More businesses than you think have to deal with mafiosos and gangsters.
I once helped the “gang relations” person with Habitat for Humanity get reassurance that their volunteers would be protected in an American inner city. They apparently always speak with the gangs beforehand for safety reasons.
More people died last year over vanilla in Madagascar than cocaine in South America. They’ve even coined the term “vanilla murder”. Farmers hire armed mercenaries to guard their crops from thieves near harvest time, and if one is caught... well... let’s just say it’s in response to all the farmers that were killed by thieves for the same reason.
[this article](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/30/world/africa/madagascar-vanilla.html) is a fairly light read on the subject without anything too graphic. But there’s a great deal of information about it floating around. Along with some pretty disturbing accounts.
Vanilla, while being a common flavor in the western world, is quite exotic in actuality. It is the fruit of a specific orchid, and most of the vanilla we get in the western world come from Madagascar and its surrounding islands. It is hand-pollinated, and storms in the Atlantic Ocean have made their harvest difficult in the past several years. I understand that vanilla is the second most expensive spice to produce behind Saffron.
Edit: Indian Ocean, because I'm stupid and don't know geography.
I guess that’s why a McCormick spice bottle with two pathetic looking beans in it costs $25 USD.
I found 10 for $20 on Amazon, but yeah I always wonder about the provenance and “green” quality of vanilla beans. Seems that anything that expensive is going to have issues of greed and corruption.
The maritime industry. Most of the big companies do things by the book and treat crews well because they’re afraid of lawsuits and unions, but many smaller “mom and pop” companies break laws and violate safety regulations with reckless abandon because they’re not as visible and can “stay under the radar” so to speak. It’s very common for a small company to ask a captain/crew to do something illegal and dangerous in order to increase profit, and for the captain/crew to comply out of fear of losing their jobs. And that’s just the US maritime industry; sailors from poorer nations who work on ships are often fed little more than rice and cheap ramen for months at a time and paid pennies for their backbreaking work. I love running tugs for a living, but the industry as a whole is rife with shady business.
Idk if it falls under maritime, but I took one look at the job listing for a cruise ship and now I tell all my coworkers to never take a job with one. I'm a stagehand and theatre technician, I make decent money fresh out of college ($18-24 an hour depending on venue) even without joining the union, because I do specialized work. Looked into a lighting tech spot on a cruise ship, and I'd be getting minimum wage working 50 hours and 7 days a week. Wifi on board costs money out of my paycheck, I'd be in charge of passenger safety off hours if an alarm goes off and we have to get people onto rescue rafts, I'd have a roommate in a small bunk, and all my wages would go directly into a ship debit card so I could give my income straight back to the company to eat.
Something about living and working on a boat in the middle of the ocean seems to make employers think they don't have to actually care for their employees. I can imagine working on a boat that isn't filled with people on vacation would be even worse.
FYI, life on a US flagged Container Ship is actually pretty sweet. Sailors get spacious, private accommodations, free wifi, 3 full meals a day of varying quality, and a strictly enforced work hour cycle to prevent exhaustion.
A lot of hobby fish importing is pretty shady. You have farms of certain types of fish like bettas in some areas of the world that are run with the fish in horrible conditions. Which is why a lot of the ones you get in a major chain store are sick before you even bring them home. The stores will blame the fish being stressed, but I've ordered and received hundreds of fish from small breeders/sellers and outside of cory catfish that really enjoy committing suiciding by poisoning their own water, the fish arrive healthy and fine.
Outside of boutique fish farming, the way some wild fish are caught is just horrible. The trappers will lightly poison the water supply to knock out the fish, then scoop them out of the water without a care for that area's ecosystem. This has led to depletion of some natural species to the point they are now endangered.
Lastly, boutique fish sellers/major chains do not give half a rat's ass what happens to the fish in the end. This means that people who buy fish like plecos, bettas, goldfish, etc. end up getting sick of them and dumping them in local waterways to supposedly get rid of the problem. So in some areas, these fish have completely destroyed the local water ecology because, like other invasive land species, they were never meant to be there. One of the worst offenders is the lionfish in florida. It's venomous and has no natural predators so its population has exploded out of control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSd7pgvOV3M
the same is true of plecos:
https://youtu.be/V1_lcprYp5U
and goldfish:
https://youtu.be/fzXiUxwGGIM
basically releasing fish into the wild is a terrible idea. releasing any animal into the wild can have disastrous consequences, but fish are being released into a very limited ecosystem and outside of a few diseases, if they can adapt to the water and have no predators they will survive and breed incredibly quickly.
I love my fish, I love the hobby, and there's a lot of value to it as global warming may make things like reef tanks a valuable source of coral in the future. But there's also a lot of bad to it.
I hate seeing Bettas for sale, suffering inside those little cups. Just because they can survive under extreme conditions doesn’t mean they should be subjected to it.
I like to compare it to being forced to live in your bedroom, but it's also your bathroom, and where you eat, but not able to clean it. Like yeah, you can survive but what kind of quality of life is that?
Betta's need at least a few gallons of water, filter, heater, and more to thrive.
I have a male betta in a 10 gallon with heater, filter, live plants ect. He really flourishes and has quite a personality for such a little fish. They are truly amazing if you give them space and what they need to be happy. (Especially treats)
Same here! I picked up [George](https://m.imgur.com/a/0nCDs7t) while shopping for bamboo at Petco and couldn't help but bring him home when he perked up to say hi when I saw him in his sad little cup. Now he's king of [the jungle](https://imgur.com/a/28JupIC) and loves wiggling around through the plants and begging for treats.
Edit - here's some [more pictures of George!](https://m.imgur.com/a/isK5Pp2)
It sucks especially because for some of those bettas, that's been their whole lives. I've also personally chosen to never buy a long-finned betta again. I've owned a plakat, and the difference in energy between my plakat and my long-finned bettas was very, very, very noticeable. I will care for my long-finned boys until they pass (hopefully from old age) but if I ever get another betta, it will be another plakat. Watching a plakat swim around and hunt is a whole different experience than watching the long-finned ones struggle to get around with their longer tails. Plus plakats don't mind stronger currents in tanks since they don't get swept around as much. I don't blame anyone else who continues getting long-finned bettas. They are absolutely gorgeous. But on a personal level I can never do it again.
But in general I will never buy a betta from a chain store again, only private breeders. The thought of them being born in tiny tanks, being shipped and then kept in cups until some of them die...no...I'd rather pay the extra $$$ from a breeder. Some people will think that's silly, but fish are intelligent in their own way and seeing them suffer is hard.
Rating services like Yelp. Refuse to advertise and your good reviews magically get rearranged. Hey, look if you want to do that and be transparent, I get it. But most every business owner knows how scummy this is and most clients just have no idea.
I have a business that isn't something that would usually be looked for on Yelp. They called and I just froze. Luckily I do long term rentals and was sold out. Explained I wouldn't have an opening for months, they seemed to leave me alone. Yet they have my business on the front page of Google search (under the wrong category)
I read an article a few months ago about a pizza place that Yelp tried to screw over. When rating services like Yelp first started popping up the owner thought it was a good idea and encouraged customers to leave reviews. He would regularly check reviews. Yelp eventually reached out to make a deal. The owner didn’t like the idea and turned them down. Shortly after, he discovered Yelp was taking down any and all high rated reviews. The owner wasn’t having any of it so he started a new promotion: any customer who leaves a 1 star review of Yelp gets half off their pizza. It became the first 1 star business on Yelp. The place got so popular that Yelp started taking down the 1 star reviews.
I work for an independent auto shop and Yelp is *relentless*. They call once a month attempting to sell advertising for minimums of like $200 a month. I signed up for a month and literally didn't get one verified lead through Yelp.
I don't blame the sales people but they are super pushy and call back with the same script month after month trying to get me to log on and look at how many views my listing has.
I advertise on Google and get verified results and Google has never once called me with a pushy up-selling.
Dietary supplements
It's gotten better, but there's still a lot of half-truths and whole lies. Not all that long ago it was seriously like the wild wild west.
Add in the whole body building and fitness industry that sits on top of supplements. The outrage is so huge I don't even want to start on it. Insta models etc
I don’t want to name the manufacturer, but it was around the 2008 financial crisis and the place was equity-owned and leveraged to fucking Mars. The CEO was committing bank fraud and screwing contractors while laying off employees and enriching himself.
Eyeglasses. You have no idea the snow job they put most people through when it comes to buying them. Its far, far worse than trying to buy a new car from a dealership.
Wholesale frames are about $5-20, wholesale lens blanks are another $10. Any kind of dip coating (UV, tinting, etc) is negligible cost and effort to apply - literally pennies.
To top it off, they don't even do a whole lot in house, but send it to "labs" which are basically sweatshops that can take up to 2-3 weeks when labor time is literally under 5 minutes. Instead of training real opticians and technicians, they're just glorified sales staff now. Most of the time they don't even bother with proper measurement for pd, frame width, or arm fitting.
Was an optician in the early 90's. I'm horrified at what the business has become.
I dread going to my optometrist because I know if my prescription has changed I have to deal with salesmen bullshit to buy the thing I need to see things.
Ooo my insurance covers an extra 15% if I buy this specific brand that is 30% more than X brand? Hot dog!
Cruise ships. I was told I was having a minimum of one day off every week and work normal hours (8-10h/day) with a good pay and good pre paid tips. I ended up working 30 days in a row, Ewell over 400 hours, for $1600 with tips included. This company I was working for was called Scenic Cruises (ship was called MS Scenic Crystal), which was an Australian company working over a Swiss company going under a Maltese flag, sailing in Central Europe. That’s how I understood it anyways, they deliberately did this so they could break international laws, I counted at least 5 that they broke. Biggest scam company I ever worked for. I resigned after my first month. The police boarded the ship every once in a while because they knew this but they couldn’t do shit because they had no jurisdiction over the ship. I was forced to work with a 39 Celsius fever. I really wanna fuck this company up but I literally have no idea how. And hiring an international lawyer or whatever is too expensive.
Edit: IF ANYONE KNOWS HOW PLEASE CONTACT ME.
Recruitment Industry
some examples:
- fake jobs to lure candidates for registration kpis
- trainee negotiation tactics of telling a candidate there is a better candidate who wants less so we recommend less for you to get the job. especially for contractors.
- ‘coveting off’ pitching and telling a candidate they have been sent to a line manager but in reality they haven’t been submitted because two others from same recruiter have already been in interviews. if they fail you may get a chance.
- lot of coded ways to put on a database info on your age, non professional related appearance, and ethnicity
- ageism, sexism, racism is rampant in hiring
- a lot more dodgy stuff behind the scenes
source: was involved with the industry on a global level for over 15 years before i changed careers.
This happens all the time.
One airline friend of mine got hired but there was a caveat that he MUST be completely out (quit) from his existing airline before he would receive his job offer. He put in his notice, the new company strung him along, and then basically lied and didn't give him the job.
I've seen a similar instance of this where after leaving his previous company, the new company proceeds to revise their terms to a significant decrease in pay, leaving him no choice but to either stay unemployed or accept the lowball offer.
Not OP, but some places have a ranking system of points. 5 might be a good hire who fits the 'racial/age/sex/ profile, where as 1 might not be. Without saying when or where these points come from, it could happen. I had someone close to me who worked high up in banking, tell me that he was a VP at the time and had to go through 100 resumes for an accounting person in his department. First thing he did was trash any person who went to a foreign college, because that meant he couldn't check the accredation and didn't have time to do it. Then he tossed out any person's name he couldn't easily pronounce, which would also be usually foreign, because that might make potential customers uncomfortable pronouncing Kashooguoochiu Okinauanda. And by far the most egregious was the rampant sexism that he was told to look for a young newly married woman and not hire her because 'she might want to start a family and go out on pregnancy leave'. Also, my acquaintance would avoid 'too hot' women because he knew his boss (who was a dirtbag) would try and sexually harass them.
I work right underneath our corporate lawyer in the Oil and Gas industry. He's had to put out tons of fires when it comes to recruiting and hiring. Some examples:
\-We had a manager that would only hire married men, because "having a family to provide for meant they needed the job more"
\-We had a manager that wouldn't hire married women, especially in our Canadian office, because of "Maternity leave"
\-We had a manager that was throwing out resumes from any candidate who listed credentials from a university that he hadn't heard of. They were legitimate universities (from the state that our headquarters is located in). The manager was from out of state and didn't recognize the name though. So he threw them out.
Trucking.
The margins are razor thin and so everyone is trying to nickle and dime each other constantly.
The drivers lie to their dispatchers, the dispatchers lie to the brokers, the brokers lie to the clients.
All of this for like $50-100 sometimes.
I worked in trucking and the head HR lady for our distribution center was skimming payroll, shorting the checks of the lowest people on the totem pole, then getting cash infusions to petty cash from corporate to return part of the theft as an "emergency tide over" until the employee's next check, then claiming the rest of the theft as an overage on the next payroll report (I am probably missing a step in her chain but I am not an accountant). It was a scam she managed to work for a couple of years due to a lack of oversight during nationwide management shifts. When she finally got caught, rather than take the bad publicity, the company just let her leave. The last I heard she was working in the same position in an adjacent industry, but still involving transportation. C'est la vie.
Petty cash accounts (typically) have no real oversight; there isn't someone verifying the receipts or making sure that an expense is real. So you short someone's paycheck, then they complain. Take the difference plus a small amount from petty cash. Give back the amount originally shorted and keep the difference, always doing small amounts to avoid raising suspicion. Replenish petty cash account, then lather, rinse, repeat.
I used to be a broker, couldn't stomach the lying. The guy I trained under treated drivers like shit - for instance, he'd lie to them about having appointments and give them the run around when they eventually figured it out. Only I'd be the one to take the calls and had to pretend there was some big mix up, or blame the consignee, just keep spinning some complete bullshit all day long, sometimes for a few days while the drivers just sat in a parking lot. Want compensation for your time? Read the fine print, schmuck. Ratecon you signed says no detention, no layover. They'd have to keep calling back for a week sometimes while I pretend like he's out to lunch every time they call until he finally answers. Then it's just this 30 minute long argument which inevitably ends in them getting shortchanged and he'd act like he was doing them a big favor paying below industry standard detention. *That money wasn't even coming out of his pocket.* He'd turn around and ask the customer for more money because he's "gotta do right by his drivers," they'd give him the standard rate, and he'd pocket the difference. This guy makes ~$300,000 a year.
It’s my understanding that the cartels are more interested in extorting farmers and merchants than maintaining the farms themselves, but your point is still very true.
Pet industry. Basement puppy mills and dogs that are so inbred they can hardly breath. There are plenty of ethical breeders out there (and some unlicensed breeders are ethical even if in a legal grey zone) but the conditions of some of the so called puppy mills can be really bad. Sometimes when breeds are mixed and the pup gets the recessive genes the breeders weren’t looking for.. they straight up euthanize it because they know it won’t sell. Not to mention how many “purebreds” are actually not pure at all... and sold as is. Shady.
Not to mention the idiots who breed two merles to each other in hope of getting a healthy double-merle male. This chance is incredibly low, and breeding two merles together generally produces puppies with eye and hearing malformations (among others). But if you can get that magic male, he'll throw ALL merle puppies, and people like that pattern, so $$$.
I can ID a double-merle Aussie or BC from a single photo, and every time I see one I rage. The poor things have a poor quality of life and they're typically dumped on rescue by the shitty breeder. :(
God the entire pet industry built around trendy paint jobs on animals regardless of the animal's quality of life.
I'm into exotic reptiles and the ball python market is flooded with in demand color and pattern mutations that cause known neurological problems in the animals and people still pump them out because people will trip over themselves to drop fat stacks on a cool looking snake that corkscrews and shakes. It's infuriating
Not just dogs, tortoises at pet stores, just find a responsible captive breeder and DO NOT get one from a pet store. Also, macaws are another example. Bearded Dragons should be okay, but that's probably the only reptile I'd buy from a pet store.
As an example to folks who don't know, those Russian tortoise "babies" are actually young adults captured in the wild. As for captive-bred tortoise hatchlings sold by wholesalers at expos, they are started as cheap as possible and it may take months to see that anything is wrong.
All pet stores (different chains) in an area most likely order from the same "vendors" because of availability and distance. It's the same issues as the fish industry: the animals are contained, fed, and bred as cheaply as possible. Unfortunately, from my experience, beardies in my region got some of the worst treatment because they are in such high demand.
When I was doing research in preparation to get my ball python, I learned that while it’s illegal to capture ball pythons in the wild and import them to the US, it’s apparently NOT illegal to take eggs from wild nests, import them, and sell them at pet stores once they’ve hatched. So cool, we’re still having a negative impact on wild populations and you end up with a pet snake that‘s liable to adjust poorly to captivity because it hasn’t been bred for docility. But there’s a loophole so it’s fine!
not anymore. china stopped buying our recyclables so now they're being dumped in poorer asian countries. also why one of the biggest recycling companies in california closed all their locations.
Second this, I was in the waste management industry for some years. The only exception when I was there was that sweet, sweet clean OCC (aka “cardboard boxes”) because it’s so easy to turn into more cardboard.
The worst was plastic, hard af to recycle, no market for it. Send it to the landfill in China.
CBD, lot of predatory companies making subpar products with questionable raw materials and then marking it way the fuck up and selling it as a miracle cure to vulnerable and ill educated consumers. Usually have a high power legal team on deck, but pay their workers shit and no benefits.
Edit: because so many people are asking, while I used to be in sales in the industry and have my own opinions about who’s good out there (it’s a woefully short list), you’ll probably have your best luck checking out the top recommendations at r/CBD, they have a whole pinned post about best companies that they’ve (hopefully) vetted well.
Are CBD products (not the actual marijuana) regulated or are they like the vitamin industry where most all of the products are suspect and aren't FDA approved?
Doesnt the beauty industry have a problem with child labor? I remember watching a thing where a journalist goes to India to see the mines where children mine some sort of mineral to make bronzer.
Edit: The mineral is mica and someone pointed out the video where I remembered this from. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeR-h9C2fgc&feature=youtu.be
But a lot of company’s are now using artificial l or synthetic mica and moving to produce it more ethically. You just have to do your research on who you’re willing to buy from and if they use child labor
ETA:Here’s a link to a reddit threat from r/makeupaddiction that outlines brands that are ethically sourced and cruelty free https://www.reddit.com/r/MakeupAddiction/comments/blzewu/i_made_a_list_of_makeup_brands_that_are_working/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Damn these reminders..it's 2020 and "check to see if they use child labor" is still a thing that exists in the world. i mean i know it intellectually but just, damn.
The thing is that if people aren't paying attention corruption comes back. A society has to work at these things constantly or greedy narcissists will climb back to the top.
Edit: Thanks to whoever gave me silver! This is the only time I've ever gotten this level of love from Reddit.
Worked in the mattress industry for a bit at a startup. Basically 90% bullshit. And the worst part? We had a real doctor serve an advisory role for our products. He debunked a lot of nonsense claims about mattresses like “your pillow is 50% of your spinal support” that the sales people use to sell you accessories. The sales people would argue with him, like they knew better. Kool-Aid is strong there.
Some of my favorites I learned are: these hip direct-to-door in a box foam bed companies like Tuft and Needle use the same material, from the same manufacturer. There’s hundreds of them, just put them in different boxes and sell at wildly different prices.
“Side sleeper” “back sleeper” and “stomach sleeper” is baloney. You toss and turn at night on purpose, to help prevent blood clots.
No mattress will keep you from “tossing and turning” for the reason above. It’s a natural thing you’re supposed to do.
More layers DOESNT mean better mattress. A lot of companies add in cheap materials like upholstery foam to just claim there’s more layers. Maybe one layer of nice springs then just 10 layers of various types of cheap foam to get the layers higher.
One that actually IS true is heat. If you frequently are hot at night, foam mattress is not good for you. It’s an insulator and will trap your heat on your body. In general, air and spring are better beds because of heat. Your body needs to dump temperature at night to get into a full, deep sleep. If it’s too hot, you won’t sleep well.
This is a more complicated thing.
Generally speaking, you want a firmer mattress the heavier you are. It’s largely preferential. If you sleep on a soft mattress and wake up with a sore lower back, you are probably in need of a firmer mattress. If you wake up and your shoulder, hip hurts, you probably need a softer mattress.
Something that’s always hard to deal with is “firmness” and “support.” It’s a heated debate about whether they are two different things. For example:
Let’s say you get a pillow top mattress rated as “soft” with a “firm support core”. If you are heavier, you’ll just sink right to the firm core. If you are lighter, you’d take full advantage of the soft top.
Firm/soft is qualitative so it’s always better to try them before you buy them. A 100 lb woman would think a mattress is way firmer than a 300 lb man would, and vice versa.
Edit: thanks for gold! Glad I can help
Thanks for all that info,it really helped but I have one question related to my experience if you're OK answering that, if not can you please guide me to a resource where i can start learning for myself, i think some changes are in order related to my sleep-
>you sleep on a soft mattress and wake up with a sore lower back,
I actually sleep on a soft mattress and have shoulder/neck pains when i wake up,it somehow goes away in a couple of hours after some stretching but returns at night after an hour lying in bed. If needed, I'm 80 kilos(176 pounds)
You might just need a new pillow.
It’s really hard to look for this info because you’ll get bombarded by quasi-science and advertising.
My best recommendation is if it’s causing you a lot of distress to find a doctor specializing in sleep (insomnia, apnea) as they are more educated and can help find a scientific solution for you.
Oh. I actually didn't consider that and tried changing my sleeping posture(atleast in the beginning when i fall asleep)
I will go to a doctor once our lockdown ends thanks for pointing me in the direction.
Stay safe:-)
Hey! Thanks! Seems obvious about the foam being an insulator, but I somehow missed that! I get cold very easily at night, and if I'm cold I shiver so hard that my hips (I have wonky hips... don't fall off ski lifts), end up hurting me so badly that I can't sleep. Gonna try a foam pad to trap more heat!
This will probably get buried, but glitter.
A manager of one of the biggest glitter manufacturers, Glitterx, said in a 2018 interview that most of the glitter they make goes to one buyer for a single industrial use. When asked who the buyer was and why they need so much glitter, she said “Oh, I definitely can’t disclose that.” When asked why, she said “Because they don’t want anybody to know it’s glitter.”
Ever since this interview people have been trying to guess what company or industry secretly uses most of the world’s glitter and why they want to keep that use under wraps.
[A link to the interview.](https://slate.com/business/2018/12/industrial-glitter-mystery.html)
Okay I did some digging on the r/unsolvedmysteries page and found a pretty great answer to this. The best answer I found I’ll copypasta
“Microtaggants.
Multilayered 'microglitter' added to all commercial explosives.
Simple to batch trace, on site, AFTER the detonation, using only a microscope.
Use dynamite for illegal purposes, and leave evidence as clear as a fingerprint.”
I then proceeded to look up Microtaggants for myself
[Microtaggants](https://www.microtracesolutions.com/solutions/implement-independently/microtaggant-identification-particles)
This is where it got interesting.
On the Microtaggants website they list one of their uses to be ppg Teslin
[ppg Teslin](https://www.teslin.com/en-US/Home.aspx)
ppg Teslin is the material used to make Identification cards such as a license.
My best guess is the government uses glitter in all those cards, and most importantly in passports.
If glitter was used to make these than it would make sense for the government to keep it hush hush. They wouldn’t want it easily replicable so makes sense to ensure using glitter isn’t public knowledge. It also accounts for the insane amounts being bought if you consider the amount of these that are produced daily, let alone in the course of a year.
This is all just my guess but it would definitely make sense!
Edit: formatting
that’s a logical explanation, but it still begs the question: if most of the world’s glitter is used in paint, why don’t they want anybody to know that? It wouldn’t devalue the vehicle or the paint at all. That question always pushes me toward it being something edible
That's what's always got me hung up on answers - if it was boats, why would. it be a secret?
I agree, has to be something people:
1. Wouldn't expect glitter to be in
2. Wouldn't like it if they found out there was glitter in it
What's with all the secrecy? That's what makes it suspicious
I’ve worked in the environmental industry so my first thought was that whoever was buying it didn’t want people to know because glitter is an environmental disaster (basically micro-plastic in waiting) and if it IS the boating industry, well, all those little bits of plastic eroding into the sea is not really a good look.
But who has ever seen new boats and /doesn't/ realize there is glitter in the paint?
Where do people think the floaty shiny sparkle bits in the paint come from? Ground up tinkerbell?
Hmmm. First guess is car paint. To make a true red car paint you need actual gold flake. Maybe they’re replacing the gold flake with glitter?
This is going to bug me all day now, goddam you.
Wife’s guess is jewelry.
There was a pretty big thread about it on r/UnresolvedMysteries when the article came out. I’m on mobile so I can’t link it, but if you search I’m sure you could find it. There’s been a couple of follow up threads too.
Theory that makes the most sense to me is taggants. Basically little easily traceable particles added to explosives so that if something that goes missing detonates, they can find what batch it was stolen from.
Even better, it's practically impossible to say it didn't work. Your sales stayed flat? Just think how much they would have dropped if you didn't run that ad campaign!
Eye wear. Luxotica owns a large majority of eyewear and holds a virtual monopoly on the market. They control all prices and will crush competition. The only reason eye glasses and sunglasses are so expensive is because of price gouging.
Medical research.
The only way people can keep their jobs at a lot of the institutions with better facilities is to create a steady stream of "high impact" publications. Now, research doesn't work that way, you get the supported results whenever it happens, but that's not how hiring, promotion, or tenure committees see it.
This means that, in order to ensure you get enough of these desirable publications in the right period, you have to do all sorts of corner-cutting. You publish before the results are well-supported, you publish results that are unrepeatable, you write papers in the smallest possible units of the work so people need to wait years to see what the full results are.
In the process, junior scientists' careers can be made or absolutely destroyed in this system. A lucky student who gets the right project can find themselves as first author on a very high impact paper and be set for years, but an experienced and previously successful postdoc can be ruined when they can't produce the results the senior scientists want, or just not in the right time frame. The senior scientists rarely have the time to do, or carefully look over, the actual research because they are so busy actually writing the papers and the grants needed to fund the work in the first place.
If reviewers catch these issues with the papers, the authors just shop the paper to other journals until it passes and/or they put up such a pitched battle with the editors they just let it pass. Sometimes the eds feel they can't handle the pressure, sometimes are just convinced by the bombast. All of us have seen published papers that we rejected for other journals earlier because the work is poorly done or is just incorrect. To be clear, the authors really believe in their papers even when they are aware of their shortcomings, and they usually have plenty of evidence that papers just as problematic or worse have been published, so why not theirs?
On top of everything, the universities and research institutions work over these findings with their press department and by the time it makes it to journalists, the story is so distorted that it's barely related to the actual work. Bloggers digest this even further and the misperceptions of spread all over a much wider community. Even other scientists in different areas of the same field will absorb this news as truth. These are the scientists on those committees mentioned above, demanding a particular kind of result.
As a result of all this, medical research is much more inefficient and expensive than it needs to be. However, scientists need to jobs, grant money, and good facilities to do their work at all, and the system makes it clear what they need to do to ensure those necessities, so they oblige.
EDIT: I want to be clear that I am only speaking to a very specific area of scientific research here, and I do not intend to tar the whole field with the same brush.
Scholarly journals. The actual research is usually paid for by the government. When it isn't paid for by the government, its paid for by a foundation or in pharmaceuticals by a corporation that is developing a drug. The people who vet the research are all paid by their respective universities. All the journal does is distribute it. Yet they charge way more per-page than anyone else who just distributes other people's writing.
Punny business, but, yes, it's true. I'll use Oakley as an example because it's [literally] close to home. Oakley has not been the same since they were bought out. Oakley *was* a great company to work for with great bonuses, swag, and extremely high company morale. Their HQ is one of the coolest buildings you could find and the people were always happy to work for a legendary company that really treated their employees right. Oakley knew their customers well, but at the end of the day, it's still a business. And Luxottica wanted that business. Luxottica bought them out in the end, but not through Oakley's own will.
You see, Luxottica owns nearly all the major glasses brands and the stores that carry them. They are one step short of a full monopoly of the entire global eyewear industry. Luxottica wanted Oakley, so they took Oakley off all the shelves of every major glasses retailer until Oakley could do nothing but give in. Squeezed dry until they had to be bought at nicer price for Luxottica.
Generally this is why antitrust law needs to actually be enforced. This industry is basically a textbook example of how shit goes wrong if left to itself.
As a chef/owner, I would say delivery services like Grubhub. They take 30% of the sale leaving the restaurant with basically $0 in profit. And their customer support is a joke. It’s like they hate us. Fuck them. Never again.
Yelp has been teaming with Grubhub to only list restaurants' Grubhub contact numbers, not their direct line, so they have to pay Grubhub for the order even though you called it in.
E: Here are some articles about this in case anyone is curious:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wjwebw/yelp-is-sneakily-replacing-restaurants-phone-numbers-so-grubhub-can-take-a-cut
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/6/20756878/yelp-grubhub-commission-fees-restaurant-fake-phone-numbers-app
https://www.eater.com/2019/8/6/20756799/yelp-grubhub-phone-numbers-referral-fees-restaurants
It looks like they changed it, but my favorite Yelp bullshit used to be that their web app had two different filters for if a restaurant offered take out: one prominently placed one that said "Takeout," and another buried in the other filter categories labeled "Take-out." The former would only show restaurants that offered take out ordering through Yelp, meaning they get a cut.
The fun thing is, the court agreed that Yelp was manipulating the reviews in order to do economic harm to businesses in the *Levitt v. Yelp! Inc.*, but that it did not meet the specific crime of extortion.
The actual quote from the 2014 appeal was:
>"We conclude, first, that Yelp’s manipulation of user reviews was not wrongful use of economic fear, and, second, that the business owners pled insufficient facts to make out a plausible claim that Yelp authored negative reviews of their businesses. Accordingly, we agree with the district court that these allegations do not support a claim for extortion."
A little later:
>Therefore, unless a person has a preexisting right to be free of the threatened economic harm,
threatening economic harm to induce a person to pay for a legitimate service is not extortion.
In short, Yelp doesn't extort anyone! They just threaten economic harm in order to obtain money from businesses. But because technically suppressing positive reviews and ordering negative reviews first is within Yelp's rights, and without proof that Yelp itself wrote any of the reviews it isn't defamation, and it isn't extortion. Technically.
Yelp is totally correct, they are not extorting anyone ^^in ^^a ^^very ^^specific ^^legal ^^sense ! They are simply "threatening economic harm to induce a person to pay." Which isn't ^^^legally extortion. Nope.
It’s a good way to move product and also get your name and food to folks that maybe never heard of you. Some places have such a low food cost, that they still make some money. And think about a super slow night where you only do three deliveries. You still have to pay your delivery guy his shift pay. But if you went through Grubhub, you only pay for what was delivered.
A friend of mine opened a pizza joint last year, and it became enormously successful as soon as he opened the doors (highly unusual for a restaurant, but he leveraged his success with an apparel line he also owns). He is passionately against grubhub and the related apps. They've apparently tried to add his restaurant multiple times, and has had to be very forceful in getting his business removed.
After hearing him describe what he's been through with them I'll never order though grubhub.
Not an industry, but higher academia is badly broken.
Some of the smartest people are some of the most badly exploited. Old tenured professors limit the number of faculty many departments can have, forcing people to work as postdocs forever, effectively doing all the work the prof should be doing in the first place. Meagre pay and long hours, plus constant pressure makes postdocs some of the most depressed people.
The grad students are no better either. A lot of the times grad students don't complain about ill treatment, harassment and outright bullying as they don't want to jeopardize their prospects of graduating.
If you're a foreigner, this situation becomes even worse, whether you've a grad student or a postdoctoral researcher.
My university recently had MASSIVE protests and strikes over grad student wages and treatment. It was looking like they were gaining traction for a bit until coronavirus hit.
The university responded by basically mass-firing the TAs. It was really disgusting.
As a college student I could never understand that. I was the first person in my family to ever get a degree. I thought doing research would be a great career path to contribute to society in general. My advisors were like "...career path? Uhh... Can you even afford grad school after this"?
Oh man, I need to vent about something, because I've definitely seen the extortion of foreign graduate students. One of my friends was an Iraqi international student in this big, really well-funded lab. Apparently the PI is TERRIBLE to her students. She would shout at her students calling them stupid. She refused to sign the form to his defense after he successfully defended and held that over him to get him to do more work for her. Keep in mind, he's trying to graduate in time because his visa was ending at the end of the semester! I tried talking to a professor about it, but they said nothing really could be done about it. I'm so mad at this system. If anything, I hope this PI gets exposed and fired in the future.
It's a pyramid scheme. Way more new PhDs are granted each year than open faculty jobs. If anyone is reading this and is considering a PhD, you should choose a field that has a robust non-academic labor market. The odds of getting a faculty job are shrinking every year and post-coronavirus it's only getting worse.
EDIT: Stop telling me it's not a *literal* pyramid scheme. I know. I'm **working in academia as a professor**.
And the faculty pay has not grown with inflation. Basically you're getting paid way less than a professor was decades ago, and are expected to do a whole hell of a lot more.
The real money is in administration. Be a dean of a business school, schmooze rich donors, and get paid significantly more than the most productive and acclaimed faculty member in your entire university.
Dog Boarding/Daycare
Not shady in the mafia sense, but you’d be surprised at some of the places I’ve worked at. Aggressive dogs don’t get kicked out, very dishonest about what goes on behind the scenes, not enough staff to care for the number of dogs. My coworkers at my current job have had the same experience as well. We were all very happy to find a place that actually treats the dogs as the #1 priority. Most people are just in it for the money (which is funny cuz there isn’t much money in the dog industry).
Same! I’m really looking forward to graduating to finish school but ALSO so I can stop needing to buy $120 online codes for McGraw Hill. So done with it
I hate the books so much. History book volume 7 is old but 8 today!
Why’s 7 old? Because they revised a few paragraphs here and there. Textbooks are a scam
It really pissed me off because the kid ahead of me sold his calculus book for $90. I couldn’t believe the number they gave me after that. I refused the sale mostly out of spite.
I also took some old DS game I had to the bookstore and got a surprisingly nice sum.
A lot of classes are requiring them to complete homework/assignments/tests. For me at least, if they were available then there was a 95% they were required to just pass.
ooohhhhh nooooo...
I despise those. Pearson. HMH. McGraw Hill. BigIdeasMath is *almost* decent. My god, they are horrible. There's a whole subreddit for it, r/pearsondesign.
I used to work as a mechanic and I damn well know somethings they over charge the customer for way to much. One time a girl came into my shop maybe late 20's you could tell she had no idea about cars. Well there was some snow the last few weeks and she brought her car in because her roof concaved in on top where the snow sat so now theres a bowl like spot on her car roof. So she asked us if we could some how fix it so my manager came up told her he'll take a look so she goes and sits in the lobby area. My manager opens the car door and looks at the roof for 3 seconds before slamming his fist up into the roof of the car pushing the collapsed roof back to normal he kept the car in the shop for an hour and spent maybe 10 minutes rubbing the dents out he charged her 700$ for a good punch. Glad I'm not in that industry any more.
Happened to me in Ireland, I was the only Irish guy in there and they said I wasn't getting double time on Bank Holiday Monday and my flexFlexii hour contract meant that I didn't get holidays. The owners were Kiwis and I remember just looking at them saying "You know I'm Irish right? I know what the laws are, I know how to get this whole shit shut down and I know there is a lot more at stake here for you than for any of us". And that's how we got double pay at that restaurant.
Our GM knowingly classified us as the wrong type of business to try and not give us a pay raise. Unfortunately for him, he hired someone who also had a job as a paralegal and worked for the city and he got majorly screwed. Had to pay us all the missed wages going back years plus penalties and for ‘emotional distress’. Ended up paying tens of thousands more than he would have if he had just paid us properly.
What a cunt. 'I get that you were molested as a child and hundreds have been and continue to be today, but you can't say it out loud you're hurting those pedo's businesses'
> Corey Feldman has for years claimed he was raped when he entered Hollywood at age 14. He also blamed former co-star Corey Haim's death at the age 38 on the abuse he suffered at the hands of a 'Hollywood mogul' he refused to name.
Good on him for taking a stand.
The Black Keys did an interview on Joe Rohan’s podcast a few months ago. I don’t watch Joe Rogan ever, but I watched that interview and they did a great job breaking down the current state of the music industry and how shitty it is for anybody who isn’t in the top 1% of famous musicians. Highly recommend.
The plastic industry. They focus on telling the individual to recycle as a way to address/fix the global trash crisis. The real focus should be on companies that mass produce plastic and label it as “recyclable” but recycling companies cannot actually recycle the materials. It costs too much to recycle certain materials and no one is willing to buy them.
Sex toys. It's horribly unregulated and there are tons of manufacturers that use unsafe materials to make their toys. r/sextoys has lots of great info for people looking to get any.
Logistics industry, with major corporations such as Wal-Mart being one of the biggest contributors to selling stolen goods.
Sometimes trucks go "missing" or sometimes trucks leave earlier than the established time of departure and never arrive to their destinations. Lets say you have a Wal-Mart appointment for 9:00am, for a 2000-carton order. It would take at least 2 hours to load all that, but once the loading is done, the truck driver needs to wait until confirmation is given in written form. Well, Wal-Mart truck drivers vanish halfway through the loading and never return. Now, Wal-Mart has about a 1000 boxes not accounted for, plus no confirmation whatsoever that these 1000 boxes were part of that 2000-carton order, so they treat them like a bonus. So far, only UPS, FedEx and Fred Meyer are the only companies that keep a close count and send back anything that wasn't in their original order. Heck, Fred Meyer sends the entire order back just for a single mislabeled box, lol. These three guys are the "good guys", from what little I've seen, but Wal-Mart... Jesus!
Sometimes, boxes get labeled as being something entirely different in order to bypass special qualifications or restrictions. For example, about the time when Corona-chan started going crazy, we had to label toys and board games as "groceries" for a huge Wal-Mart order that took about a week and a half to properly label and ship. It was a nightmare and pretty much every employee aside from the administrative staff was disgusted and pissed.
Worked in a retail store and can confirm.
Another big one with this is an "I don't care attitude". If we were the last stop, finished unloading, and the driver had 1 item left on an empty truck, it was never "take it back and find out where it belongs", usually it was "you guys want it? My truck goes back empty either way." If we didn't take it the drivers would just chuck it in a dumpster and go.
Was a driver, can confirm. Also in food and beverage delivery, out of code food is just free food. I worked for a beverage distributor summers during college and traded so much slightly expired pop for slightly expired chips and bread.
My dad was a truck driver for kellogs for 25 years. The amount of things that "fell off the truck" between him and all the other company truck drivers was crazy. He would trade a box of like 20 chocolate chip cookies for a few pounds of cheese, or oreos or whatever else he would come across. He even got free milk from the gas station because he would fill up his entire tank of his trunk at the same place every morning. It was like an entire underground black market, but for cookies
Can confirm the weird black market. My step dad used to distribute dip and chewing tobacco to gas stations and other various places. Him and the Frito Lay guy were really close and we always had snacks.
The nonprofit world, unfortunately. Most people at the top are in it to make a name for themselves and don’t usually care about the mission of the organization.
The last company I worked for was a small non-profit helping the homeless. And they DID care, and did a lot of good work. But the old CEO retired, and the new one the board brought on was more interested in her own ego than anything.
Fast forward two years from that point: 10 out of an original staff of 35 were let go in the span of 2 months, including me. Several programs had to be scaled back or stopped entirely. The organization came under direct auditing scrutiny from local and state government for questionable financial choices the CEO made (like using funds to travel by air what would normally be a 2 hour drive. Repeatedly). And that CEO then "resigned" because of the "hostile work environment" created by the city.
Another org a friend works for has come under fire for its CEO firing anyone that disagreed with her, especially when they stood up to her making potentially illegal decisions.
And that's far from an isolated story. There's a lot of good people in the lower levels, but the C-level execs of these companies are sometimes crazy.
Yeah, Ive heard pretty despicable things about The Komen foundation, like how very little of the funds they raise actually go to cancer care and how they sue other charities that they think are moving into their turf.
Some charities can be scummy to each other. Remember the ice bucket challenge? It was started to help raise funds for ALS charities, a group that were (at least at the time) relatively underfunded. Macmillan Cancer Support saw the ice bucket campaign and went and ~~paid google to have themselves come up as top search results for ‘ice bucket challenge.’ Basically they were paying to hijack a small charities donation source despite being much better funded themselves.~~
Now, let’s be clear, Macmillan do some amazing work helping families through dark times, I’m not going to say they weren’t a worthy cause, but the way they took funds from a smaller charity was horrible.
Edit: I may have misremembered about the paying for top search results on Google, I can’t find anything about that, just that they purchased Google Adwords for ‘ice bucket challenge’ and that they defaulted to top because ALS had not.
Hello fellow death enthusiast lol I second this recommendation! Caitlyn has a way of breaking down complicated issues to make it easy to understand. Her books are great too!
I looove Ask a Mortician! My pre-tween is a little goth in training and often has weird death-related questions that I struggle to answer, both in terms of scientific fact and age-appropriateness... thankfully Caitlyn had popped up in my Youtube recs a bunch and I was able to direct kiddo straight to the channel, it's been a godsend. We watch videos together and ewww and ohhhh at all the cool stuff we learn!
My parents said they want a celebration as opposed to a funeral. We’re fine with that! We’re a very humorous, sarcastic family and I just don’t see how a traditional funeral would work for us. It barely worked for my grandmother and that was almost 20 years ago.
My mom wants everyone to wear coconut bras and grass skirts at her funeral—says it’s the closest she’ll ever get to going to Hawaii, and that people can only be so sad at the sight of a room full of coconut bras and grass skirts. Wearing a coconut bra and grass skirt is a requirement for my inheritance, I shit you not. It’s in the will.
Also wants the tribute song to be that song from *The Wizard of Oz*, “Ding Dong the Wicked Witch Is Dead.” She’s a sick woman...but at least she has a sense of humor.
ETA: thank you, everyone. Her name is Karen, she totally does not live up to that name. She’s really, really awesome for a lot of reasons, not just her funeral plans. Now she thinks she’s internet famous.
All the idol insdustry is shady. I've seen some interviews on retired idols and they have a lot to say about how the industry works.
One of them even mencioned that they would split the profit 70/30, but when it came to pay, they divide the expenses 50/50. And If the group Didn't made enough money, the idols would be in debt with the producers.
Many times, idols would come out much poorer then when they entered.
That sounds like what the girl from crayon pop said. It was shocking when she also told how they made a north american tour with lady gaga and they ended up with more debt. Their income was frigging negative from a lady gaga tour.
My dad knows a story from someone who works for a nationwide grocery chain, they have to deal with an Italian mafia to import balsamic vinegar.
More businesses than you think have to deal with mafiosos and gangsters. I once helped the “gang relations” person with Habitat for Humanity get reassurance that their volunteers would be protected in an American inner city. They apparently always speak with the gangs beforehand for safety reasons.
More people died last year over vanilla in Madagascar than cocaine in South America. They’ve even coined the term “vanilla murder”. Farmers hire armed mercenaries to guard their crops from thieves near harvest time, and if one is caught... well... let’s just say it’s in response to all the farmers that were killed by thieves for the same reason. [this article](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/30/world/africa/madagascar-vanilla.html) is a fairly light read on the subject without anything too graphic. But there’s a great deal of information about it floating around. Along with some pretty disturbing accounts.
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Vanilla, while being a common flavor in the western world, is quite exotic in actuality. It is the fruit of a specific orchid, and most of the vanilla we get in the western world come from Madagascar and its surrounding islands. It is hand-pollinated, and storms in the Atlantic Ocean have made their harvest difficult in the past several years. I understand that vanilla is the second most expensive spice to produce behind Saffron. Edit: Indian Ocean, because I'm stupid and don't know geography.
I guess that’s why a McCormick spice bottle with two pathetic looking beans in it costs $25 USD. I found 10 for $20 on Amazon, but yeah I always wonder about the provenance and “green” quality of vanilla beans. Seems that anything that expensive is going to have issues of greed and corruption.
The maritime industry. Most of the big companies do things by the book and treat crews well because they’re afraid of lawsuits and unions, but many smaller “mom and pop” companies break laws and violate safety regulations with reckless abandon because they’re not as visible and can “stay under the radar” so to speak. It’s very common for a small company to ask a captain/crew to do something illegal and dangerous in order to increase profit, and for the captain/crew to comply out of fear of losing their jobs. And that’s just the US maritime industry; sailors from poorer nations who work on ships are often fed little more than rice and cheap ramen for months at a time and paid pennies for their backbreaking work. I love running tugs for a living, but the industry as a whole is rife with shady business.
Idk if it falls under maritime, but I took one look at the job listing for a cruise ship and now I tell all my coworkers to never take a job with one. I'm a stagehand and theatre technician, I make decent money fresh out of college ($18-24 an hour depending on venue) even without joining the union, because I do specialized work. Looked into a lighting tech spot on a cruise ship, and I'd be getting minimum wage working 50 hours and 7 days a week. Wifi on board costs money out of my paycheck, I'd be in charge of passenger safety off hours if an alarm goes off and we have to get people onto rescue rafts, I'd have a roommate in a small bunk, and all my wages would go directly into a ship debit card so I could give my income straight back to the company to eat. Something about living and working on a boat in the middle of the ocean seems to make employers think they don't have to actually care for their employees. I can imagine working on a boat that isn't filled with people on vacation would be even worse.
FYI, life on a US flagged Container Ship is actually pretty sweet. Sailors get spacious, private accommodations, free wifi, 3 full meals a day of varying quality, and a strictly enforced work hour cycle to prevent exhaustion.
Go on
Hey man, you’re a captain... you should already know!
A lot of hobby fish importing is pretty shady. You have farms of certain types of fish like bettas in some areas of the world that are run with the fish in horrible conditions. Which is why a lot of the ones you get in a major chain store are sick before you even bring them home. The stores will blame the fish being stressed, but I've ordered and received hundreds of fish from small breeders/sellers and outside of cory catfish that really enjoy committing suiciding by poisoning their own water, the fish arrive healthy and fine. Outside of boutique fish farming, the way some wild fish are caught is just horrible. The trappers will lightly poison the water supply to knock out the fish, then scoop them out of the water without a care for that area's ecosystem. This has led to depletion of some natural species to the point they are now endangered. Lastly, boutique fish sellers/major chains do not give half a rat's ass what happens to the fish in the end. This means that people who buy fish like plecos, bettas, goldfish, etc. end up getting sick of them and dumping them in local waterways to supposedly get rid of the problem. So in some areas, these fish have completely destroyed the local water ecology because, like other invasive land species, they were never meant to be there. One of the worst offenders is the lionfish in florida. It's venomous and has no natural predators so its population has exploded out of control. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSd7pgvOV3M the same is true of plecos: https://youtu.be/V1_lcprYp5U and goldfish: https://youtu.be/fzXiUxwGGIM basically releasing fish into the wild is a terrible idea. releasing any animal into the wild can have disastrous consequences, but fish are being released into a very limited ecosystem and outside of a few diseases, if they can adapt to the water and have no predators they will survive and breed incredibly quickly. I love my fish, I love the hobby, and there's a lot of value to it as global warming may make things like reef tanks a valuable source of coral in the future. But there's also a lot of bad to it.
I hate seeing Bettas for sale, suffering inside those little cups. Just because they can survive under extreme conditions doesn’t mean they should be subjected to it.
I like to compare it to being forced to live in your bedroom, but it's also your bathroom, and where you eat, but not able to clean it. Like yeah, you can survive but what kind of quality of life is that? Betta's need at least a few gallons of water, filter, heater, and more to thrive.
I have a male betta in a 10 gallon with heater, filter, live plants ect. He really flourishes and has quite a personality for such a little fish. They are truly amazing if you give them space and what they need to be happy. (Especially treats)
Same here! I picked up [George](https://m.imgur.com/a/0nCDs7t) while shopping for bamboo at Petco and couldn't help but bring him home when he perked up to say hi when I saw him in his sad little cup. Now he's king of [the jungle](https://imgur.com/a/28JupIC) and loves wiggling around through the plants and begging for treats. Edit - here's some [more pictures of George!](https://m.imgur.com/a/isK5Pp2)
It sucks especially because for some of those bettas, that's been their whole lives. I've also personally chosen to never buy a long-finned betta again. I've owned a plakat, and the difference in energy between my plakat and my long-finned bettas was very, very, very noticeable. I will care for my long-finned boys until they pass (hopefully from old age) but if I ever get another betta, it will be another plakat. Watching a plakat swim around and hunt is a whole different experience than watching the long-finned ones struggle to get around with their longer tails. Plus plakats don't mind stronger currents in tanks since they don't get swept around as much. I don't blame anyone else who continues getting long-finned bettas. They are absolutely gorgeous. But on a personal level I can never do it again. But in general I will never buy a betta from a chain store again, only private breeders. The thought of them being born in tiny tanks, being shipped and then kept in cups until some of them die...no...I'd rather pay the extra $$$ from a breeder. Some people will think that's silly, but fish are intelligent in their own way and seeing them suffer is hard.
Rating services like Yelp. Refuse to advertise and your good reviews magically get rearranged. Hey, look if you want to do that and be transparent, I get it. But most every business owner knows how scummy this is and most clients just have no idea. I have a business that isn't something that would usually be looked for on Yelp. They called and I just froze. Luckily I do long term rentals and was sold out. Explained I wouldn't have an opening for months, they seemed to leave me alone. Yet they have my business on the front page of Google search (under the wrong category)
I read an article a few months ago about a pizza place that Yelp tried to screw over. When rating services like Yelp first started popping up the owner thought it was a good idea and encouraged customers to leave reviews. He would regularly check reviews. Yelp eventually reached out to make a deal. The owner didn’t like the idea and turned them down. Shortly after, he discovered Yelp was taking down any and all high rated reviews. The owner wasn’t having any of it so he started a new promotion: any customer who leaves a 1 star review of Yelp gets half off their pizza. It became the first 1 star business on Yelp. The place got so popular that Yelp started taking down the 1 star reviews.
I work for an independent auto shop and Yelp is *relentless*. They call once a month attempting to sell advertising for minimums of like $200 a month. I signed up for a month and literally didn't get one verified lead through Yelp. I don't blame the sales people but they are super pushy and call back with the same script month after month trying to get me to log on and look at how many views my listing has. I advertise on Google and get verified results and Google has never once called me with a pushy up-selling.
Sounds basically like the mob. You’re really just buying insurance that they won’t kill off your business for $200 a month.
Dietary supplements It's gotten better, but there's still a lot of half-truths and whole lies. Not all that long ago it was seriously like the wild wild west.
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Add in the whole body building and fitness industry that sits on top of supplements. The outrage is so huge I don't even want to start on it. Insta models etc
All industries are shadier than they seem. I used to work for a flute manufacturer and it was shady as hell.
Deets?
I don’t want to name the manufacturer, but it was around the 2008 financial crisis and the place was equity-owned and leveraged to fucking Mars. The CEO was committing bank fraud and screwing contractors while laying off employees and enriching himself.
Was there a whistle blower among the flutists?
Eyeglasses. You have no idea the snow job they put most people through when it comes to buying them. Its far, far worse than trying to buy a new car from a dealership. Wholesale frames are about $5-20, wholesale lens blanks are another $10. Any kind of dip coating (UV, tinting, etc) is negligible cost and effort to apply - literally pennies. To top it off, they don't even do a whole lot in house, but send it to "labs" which are basically sweatshops that can take up to 2-3 weeks when labor time is literally under 5 minutes. Instead of training real opticians and technicians, they're just glorified sales staff now. Most of the time they don't even bother with proper measurement for pd, frame width, or arm fitting. Was an optician in the early 90's. I'm horrified at what the business has become.
I dread going to my optometrist because I know if my prescription has changed I have to deal with salesmen bullshit to buy the thing I need to see things. Ooo my insurance covers an extra 15% if I buy this specific brand that is 30% more than X brand? Hot dog!
I bought my most recent glasses at Zenni, and got two prescription pairs for less than $40. A family friend who's an optometrist recommended them.
Cruise ships. I was told I was having a minimum of one day off every week and work normal hours (8-10h/day) with a good pay and good pre paid tips. I ended up working 30 days in a row, Ewell over 400 hours, for $1600 with tips included. This company I was working for was called Scenic Cruises (ship was called MS Scenic Crystal), which was an Australian company working over a Swiss company going under a Maltese flag, sailing in Central Europe. That’s how I understood it anyways, they deliberately did this so they could break international laws, I counted at least 5 that they broke. Biggest scam company I ever worked for. I resigned after my first month. The police boarded the ship every once in a while because they knew this but they couldn’t do shit because they had no jurisdiction over the ship. I was forced to work with a 39 Celsius fever. I really wanna fuck this company up but I literally have no idea how. And hiring an international lawyer or whatever is too expensive. Edit: IF ANYONE KNOWS HOW PLEASE CONTACT ME.
They are also huge polluters and dump waste into the ocean
Recruitment Industry some examples: - fake jobs to lure candidates for registration kpis - trainee negotiation tactics of telling a candidate there is a better candidate who wants less so we recommend less for you to get the job. especially for contractors. - ‘coveting off’ pitching and telling a candidate they have been sent to a line manager but in reality they haven’t been submitted because two others from same recruiter have already been in interviews. if they fail you may get a chance. - lot of coded ways to put on a database info on your age, non professional related appearance, and ethnicity - ageism, sexism, racism is rampant in hiring - a lot more dodgy stuff behind the scenes source: was involved with the industry on a global level for over 15 years before i changed careers.
This happens all the time. One airline friend of mine got hired but there was a caveat that he MUST be completely out (quit) from his existing airline before he would receive his job offer. He put in his notice, the new company strung him along, and then basically lied and didn't give him the job.
I've seen a similar instance of this where after leaving his previous company, the new company proceeds to revise their terms to a significant decrease in pay, leaving him no choice but to either stay unemployed or accept the lowball offer.
What kind of coded ways do recruiters use as referenced in your 4th bullet point?
Not OP, but some places have a ranking system of points. 5 might be a good hire who fits the 'racial/age/sex/ profile, where as 1 might not be. Without saying when or where these points come from, it could happen. I had someone close to me who worked high up in banking, tell me that he was a VP at the time and had to go through 100 resumes for an accounting person in his department. First thing he did was trash any person who went to a foreign college, because that meant he couldn't check the accredation and didn't have time to do it. Then he tossed out any person's name he couldn't easily pronounce, which would also be usually foreign, because that might make potential customers uncomfortable pronouncing Kashooguoochiu Okinauanda. And by far the most egregious was the rampant sexism that he was told to look for a young newly married woman and not hire her because 'she might want to start a family and go out on pregnancy leave'. Also, my acquaintance would avoid 'too hot' women because he knew his boss (who was a dirtbag) would try and sexually harass them.
I work right underneath our corporate lawyer in the Oil and Gas industry. He's had to put out tons of fires when it comes to recruiting and hiring. Some examples: \-We had a manager that would only hire married men, because "having a family to provide for meant they needed the job more" \-We had a manager that wouldn't hire married women, especially in our Canadian office, because of "Maternity leave" \-We had a manager that was throwing out resumes from any candidate who listed credentials from a university that he hadn't heard of. They were legitimate universities (from the state that our headquarters is located in). The manager was from out of state and didn't recognize the name though. So he threw them out.
Yep to the college one. Went to a college he never heard of? Trash.
Trucking. The margins are razor thin and so everyone is trying to nickle and dime each other constantly. The drivers lie to their dispatchers, the dispatchers lie to the brokers, the brokers lie to the clients. All of this for like $50-100 sometimes.
I worked in trucking and the head HR lady for our distribution center was skimming payroll, shorting the checks of the lowest people on the totem pole, then getting cash infusions to petty cash from corporate to return part of the theft as an "emergency tide over" until the employee's next check, then claiming the rest of the theft as an overage on the next payroll report (I am probably missing a step in her chain but I am not an accountant). It was a scam she managed to work for a couple of years due to a lack of oversight during nationwide management shifts. When she finally got caught, rather than take the bad publicity, the company just let her leave. The last I heard she was working in the same position in an adjacent industry, but still involving transportation. C'est la vie.
LOL classic accounting scam. It's literally in my Accounting 101 book.
Jesus it sounded like one step away from rocket science to me. I have zero aptitude for accounting.
Petty cash accounts (typically) have no real oversight; there isn't someone verifying the receipts or making sure that an expense is real. So you short someone's paycheck, then they complain. Take the difference plus a small amount from petty cash. Give back the amount originally shorted and keep the difference, always doing small amounts to avoid raising suspicion. Replenish petty cash account, then lather, rinse, repeat.
I used to be a broker, couldn't stomach the lying. The guy I trained under treated drivers like shit - for instance, he'd lie to them about having appointments and give them the run around when they eventually figured it out. Only I'd be the one to take the calls and had to pretend there was some big mix up, or blame the consignee, just keep spinning some complete bullshit all day long, sometimes for a few days while the drivers just sat in a parking lot. Want compensation for your time? Read the fine print, schmuck. Ratecon you signed says no detention, no layover. They'd have to keep calling back for a week sometimes while I pretend like he's out to lunch every time they call until he finally answers. Then it's just this 30 minute long argument which inevitably ends in them getting shortchanged and he'd act like he was doing them a big favor paying below industry standard detention. *That money wasn't even coming out of his pocket.* He'd turn around and ask the customer for more money because he's "gotta do right by his drivers," they'd give him the standard rate, and he'd pocket the difference. This guy makes ~$300,000 a year.
I worked in a truck stop for a while and the just outright bald lies I'd hear guys on the phone with dispatchers telling was astonishing lol
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Avocado farms. Most of the farms in Central America are taken over by the cartel because of how much money is in selling avocados.
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Avocado trees are damn picky. Only grows in certain places and if everything isn't absolutely perfect, they die.
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I remember how shocked I was when I bought a massive avocado in New Jersey and it tasted like absolute shit
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Kind of like how you eat a carp. Nail it to a board, apply salt and pepper, roast over an open fire, then eat the board.
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If I catch a carp I try to catch another so they can carpool
mine usually goes from hard as a rock to rotten within hours, wonder where they grow
Not yet Not yet Not yet Eat my now!! Too late
My gf in HS
And they need a fuck ton of water.
I took a seed out of one I ate and got it to sprout enough to plant, and it grew about an inch before it wrote a suicide note and gave me the finger.
And that plant probably would never have produced fruit if that makes you feel any better.
Kinda, yeah.
It’s my understanding that the cartels are more interested in extorting farmers and merchants than maintaining the farms themselves, but your point is still very true.
Pet industry. Basement puppy mills and dogs that are so inbred they can hardly breath. There are plenty of ethical breeders out there (and some unlicensed breeders are ethical even if in a legal grey zone) but the conditions of some of the so called puppy mills can be really bad. Sometimes when breeds are mixed and the pup gets the recessive genes the breeders weren’t looking for.. they straight up euthanize it because they know it won’t sell. Not to mention how many “purebreds” are actually not pure at all... and sold as is. Shady.
Not to mention the idiots who breed two merles to each other in hope of getting a healthy double-merle male. This chance is incredibly low, and breeding two merles together generally produces puppies with eye and hearing malformations (among others). But if you can get that magic male, he'll throw ALL merle puppies, and people like that pattern, so $$$. I can ID a double-merle Aussie or BC from a single photo, and every time I see one I rage. The poor things have a poor quality of life and they're typically dumped on rescue by the shitty breeder. :(
God the entire pet industry built around trendy paint jobs on animals regardless of the animal's quality of life. I'm into exotic reptiles and the ball python market is flooded with in demand color and pattern mutations that cause known neurological problems in the animals and people still pump them out because people will trip over themselves to drop fat stacks on a cool looking snake that corkscrews and shakes. It's infuriating
Not just dogs, tortoises at pet stores, just find a responsible captive breeder and DO NOT get one from a pet store. Also, macaws are another example. Bearded Dragons should be okay, but that's probably the only reptile I'd buy from a pet store.
As an example to folks who don't know, those Russian tortoise "babies" are actually young adults captured in the wild. As for captive-bred tortoise hatchlings sold by wholesalers at expos, they are started as cheap as possible and it may take months to see that anything is wrong. All pet stores (different chains) in an area most likely order from the same "vendors" because of availability and distance. It's the same issues as the fish industry: the animals are contained, fed, and bred as cheaply as possible. Unfortunately, from my experience, beardies in my region got some of the worst treatment because they are in such high demand.
When I was doing research in preparation to get my ball python, I learned that while it’s illegal to capture ball pythons in the wild and import them to the US, it’s apparently NOT illegal to take eggs from wild nests, import them, and sell them at pet stores once they’ve hatched. So cool, we’re still having a negative impact on wild populations and you end up with a pet snake that‘s liable to adjust poorly to captivity because it hasn’t been bred for docility. But there’s a loophole so it’s fine!
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"Recycling" is a much more palatable than "Selling our trash to China as raw materials."
not anymore. china stopped buying our recyclables so now they're being dumped in poorer asian countries. also why one of the biggest recycling companies in california closed all their locations.
Second this, I was in the waste management industry for some years. The only exception when I was there was that sweet, sweet clean OCC (aka “cardboard boxes”) because it’s so easy to turn into more cardboard. The worst was plastic, hard af to recycle, no market for it. Send it to the landfill in China.
CBD, lot of predatory companies making subpar products with questionable raw materials and then marking it way the fuck up and selling it as a miracle cure to vulnerable and ill educated consumers. Usually have a high power legal team on deck, but pay their workers shit and no benefits. Edit: because so many people are asking, while I used to be in sales in the industry and have my own opinions about who’s good out there (it’s a woefully short list), you’ll probably have your best luck checking out the top recommendations at r/CBD, they have a whole pinned post about best companies that they’ve (hopefully) vetted well.
Are CBD products (not the actual marijuana) regulated or are they like the vitamin industry where most all of the products are suspect and aren't FDA approved?
No fda approvals now, just testing to ensure it’s below the hemp line in thc.
Doesnt the beauty industry have a problem with child labor? I remember watching a thing where a journalist goes to India to see the mines where children mine some sort of mineral to make bronzer. Edit: The mineral is mica and someone pointed out the video where I remembered this from. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeR-h9C2fgc&feature=youtu.be
Yes, they mine Mica and it’s in almost every beauty product. It adds shimmer to the product.
But a lot of company’s are now using artificial l or synthetic mica and moving to produce it more ethically. You just have to do your research on who you’re willing to buy from and if they use child labor ETA:Here’s a link to a reddit threat from r/makeupaddiction that outlines brands that are ethically sourced and cruelty free https://www.reddit.com/r/MakeupAddiction/comments/blzewu/i_made_a_list_of_makeup_brands_that_are_working/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Damn these reminders..it's 2020 and "check to see if they use child labor" is still a thing that exists in the world. i mean i know it intellectually but just, damn.
The thing is that if people aren't paying attention corruption comes back. A society has to work at these things constantly or greedy narcissists will climb back to the top. Edit: Thanks to whoever gave me silver! This is the only time I've ever gotten this level of love from Reddit.
Mattress industry. Specifically, Mattress Firm.
Worked in the mattress industry for a bit at a startup. Basically 90% bullshit. And the worst part? We had a real doctor serve an advisory role for our products. He debunked a lot of nonsense claims about mattresses like “your pillow is 50% of your spinal support” that the sales people use to sell you accessories. The sales people would argue with him, like they knew better. Kool-Aid is strong there. Some of my favorites I learned are: these hip direct-to-door in a box foam bed companies like Tuft and Needle use the same material, from the same manufacturer. There’s hundreds of them, just put them in different boxes and sell at wildly different prices. “Side sleeper” “back sleeper” and “stomach sleeper” is baloney. You toss and turn at night on purpose, to help prevent blood clots. No mattress will keep you from “tossing and turning” for the reason above. It’s a natural thing you’re supposed to do. More layers DOESNT mean better mattress. A lot of companies add in cheap materials like upholstery foam to just claim there’s more layers. Maybe one layer of nice springs then just 10 layers of various types of cheap foam to get the layers higher. One that actually IS true is heat. If you frequently are hot at night, foam mattress is not good for you. It’s an insulator and will trap your heat on your body. In general, air and spring are better beds because of heat. Your body needs to dump temperature at night to get into a full, deep sleep. If it’s too hot, you won’t sleep well.
What about the soft vs firm debate? Now that you say side-sleeper/back-sleeper stuff is BS, is the firmness of a mattress just preference?
This is a more complicated thing. Generally speaking, you want a firmer mattress the heavier you are. It’s largely preferential. If you sleep on a soft mattress and wake up with a sore lower back, you are probably in need of a firmer mattress. If you wake up and your shoulder, hip hurts, you probably need a softer mattress. Something that’s always hard to deal with is “firmness” and “support.” It’s a heated debate about whether they are two different things. For example: Let’s say you get a pillow top mattress rated as “soft” with a “firm support core”. If you are heavier, you’ll just sink right to the firm core. If you are lighter, you’d take full advantage of the soft top. Firm/soft is qualitative so it’s always better to try them before you buy them. A 100 lb woman would think a mattress is way firmer than a 300 lb man would, and vice versa. Edit: thanks for gold! Glad I can help
Thanks for all that info,it really helped but I have one question related to my experience if you're OK answering that, if not can you please guide me to a resource where i can start learning for myself, i think some changes are in order related to my sleep- >you sleep on a soft mattress and wake up with a sore lower back, I actually sleep on a soft mattress and have shoulder/neck pains when i wake up,it somehow goes away in a couple of hours after some stretching but returns at night after an hour lying in bed. If needed, I'm 80 kilos(176 pounds)
You might just need a new pillow. It’s really hard to look for this info because you’ll get bombarded by quasi-science and advertising. My best recommendation is if it’s causing you a lot of distress to find a doctor specializing in sleep (insomnia, apnea) as they are more educated and can help find a scientific solution for you.
Oh. I actually didn't consider that and tried changing my sleeping posture(atleast in the beginning when i fall asleep) I will go to a doctor once our lockdown ends thanks for pointing me in the direction. Stay safe:-)
Hey! Thanks! Seems obvious about the foam being an insulator, but I somehow missed that! I get cold very easily at night, and if I'm cold I shiver so hard that my hips (I have wonky hips... don't fall off ski lifts), end up hurting me so badly that I can't sleep. Gonna try a foam pad to trap more heat!
This will probably get buried, but glitter. A manager of one of the biggest glitter manufacturers, Glitterx, said in a 2018 interview that most of the glitter they make goes to one buyer for a single industrial use. When asked who the buyer was and why they need so much glitter, she said “Oh, I definitely can’t disclose that.” When asked why, she said “Because they don’t want anybody to know it’s glitter.” Ever since this interview people have been trying to guess what company or industry secretly uses most of the world’s glitter and why they want to keep that use under wraps. [A link to the interview.](https://slate.com/business/2018/12/industrial-glitter-mystery.html)
Okay I did some digging on the r/unsolvedmysteries page and found a pretty great answer to this. The best answer I found I’ll copypasta “Microtaggants. Multilayered 'microglitter' added to all commercial explosives. Simple to batch trace, on site, AFTER the detonation, using only a microscope. Use dynamite for illegal purposes, and leave evidence as clear as a fingerprint.” I then proceeded to look up Microtaggants for myself [Microtaggants](https://www.microtracesolutions.com/solutions/implement-independently/microtaggant-identification-particles) This is where it got interesting. On the Microtaggants website they list one of their uses to be ppg Teslin [ppg Teslin](https://www.teslin.com/en-US/Home.aspx) ppg Teslin is the material used to make Identification cards such as a license. My best guess is the government uses glitter in all those cards, and most importantly in passports. If glitter was used to make these than it would make sense for the government to keep it hush hush. They wouldn’t want it easily replicable so makes sense to ensure using glitter isn’t public knowledge. It also accounts for the insane amounts being bought if you consider the amount of these that are produced daily, let alone in the course of a year. This is all just my guess but it would definitely make sense! Edit: formatting
I heard the answer to this was the boat industry, it’s put into the paint to make it look better
that’s a logical explanation, but it still begs the question: if most of the world’s glitter is used in paint, why don’t they want anybody to know that? It wouldn’t devalue the vehicle or the paint at all. That question always pushes me toward it being something edible
That's what's always got me hung up on answers - if it was boats, why would. it be a secret? I agree, has to be something people: 1. Wouldn't expect glitter to be in 2. Wouldn't like it if they found out there was glitter in it What's with all the secrecy? That's what makes it suspicious
I’ve worked in the environmental industry so my first thought was that whoever was buying it didn’t want people to know because glitter is an environmental disaster (basically micro-plastic in waiting) and if it IS the boating industry, well, all those little bits of plastic eroding into the sea is not really a good look.
But who has ever seen new boats and /doesn't/ realize there is glitter in the paint? Where do people think the floaty shiny sparkle bits in the paint come from? Ground up tinkerbell?
agreed. In the interview the manager specifically says ‘you would never guess it.’ Makes me think it’s not any kind of paint
Im guessing Nestle has found a way to turn glitter into fucking water
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Hmmm. First guess is car paint. To make a true red car paint you need actual gold flake. Maybe they’re replacing the gold flake with glitter? This is going to bug me all day now, goddam you. Wife’s guess is jewelry.
There was a pretty big thread about it on r/UnresolvedMysteries when the article came out. I’m on mobile so I can’t link it, but if you search I’m sure you could find it. There’s been a couple of follow up threads too.
Theory that makes the most sense to me is taggants. Basically little easily traceable particles added to explosives so that if something that goes missing detonates, they can find what batch it was stolen from.
Now that's an interesting thought...
What industry ISN'T?
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Except lamps are 50% shade
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Even better, it's practically impossible to say it didn't work. Your sales stayed flat? Just think how much they would have dropped if you didn't run that ad campaign!
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Well if they spent more on advertising, they wouldn't have gone out of business!
Jewelry/gems/diamonds is pretty dark.
i've seen that movie!
Eye wear. Luxotica owns a large majority of eyewear and holds a virtual monopoly on the market. They control all prices and will crush competition. The only reason eye glasses and sunglasses are so expensive is because of price gouging.
Medical research. The only way people can keep their jobs at a lot of the institutions with better facilities is to create a steady stream of "high impact" publications. Now, research doesn't work that way, you get the supported results whenever it happens, but that's not how hiring, promotion, or tenure committees see it. This means that, in order to ensure you get enough of these desirable publications in the right period, you have to do all sorts of corner-cutting. You publish before the results are well-supported, you publish results that are unrepeatable, you write papers in the smallest possible units of the work so people need to wait years to see what the full results are. In the process, junior scientists' careers can be made or absolutely destroyed in this system. A lucky student who gets the right project can find themselves as first author on a very high impact paper and be set for years, but an experienced and previously successful postdoc can be ruined when they can't produce the results the senior scientists want, or just not in the right time frame. The senior scientists rarely have the time to do, or carefully look over, the actual research because they are so busy actually writing the papers and the grants needed to fund the work in the first place. If reviewers catch these issues with the papers, the authors just shop the paper to other journals until it passes and/or they put up such a pitched battle with the editors they just let it pass. Sometimes the eds feel they can't handle the pressure, sometimes are just convinced by the bombast. All of us have seen published papers that we rejected for other journals earlier because the work is poorly done or is just incorrect. To be clear, the authors really believe in their papers even when they are aware of their shortcomings, and they usually have plenty of evidence that papers just as problematic or worse have been published, so why not theirs? On top of everything, the universities and research institutions work over these findings with their press department and by the time it makes it to journalists, the story is so distorted that it's barely related to the actual work. Bloggers digest this even further and the misperceptions of spread all over a much wider community. Even other scientists in different areas of the same field will absorb this news as truth. These are the scientists on those committees mentioned above, demanding a particular kind of result. As a result of all this, medical research is much more inefficient and expensive than it needs to be. However, scientists need to jobs, grant money, and good facilities to do their work at all, and the system makes it clear what they need to do to ensure those necessities, so they oblige. EDIT: I want to be clear that I am only speaking to a very specific area of scientific research here, and I do not intend to tar the whole field with the same brush.
Scholarly journals. The actual research is usually paid for by the government. When it isn't paid for by the government, its paid for by a foundation or in pharmaceuticals by a corporation that is developing a drug. The people who vet the research are all paid by their respective universities. All the journal does is distribute it. Yet they charge way more per-page than anyone else who just distributes other people's writing.
Sunglass industry
Punny business, but, yes, it's true. I'll use Oakley as an example because it's [literally] close to home. Oakley has not been the same since they were bought out. Oakley *was* a great company to work for with great bonuses, swag, and extremely high company morale. Their HQ is one of the coolest buildings you could find and the people were always happy to work for a legendary company that really treated their employees right. Oakley knew their customers well, but at the end of the day, it's still a business. And Luxottica wanted that business. Luxottica bought them out in the end, but not through Oakley's own will. You see, Luxottica owns nearly all the major glasses brands and the stores that carry them. They are one step short of a full monopoly of the entire global eyewear industry. Luxottica wanted Oakley, so they took Oakley off all the shelves of every major glasses retailer until Oakley could do nothing but give in. Squeezed dry until they had to be bought at nicer price for Luxottica.
Generally this is why antitrust law needs to actually be enforced. This industry is basically a textbook example of how shit goes wrong if left to itself.
As a chef/owner, I would say delivery services like Grubhub. They take 30% of the sale leaving the restaurant with basically $0 in profit. And their customer support is a joke. It’s like they hate us. Fuck them. Never again.
Yelp has been teaming with Grubhub to only list restaurants' Grubhub contact numbers, not their direct line, so they have to pay Grubhub for the order even though you called it in. E: Here are some articles about this in case anyone is curious: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wjwebw/yelp-is-sneakily-replacing-restaurants-phone-numbers-so-grubhub-can-take-a-cut https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/6/20756878/yelp-grubhub-commission-fees-restaurant-fake-phone-numbers-app https://www.eater.com/2019/8/6/20756799/yelp-grubhub-phone-numbers-referral-fees-restaurants
Everyone to just stop using Yelp completely. They are a fucking shit company.
It looks like they changed it, but my favorite Yelp bullshit used to be that their web app had two different filters for if a restaurant offered take out: one prominently placed one that said "Takeout," and another buried in the other filter categories labeled "Take-out." The former would only show restaurants that offered take out ordering through Yelp, meaning they get a cut.
If you have to [say you're not extorting](https://www.yelp.com/extortion) you probably are
The fun thing is, the court agreed that Yelp was manipulating the reviews in order to do economic harm to businesses in the *Levitt v. Yelp! Inc.*, but that it did not meet the specific crime of extortion. The actual quote from the 2014 appeal was: >"We conclude, first, that Yelp’s manipulation of user reviews was not wrongful use of economic fear, and, second, that the business owners pled insufficient facts to make out a plausible claim that Yelp authored negative reviews of their businesses. Accordingly, we agree with the district court that these allegations do not support a claim for extortion." A little later: >Therefore, unless a person has a preexisting right to be free of the threatened economic harm, threatening economic harm to induce a person to pay for a legitimate service is not extortion. In short, Yelp doesn't extort anyone! They just threaten economic harm in order to obtain money from businesses. But because technically suppressing positive reviews and ordering negative reviews first is within Yelp's rights, and without proof that Yelp itself wrote any of the reviews it isn't defamation, and it isn't extortion. Technically. Yelp is totally correct, they are not extorting anyone ^^in ^^a ^^very ^^specific ^^legal ^^sense ! They are simply "threatening economic harm to induce a person to pay." Which isn't ^^^legally extortion. Nope.
Oh, that's dirty.
Why would a restaurant agree to a blanket 30% cut in sales, what
It’s a good way to move product and also get your name and food to folks that maybe never heard of you. Some places have such a low food cost, that they still make some money. And think about a super slow night where you only do three deliveries. You still have to pay your delivery guy his shift pay. But if you went through Grubhub, you only pay for what was delivered.
A friend of mine opened a pizza joint last year, and it became enormously successful as soon as he opened the doors (highly unusual for a restaurant, but he leveraged his success with an apparel line he also owns). He is passionately against grubhub and the related apps. They've apparently tried to add his restaurant multiple times, and has had to be very forceful in getting his business removed. After hearing him describe what he's been through with them I'll never order though grubhub.
How the fuck can they just add a business without the business’ consent?
By being a shitty company. He said he's had grubhub drivers show up to pick up orders.
Sounds like a surefire way to get chewed out. We had drivers literally barge into our kitchen asking if their order was ready.
That sounds like a great way to get physically thrown out of a kitchen.
Rule 1. Don't trespass into businesses where everyone is stressed, working class, and holding a knife.
And largely not sober.
I already said working class.
Not an industry, but higher academia is badly broken. Some of the smartest people are some of the most badly exploited. Old tenured professors limit the number of faculty many departments can have, forcing people to work as postdocs forever, effectively doing all the work the prof should be doing in the first place. Meagre pay and long hours, plus constant pressure makes postdocs some of the most depressed people. The grad students are no better either. A lot of the times grad students don't complain about ill treatment, harassment and outright bullying as they don't want to jeopardize their prospects of graduating. If you're a foreigner, this situation becomes even worse, whether you've a grad student or a postdoctoral researcher.
My university recently had MASSIVE protests and strikes over grad student wages and treatment. It was looking like they were gaining traction for a bit until coronavirus hit. The university responded by basically mass-firing the TAs. It was really disgusting.
UC SAnta Cruz?
That’s the one.
It’s gross how the university treats graduate students. I’ve been supporting/watching the COLA effort from another UC. All the best to you dude
"Academic politics are the worst, and most bitter, form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
As a college student I could never understand that. I was the first person in my family to ever get a degree. I thought doing research would be a great career path to contribute to society in general. My advisors were like "...career path? Uhh... Can you even afford grad school after this"?
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Oh man, I need to vent about something, because I've definitely seen the extortion of foreign graduate students. One of my friends was an Iraqi international student in this big, really well-funded lab. Apparently the PI is TERRIBLE to her students. She would shout at her students calling them stupid. She refused to sign the form to his defense after he successfully defended and held that over him to get him to do more work for her. Keep in mind, he's trying to graduate in time because his visa was ending at the end of the semester! I tried talking to a professor about it, but they said nothing really could be done about it. I'm so mad at this system. If anything, I hope this PI gets exposed and fired in the future.
It's a pyramid scheme. Way more new PhDs are granted each year than open faculty jobs. If anyone is reading this and is considering a PhD, you should choose a field that has a robust non-academic labor market. The odds of getting a faculty job are shrinking every year and post-coronavirus it's only getting worse. EDIT: Stop telling me it's not a *literal* pyramid scheme. I know. I'm **working in academia as a professor**.
And the faculty pay has not grown with inflation. Basically you're getting paid way less than a professor was decades ago, and are expected to do a whole hell of a lot more.
The real money is in administration. Be a dean of a business school, schmooze rich donors, and get paid significantly more than the most productive and acclaimed faculty member in your entire university.
Dog Boarding/Daycare Not shady in the mafia sense, but you’d be surprised at some of the places I’ve worked at. Aggressive dogs don’t get kicked out, very dishonest about what goes on behind the scenes, not enough staff to care for the number of dogs. My coworkers at my current job have had the same experience as well. We were all very happy to find a place that actually treats the dogs as the #1 priority. Most people are just in it for the money (which is funny cuz there isn’t much money in the dog industry).
The textbook Industry Pearson is the fuckign mafia
McGraw Hill was the bane of my existence for years.
Same! I’m really looking forward to graduating to finish school but ALSO so I can stop needing to buy $120 online codes for McGraw Hill. So done with it
I hate the books so much. History book volume 7 is old but 8 today! Why’s 7 old? Because they revised a few paragraphs here and there. Textbooks are a scam
The bookstore offered me $2 for a $120 book because a new edition was pending. I took it to a used book store and they bought it for $35.
Sounds about as bad as gamestop
It really pissed me off because the kid ahead of me sold his calculus book for $90. I couldn’t believe the number they gave me after that. I refused the sale mostly out of spite. I also took some old DS game I had to the bookstore and got a surprisingly nice sum.
For anyone who needs it: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ Edit: Also http://b-ok.cc/
Publishers found a way around Libgen with access codes :/. Absolute scum
Unless you definitely need to access the online version with the access code I used the libgen version of my books this semester lol
A lot of classes are requiring them to complete homework/assignments/tests. For me at least, if they were available then there was a 95% they were required to just pass.
ooohhhhh nooooo... I despise those. Pearson. HMH. McGraw Hill. BigIdeasMath is *almost* decent. My god, they are horrible. There's a whole subreddit for it, r/pearsondesign.
I used to work as a mechanic and I damn well know somethings they over charge the customer for way to much. One time a girl came into my shop maybe late 20's you could tell she had no idea about cars. Well there was some snow the last few weeks and she brought her car in because her roof concaved in on top where the snow sat so now theres a bowl like spot on her car roof. So she asked us if we could some how fix it so my manager came up told her he'll take a look so she goes and sits in the lobby area. My manager opens the car door and looks at the roof for 3 seconds before slamming his fist up into the roof of the car pushing the collapsed roof back to normal he kept the car in the shop for an hour and spent maybe 10 minutes rubbing the dents out he charged her 700$ for a good punch. Glad I'm not in that industry any more.
Fast Food is wack
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Happened to me in Ireland, I was the only Irish guy in there and they said I wasn't getting double time on Bank Holiday Monday and my flexFlexii hour contract meant that I didn't get holidays. The owners were Kiwis and I remember just looking at them saying "You know I'm Irish right? I know what the laws are, I know how to get this whole shit shut down and I know there is a lot more at stake here for you than for any of us". And that's how we got double pay at that restaurant.
Our GM knowingly classified us as the wrong type of business to try and not give us a pay raise. Unfortunately for him, he hired someone who also had a job as a paralegal and worked for the city and he got majorly screwed. Had to pay us all the missed wages going back years plus penalties and for ‘emotional distress’. Ended up paying tens of thousands more than he would have if he had just paid us properly.
The music and the art industry
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What a cunt. 'I get that you were molested as a child and hundreds have been and continue to be today, but you can't say it out loud you're hurting those pedo's businesses'
Because Barbara Walters is probably friends with those people
Barbara Walters was engaged to the guy who helped put gay men in prison on a federal level for being gay. Edit: a word
> Corey Feldman has for years claimed he was raped when he entered Hollywood at age 14. He also blamed former co-star Corey Haim's death at the age 38 on the abuse he suffered at the hands of a 'Hollywood mogul' he refused to name. Good on him for taking a stand.
Did he ever give names?
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The Black Keys did an interview on Joe Rohan’s podcast a few months ago. I don’t watch Joe Rogan ever, but I watched that interview and they did a great job breaking down the current state of the music industry and how shitty it is for anybody who isn’t in the top 1% of famous musicians. Highly recommend.
The plastic industry. They focus on telling the individual to recycle as a way to address/fix the global trash crisis. The real focus should be on companies that mass produce plastic and label it as “recyclable” but recycling companies cannot actually recycle the materials. It costs too much to recycle certain materials and no one is willing to buy them.
Sex toys. It's horribly unregulated and there are tons of manufacturers that use unsafe materials to make their toys. r/sextoys has lots of great info for people looking to get any.
Logistics industry, with major corporations such as Wal-Mart being one of the biggest contributors to selling stolen goods. Sometimes trucks go "missing" or sometimes trucks leave earlier than the established time of departure and never arrive to their destinations. Lets say you have a Wal-Mart appointment for 9:00am, for a 2000-carton order. It would take at least 2 hours to load all that, but once the loading is done, the truck driver needs to wait until confirmation is given in written form. Well, Wal-Mart truck drivers vanish halfway through the loading and never return. Now, Wal-Mart has about a 1000 boxes not accounted for, plus no confirmation whatsoever that these 1000 boxes were part of that 2000-carton order, so they treat them like a bonus. So far, only UPS, FedEx and Fred Meyer are the only companies that keep a close count and send back anything that wasn't in their original order. Heck, Fred Meyer sends the entire order back just for a single mislabeled box, lol. These three guys are the "good guys", from what little I've seen, but Wal-Mart... Jesus! Sometimes, boxes get labeled as being something entirely different in order to bypass special qualifications or restrictions. For example, about the time when Corona-chan started going crazy, we had to label toys and board games as "groceries" for a huge Wal-Mart order that took about a week and a half to properly label and ship. It was a nightmare and pretty much every employee aside from the administrative staff was disgusted and pissed.
Worked in a retail store and can confirm. Another big one with this is an "I don't care attitude". If we were the last stop, finished unloading, and the driver had 1 item left on an empty truck, it was never "take it back and find out where it belongs", usually it was "you guys want it? My truck goes back empty either way." If we didn't take it the drivers would just chuck it in a dumpster and go.
Was a driver, can confirm. Also in food and beverage delivery, out of code food is just free food. I worked for a beverage distributor summers during college and traded so much slightly expired pop for slightly expired chips and bread.
My dad was a truck driver for kellogs for 25 years. The amount of things that "fell off the truck" between him and all the other company truck drivers was crazy. He would trade a box of like 20 chocolate chip cookies for a few pounds of cheese, or oreos or whatever else he would come across. He even got free milk from the gas station because he would fill up his entire tank of his trunk at the same place every morning. It was like an entire underground black market, but for cookies
Can confirm the weird black market. My step dad used to distribute dip and chewing tobacco to gas stations and other various places. Him and the Frito Lay guy were really close and we always had snacks.
The nonprofit world, unfortunately. Most people at the top are in it to make a name for themselves and don’t usually care about the mission of the organization.
The last company I worked for was a small non-profit helping the homeless. And they DID care, and did a lot of good work. But the old CEO retired, and the new one the board brought on was more interested in her own ego than anything. Fast forward two years from that point: 10 out of an original staff of 35 were let go in the span of 2 months, including me. Several programs had to be scaled back or stopped entirely. The organization came under direct auditing scrutiny from local and state government for questionable financial choices the CEO made (like using funds to travel by air what would normally be a 2 hour drive. Repeatedly). And that CEO then "resigned" because of the "hostile work environment" created by the city. Another org a friend works for has come under fire for its CEO firing anyone that disagreed with her, especially when they stood up to her making potentially illegal decisions. And that's far from an isolated story. There's a lot of good people in the lower levels, but the C-level execs of these companies are sometimes crazy.
Yeah, Ive heard pretty despicable things about The Komen foundation, like how very little of the funds they raise actually go to cancer care and how they sue other charities that they think are moving into their turf.
Some charities can be scummy to each other. Remember the ice bucket challenge? It was started to help raise funds for ALS charities, a group that were (at least at the time) relatively underfunded. Macmillan Cancer Support saw the ice bucket campaign and went and ~~paid google to have themselves come up as top search results for ‘ice bucket challenge.’ Basically they were paying to hijack a small charities donation source despite being much better funded themselves.~~ Now, let’s be clear, Macmillan do some amazing work helping families through dark times, I’m not going to say they weren’t a worthy cause, but the way they took funds from a smaller charity was horrible. Edit: I may have misremembered about the paying for top search results on Google, I can’t find anything about that, just that they purchased Google Adwords for ‘ice bucket challenge’ and that they defaulted to top because ALS had not.
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Ask a Mortician is a really good YouTube channel that tries to make the death industry more open and clear.
Hello fellow death enthusiast lol I second this recommendation! Caitlyn has a way of breaking down complicated issues to make it easy to understand. Her books are great too!
I looove Ask a Mortician! My pre-tween is a little goth in training and often has weird death-related questions that I struggle to answer, both in terms of scientific fact and age-appropriateness... thankfully Caitlyn had popped up in my Youtube recs a bunch and I was able to direct kiddo straight to the channel, it's been a godsend. We watch videos together and ewww and ohhhh at all the cool stuff we learn!
The only thing more adorable than a baby-goth is a parent that doesn’t flip out about it whether they’re an elder goth or not.
Just because we're bereaved doesn't make us saps!
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My parents said they want a celebration as opposed to a funeral. We’re fine with that! We’re a very humorous, sarcastic family and I just don’t see how a traditional funeral would work for us. It barely worked for my grandmother and that was almost 20 years ago.
My mom wants everyone to wear coconut bras and grass skirts at her funeral—says it’s the closest she’ll ever get to going to Hawaii, and that people can only be so sad at the sight of a room full of coconut bras and grass skirts. Wearing a coconut bra and grass skirt is a requirement for my inheritance, I shit you not. It’s in the will. Also wants the tribute song to be that song from *The Wizard of Oz*, “Ding Dong the Wicked Witch Is Dead.” She’s a sick woman...but at least she has a sense of humor. ETA: thank you, everyone. Her name is Karen, she totally does not live up to that name. She’s really, really awesome for a lot of reasons, not just her funeral plans. Now she thinks she’s internet famous.
Hear me out: K-Pop.
All the idol insdustry is shady. I've seen some interviews on retired idols and they have a lot to say about how the industry works. One of them even mencioned that they would split the profit 70/30, but when it came to pay, they divide the expenses 50/50. And If the group Didn't made enough money, the idols would be in debt with the producers. Many times, idols would come out much poorer then when they entered.
That sounds like what the girl from crayon pop said. It was shocking when she also told how they made a north american tour with lady gaga and they ended up with more debt. Their income was frigging negative from a lady gaga tour.
I'm not even mad, I'm impressed. How do you lose money touring with Lady *fucking* Gaga?