What country? In my country everyone knows that’s a scam.
UK
We had a referendum and people voted to keep the scam.
Welcome to Canada.
I’m still salty about that broken Liberal promise to reform our elections. None of the parties care about it and it seems no one wants to try to change it.
ads
Massage school. They say they’re teaching you a trade and will help with job placement but there is a glut of graduates and not enough jobs for them. Yet the school keeps signing up new students because that’s how they make money.
People who vote for conservatives
Religion
Religion. The all-time champion, no contest, just as George Carlin said:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/2tp0UNcjzl8
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Is it just me or do Piped videos not play for everyone? The play button does nothing.
What do you expect to happen when faith in the divine is literally a socially acceptable mental illness.
Then start somewhere. Require new construction to be built for humans first. Then bit by bit change.
The Netherlands did this back in 1960 and look at it now. They too had to start somewhere and they did
It requires investment in your infrastructure which well, in the US that’s a joke.
I’ll try to list things that aren’t in the typical internet echo chamber. Bring on the controversy. These are just my opinions.
50% of the shelf space at the grocery store is just different forms of corn syrup, sometimes with some trans fat mixed in, generationally twisting our idea of what food is in a race to the cheapest, most addictive product.
The only way it’s profitable for someone to knock on your door to sell ANYTHING is if they are obscenely inflating the price (think 100-600% markup)
Most supplements, especially expensive ones with TV ads
Dr Scholl’s and the goodfeet store
Genuine leather is just about the opposite of what you’d think
Bamboo fabric which is pretty much just a different way to say rayon but is pitched as a revolutionary and environmentally friendly cloth
Most bladeless fans just hide fan blades in the base
Many cleaning products don’t do better than diluted soap and water (even for sanitizing) especially the ones with TV ads
Financial planners who are actually financial product salespeople
Most single-purpose kitchen gadgets, especially as-seen-on-TV
The realtors racket: I just paid $30k for an internet posting and mediocre advice
Many personal hygiene products are just repackaging the same two or three active ingredients by the same one or two megacorporations
Essential oils (even ignoring mystical claims) big names charge an order of magnitude higher than they should
New to Lemmy but yours is my 2nd ever saved comment, thanks bud
Oh and congratulations on selling your 600k ish home, hope you got what you wanted
Your list makes me realize just how far we peddle bullshit in our society. Virtually everything is lying to you, if only by omission or by being misleading. If you don’t know about cars, finance, food, technology, laws, housing, virtually anything, you will be taken advantage off, if only a little. Pretty much your whole list is spot-on, and it could go on for pages. Toothpaste? They’re lying about the quantity. You think your orange juice is healthy because it is very, very heavily suggested? Nope, it is old oranges with a lot of sugar. Anyway, I am not gonna type the entire comment I want to because it would become very rant-y.
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.
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
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.
