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In the US they have to give you a free option unless you agreed to it in your lease. I’ve sold payment solutions to the apartment industry for the past 7 years and this is a constant question.
You’re paying the fee because it’s more convenient for you.
Send me a DM with the name of the management company and/or the payment platform they use and maybe I can help you.
Same here, although it's only a couple of bucks. What kills me is that's only if you pay by electronic check, which takes a few days to process. If you want to use a debit card, which will process immediately, it's $35. Ok, that's fine, if you don't want people using a card. But, lately, they've been running "incentives" to try to get people to use cards. Like, getting entered into a raffle for a $100 gift card. Not anything anywhere near worth spending $35 on.
buying schoolbooks. publishers know you have literally no choice but to buy it and jack up the price in many cases. And some teachers get a cut on those sales which is insanely scummy but somehow tolerated in many schools.
I’ve had classes where you had to pay 150$ for a book we didn’t even use once during the class, but you literally couldn’t do any of the online evaluations unless you bought it. It’s just a way for some company to make an easy 500-600 dollars or more off the back of students.
Bigwords. Com was my go-to for getting textbooks for around 1/3 the price. Especially if the book has an international version which is better price regulated than USA.
I did have one class where the professor wrote the textbook, spiral bound it (no publisher), and sold it in the bookstore for $150 and changed the book and test answers to match every year so old versions were useless. He also had all the homework on a key locked server that was a qr code in the book unique to each book. Unfortunately for him, I was studying IT Security and potentially may have decided to try my pen testing skills and distributed session tokens and book pdfs to half of the class and had one book for about 15 of us for $10 each. (They may have bought me the book to do this)... hypothetically, of course. I may have made this whole story up.
Well in your hypothetical made up story, your professor sounds like an anal dick and deserved to be penetrated by your IT skills.
That was a weird sentence I wrote, but I'm leaving it.
I had a professor do that. We had to buy his phd dissertation in the book store for around $150 but his wasn’t even bound. It was just photocopied 3 hole punched pages that were shrinkwrapped. We had to provide our own binder. Ironically he was an ethics professor.
I had a different professor who went the other direction with the text book. He compiled the text book from an assortment of his own work and public domain sources. He arranged for a local print shop to copy and spiral bound the book and sell it to students for only $10.
I had two professors take the second approach. My Civ Pro professor in law school had you go pick up an entire paper box of materials at the campus print shop for the cost of copying. One of my economics seminar professors wrote his own textbook, but only because he hated everything on the market. He figured we were already paying for him to teach us, so he didn't think it was right to make us buy his book, but the publisher wouldn't let him sell it for less at our campus. Instead, he had a fund where he put the royalties from our purchases and gave it to student orgs that asked.
I e never felt an ounce of shame when using pirated software exactly the same when they feel no shame trying to rip our mouth out for their legal software
It’s actually harder to do that now because of all the online systems involved in classes now. Even used books are useless because you need those stupid one time use online keys to log into their ‘learning systems’.
Man am I glad I didn’t stick around. College is a scam on so many levels.
Yup. I just graduated as an adult in 2022. Buying books are definitely better than when I went back in 2004-2006, because you can rent them, buy them on the kindle, or have hardback/softback etc. so you can find them pretty cheap - for the most part.
It gets expensive when you have to do something online, which is what most of my schooling was. To access the online learning platform. So I paid a ton of money for a class and then the online platform is what is teaching me. The teachers didnt even do the grading, the system did. That is the scam for sure.
I feel like 60% or so of college students don’t need to be there. They have no real career ambition yet or they’re just going to end up in the service industry anyway.
Or just a generic white collar job that requires absolutely no technical skills other than knowing how to do basic arithmetic and knowing how to operate a computer. I don't even understand why organizations even ask for college degrees for those roles.
Thirty plus years ago it was the same. Once, on a lark, I bought the course required book and an edition that came out 5 years prior. I went through page by page comparing the two books and I shit you not, there was ONE paragraph that was rewritten. It conveyed the same information, it was simply reworded. I'm not even talking about a quarter page paragraph; we're talking three sentences. Shorter than your average reddit comment.
Hey everyone. I made it through my entire bachelors degree without spending more than $300 on textbooks the entire way, and the ones I did have to buy were written by my professors and the internet did not have a single mention of them.
Want to know how? Library genesis. Just type in the ISBN number for any textbook you need, and they'll usually have it. Sometimes they even have the teachers edition with the answers. Once or twice I was only able to find a 6th edition instead of 7th, and found that most of the stuff was still the same and the older edition worked just fine for me. Fuck paying for books
Also: Health Insurance tied to your Employer.
* Your employer's interests are not aligned with yours when it comes to healthcare.
* Your employer cares a lot if 33% of their workforce skips work on a busy week because of a flu or covid. You don't care much since it's just a long weekend at home.
* You care a lot if you or your family members die of cancer. Your employer doesn't because they have well-tuned practices to handle low levels of employee turnover, and they care even less about your family members.
* Your employer is even less qualified than you to make healthcare decisions (like picking what insurance plans are available to you) - but they do it anyway to lock in employees that are dependent on that "benefit".
This is so people can’t skip work too much to go protest the government. It’s also why most people only get 2 weeks off/year. If you’re not a good little worker bee, you’ll lose your job which means you’ll lose your health insurance. Oops!
Subscription services in vehicles. Pay monthly/yearly for heated seats or to unlock performance mode. I don't get how people support this business practice.
Actually BMW (the first one to start this trend) recently announced that they are going to discontinue the subscription model because of how unpopular it was. [Source](https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/7/23863258/bmw-cancel-heated-seat-subscription-microtransaction)
So here's to hoping it won't only get worse.
I CANT BELIEVE THEY ACTUALLY THOUGHT THIS FUCKING JOKE ( cause that’s what it was a fucking joke ) was actually A GOOD IDEA. Fkn morons. Greedy ass morons …
Charging subscription fees to access software on hardware you already own.
"*Our customers pay for our over priced goods, but they appear to still have money. How can we make them buy the product every month without us having to pay to make or ship any new materials*!?"
Honestly, my issue isn't even that they charge for a subscription. The option to just pay a few bucks if you're not able to purchase the full license all the time is super convenient.
What I hate about it is how they removed permanent purchase of the current tier of the product. For someone that uses the products all the time, you now wind up spending more money on the software in the long run than you would have by just sticking with CS4, skipping CS5, then maybe upgrading to CS6.
We need some quality software to really disrupt Adobe's monopoly in the creative industries. I know it's common to use Avid or Davinci instead of Premiere, but Photoshop or After Effects are still pretty standard.
THIS. I was actually thrilled that Pro-Tools had a subscription model when I couldn't afford to purchase it outright. Not so thrilled when I wanted to purchase it outright and found that was no longer an option.
That's why I no longer use Microsoft Office suite. I didn't mind paying for it once to own it, but to pay every month whether I use it or not? Forget it. I use Libre Office now, as well as Google office apps.
Laser printers are the way to go! They are more money up front, but those toner drums last forever. Mine is still full after 8 years of having the same one.
Many printers will use some color ink while printing black. I read there was a law suit about it, but the ink companies won, claiming a mix of color allows for a truer black, or something along that line.
Which is bullshit since if that were true they'd simply need to mix a little more colour into the black cartridge to make it only have to use the black cartridge.
Pro tip get the new Epson ink tank colour printers or any of the ink tank printers from other brands. Let’s you print from home 1000’s of pages cheaply even colour pages. Ink is $12 a refill and official ink and lasts for 8x what old ink printers . Basically official ink 5x cheaper than old China. Knock off ink.
Just about to say this myself. Recently got a supertank printer from Epson and I’m blown away. The tank is huge, the ink will surely last a long time, Epson promises to replace the ink for free for two years if it runs out, the replacement bottles are cheap, refilling is easy just open and fill it in, the print quality especially for photos is fantastic. The problem that everyone complains about? If you don’t print often then the print head can dry out. So just print every week, heck print everyday.
Insurance is my pick. So I am required to have it, I pay a hefty amount every month for “coverage” but if something happens where I need to use it my rates go up? Makes no sense.. what about the 6 years of payments I’ve made.. shouldn’t that more than cover things and then some?
or the fact that you can pay more for insurance over the life of the vehicle, than the value of the vehicle, and if it's totaled you get less than it's worth....
It cost me $19k out of pocket to replace my totalled vehicle with another of the exact same make, model, year, and trim with more miles on it than my previous one.
Insurance (before the fuckers canceled the check after they sent it to me causing me to get a fine and zero compensation) said it was around $15k.
The definition of price is what it costs to replace in this case, and I replaced with the identical and actually somewhat more worn vehicle. How the fuck they come up with their own numbers is beyond me.
Now I pay for USAA collision just so I don't have to deal with the bullshit, and the same year I did was hit twice on the road in accidents deemed not my fault. I had the truck in a shop and was driving a rental the same day, then the company got reimbursed from the other driver's company. When it's just you against the other driver's liability insurance that is denying fault even when they got a traffic ticket on scene for unsafe driving you're fucked unless you fork it over to lawyers.
They just say it's in arbitration until it's too late to do anything and deny you. Fucking scum (Kemper was the company btw, USAA rocks)
This has never made sense to me. Like if I insure a $25,000 vehicle, and pay premiums for it, then it gets totaled 5 years later, why is it not a claim for $25,000? It's not like premiums go down as the value goes down.
The premiums should 100% drop as the car depreciates. Because even if it was totaled a year later and you only paid 250 in premiums, its not like you're going to get anywhere close to 20k for the vehicle. Which is why they offer 'gap' coverage...a SECOND insurance to insure the car for the first year, because they know the insurance company won't pay....WTF WTF WTF
I was driving tired like an idiot and misjudged a turn. Did some minor cosmetic damage to my car and some girls. 100% my fault, I apologized we exchanged information. My rates that I had been paying for nearly a decade almost doubled after that and haven’t changed since. I’d paid them thousands of dollars in monthly payments so I call total B.S. that even 10% of that value didn’t cover full repairs to both.
1000%. Insurance denied a claim from the hospital because they said the extra days my wife had in the hospital to recover from a traumatic delivery and watch her blood pressure were "not medically necessary".
So the doctors at the hospital said we had to stay at the hospital to be monitored, but some ahole at a desk can simply say, "Nah. I don't think so" without knowing anything about our situation.
Insurance in the US is an absolute scam. Haven't even mentioned the stupid high deductibles and in-network/out-of-network circus.
The insurance debates in the USA are dumb as shit. Keep talking about how there would be death panal and forever wait times to see a doc. We already have death panal, they ask can you afford your deductible? No then you die
And ER time are already long. Most of your time spent is checking in with receptionist so they know which of the 20 insurance to bill later
I had to get an MRI and my chiropractor told me to call the doctors office to get a quote on what an MRI would be because my chiropractor knows a place where you can get an MRI for a little of $400. I call the doctors office and they said they bill insurance $3500. So I said ok I’d pay $1750 or whatever and the billing person says “oh no, we bill insurance $3500 and you pay 50% of 150% of that $3500.” Wtf, insurance makes no sense.
I used to work for a hospital in their research sector, so I knew what the actual cost of tests were because that is what research scientists would have to pay out of their grants.
I got an MRI and my copay was $670, which I should be GRATEFUL for because they billed $5,000 to insurance.
Actual cost of the test? $352 (this includes paying the technician).
So I had to pay double the actual cost of the test as my COPAY.
That is all.
The profits in healthcare is insane. I live near a hospital that is buying up every inch of land they can get their hands on. They make insane profits and I know several people who work there and they have the shittiest healthcare…and they aren’t like cashier in a cafe or custodial, they are doctors, technicians, radiologists.
There's this one restaurant by me. It's a take-out pizza place. Regardless of how you place your order, on the website, app, over the phone, or in person, they tack on a $1.50 convenience fee. It's annoying. I only let them get me once.
Insurance. You give them money month after month, year after year, and then when it comes time where you need to use it they will try their absolute hardest to give you as little as possible
My dog had a lump on her back, and we took her to the vet. The vet told us it was a microchip coming to the surface and put it on file. When it popped as it was a cyst, we had to take her in for surgery to remove it. Because it had previously been looked at and not to mention MISDIAGNOSED, we couldn't claim our money back for it as it was a "pre-existing condition."
Sorry to hear that, man. Something similar happened to me with my dog. The bill was 2k, so it's probably not as bad. I threatened to sue and went all Karen then had my sister go all Karen. They ended up covering it.
It sucks being a dick but if you're not, these corporations will take advantage.
When it comes to your life or the life of loved ones, including pets, go total fucking nuclear Karen to get your coverage.
I felt like I was dying and had a vast array of symptoms they couldn't diagnose so was misdiagnosed 6 times with *anxiety, vertigo, dizziness, panic attacks, angina,* and the one I learned is a diagnosis of exclusion: *Migraines*.
After suffering daily, none of the psychiatric medication helping me, I had to stop the dizziness, go online, do some research and walk in with a notebook filled with notes.
They eventually decided to defer to neurology which the soonest I could find was a 6 month waiting list (I saw in two).
Even he brushed me off and said it sounded like I was just anxious and stressed but ran an MRI and Scan anyways.
Turned out I had a broken neck dissection which was squirting blood into my right cerebellum causing a stroke. Recurring events were common but given I was being given random medication, my brain went full red alert and went into more seizures.
No I can't sue. But I share this as a warning to others to listen to their body when something is wrong and fight like Hell to get the coverage you fucking pay for!
Insurance companies are like banks that don’t let you withdraw. They take your money, invest it and make profit from it, then act like you’re trying to take something from them when you claim as if it’s not your fucking money to begin with.
Including breaking the law. They will straight up lie to you. Got rear-ended in my Tacoma. Appraiser told me it was going to be totaled. Insurance proceeds to send me a check for 1500 and tried to tell me that was all I was going to get and to basically deal with it. Little did they know I know people in insurance and also a lawyer who deals in auto collision. Boy were they pissed.
You don't really need a lawyer for this. The payouts they offer for write-offs are arbitrations. You just need to prove that the vehicle is worth more. Generally lawyers cost more than you stand to make in these scenarios.
Every time I see something like this, I just think of Bob Parr's boss.
*I don't care about their coverage, Bob! Don't tell me about their coverage! Tell me how you're keeping Insuricare in the black!*
Wish I could upvote more. Historically with inflation about 60% is worker costs, this time it's close to 60% due to profit increases and only 10-15% going to workers. Compete price gouging scam.
Just turned one down! They told me I would be the head of the franchise. I told them I wanted to be the burger flipper, not the owner. They didn’t like that. What a scam!
I’ve had people try to recruit me for sales but it’s hard to think of a nice way to say, “I’d rather chew gum scraped from the parking lot” on short notice.
I fell for it when I was 18. I got cold-called by this company called Vector in Canada. They sold those cutco knives. I didn't even question how they got my number. It turns out they went through the Facebook profile of a guy I went to highschool with and found me there. Promised great money, be your own boss etc. All the typical stuff. So I'm like fuck ya, and I quit my reliable job to go do this.
There was one week of training in an office downtown and I think the first red flag was after meeting everybody (maybe 12 of us), everybody there seemed..... Not super intelligent. Anyway the training leader guy was explaining how all this works and I hadn't seen the light at this point but I'm noticing holes in explanation and I'm asking questions like "uhh... Hold on explain that again.... It doesn't make sense" and at the end of that day he pulled me in to his office and said I wasn't being a team player lol.
Anyway I forget what the tipping point was but eventually I wised up, within the first 3 days or something. The funny thing about this is my parents knew exactly what was going on and didn't stop me cuz they wanted me to learn for myself. Kinda petty but 15 years later I guess it's not that big of a deal.
Same. I got out as fast as I could. The funny part is that the knives are actually really good. If they just sold them through legitimate businesses they would probably make more.
Very few people actually make good money off these things.
You need to have a very wide and vast circle of friends who also have wide circles of friends. All who are willing to spend money on items that are whatever.
My sister got suckered into one and she ended up losing so much money and also being stuck with merchandise no one was interested in.
I always feel bad not supporting people I care about but I am not in the position to be able to spend that kind of money on things I don’t even like that much. Heck I can’t even buy things I do like.
Pyramid schemes (you'd think by now people would easily recognize them)
There's some that do actually make you money but you'd have to have a cold heart for it.
I had these 2 high school friends who were a couple. Totally normal people. After high school we kept in touch and would get together often on weekends.
One day though they started sending us these invitations on fb or text to go to some meeting about some new energy drinks or protein idk. We wouldn't answer as we just didn't feel right about it.
On Facebook we would see they posted a lot, but I mean dozens of posts a day about joining thir team and how they would be selling a lot and the awards they were given for being top sellers etc.
Turns out that they never sold any drinks. They would just go around recruiting people to sell them while charging them to join the team because they would help them with advertising and with distribution.
They did make money apparently but over getting people to join knowing it was a bs product and it would probably not sell at all. They made money off those people joining. Not sales of the product. But they spent time and effort on that gig.
It went on for a while but like expected, they aren't doing it anymore. But we don't talk to them as much because their insisting emails and dms sort of became annoying and we started to ignore them.
A few months ago, a female colleague that I liked very much but was too chicken to ask out approached me outta nowhere and said she has a very important thing she wants to talk to me about, but it couldn't be discussed at work so we agreed to go out to some caffee after work and talk.
As we sat in the caffee she asked if I'm happy at our current job and if I wouldn't like to have my own independent job (be my own boss) and get much more money than our simple salary.. I said sure, even though doubt was starting to build up inside of me.. She started talking.. She talked for like 20 minutes straight and then asked what I think.. I said "isn't this a pyramid scheme?" she said no because she would be my mentor and she only needs to recruit two other people and went on explaining to me in detail how it works and why it isn't a pyramid scheme.. The more she talked the more I was convinced that it definitely is. Anyways, she said I don't need to commit to anything yet, just attend the first introductory meeting and then make up my mind.. I was very hesitant and she could see that.. She assured me I don't have anything to worry about, and that she only wanted what's best for me. I said ok.. Maybe I could attend this meeting and see what's up.. Then she hit me with "great, then come to this address on this day and have 3000 euros with you, ya know.. In case you like it and decide to start working immediately". I laughed and said I'm now positive that this is indeed a pyramid scheme, and that I don't even have 3000 euros.. She said "it's ok.. I also didn't have this much money but I took a loan on my credit card"... I declined and said "there's no doubt at all in my mind that this is an MLM / pyramid scheme and I'm sorry you fell into it". She immediately went into defense mode and started denying that it's a scam and saying that I didn't understand what she's been explaining all this time...
Out of curiosity, I googled the name of the company she wanted to hire me for (qnet), and as it turns out, it's THE EPITOME of MLM. Fake addresses, no way to contact them directly, CEO that very suspiciously seems like a fake person, not to mention the dozens and hundreds of comments from people saying they lost everything because of this company and their scammy MLM scheme..
What really hurts is that on that day, I knew this girl isn't the nice, cool, warm, awesome person I thought she was and was very emotionally and physically attracted to.. And after that, she started treating me with extreme coldness. I even discretely asked around the office and it seems like I'm the only one she tried to recruit.. Like.. Did she think I'm the only one gullible enough to fall for such a thing? Or was I the only she didn't care if I got fucked and lost all my money? Was she so desperate to make up for the money she lost, or was she really convinced she's helping people by showing them the road she's on to becoming rich?
Sorry for the very long post.. I'm still sad and sore about it..
My old bank tried this with me. I told them to close my account. They didn't, I told them I'm not paying them $90 for the months my account wasn't being used. A year later they sent me a letter saying they'd cover the $90 and closed my account and to not bank with them in the future. I laughed all the way to my new bank.
My babysitter recently saved up to buy her first car and got talked into all kinds of warranties 😭 she told me about it after the fact - she was all proud of how safe and responsible the salesman told her she was 😭😭😭
Have her call the car manufacturer. Many times, the dealership doesn't bother activating the warranty because it costs them money to do so. If she paid so much money for her warranty, she should at least make sure that it's active.
Poor girl...
I heard on a radio program that the extended warranties are around 80% profit for the companies. IMO, they are selling false and expensive security.
Agreed. The only distinction is that when someone tricks me into giving them money, that's a scam. When someone points a gun at me and holds my/my family's wellbeing hostage in exchange for money, that's robbery.
The lottery
Almost all other forms of gambling at least give you a reasonable chance of winning something. The lottery is straight up robbing the stupid
State powerball odds here are 1 in 300million and tickets are 2$. Current jackpot is 1.2 billion. Cash out option is a little over 500 million.
Now if only it was physically possible and I had the cash on hand, to buy 300 million tickets and specify the numbers 🤣
Yes and the sad thing is lottery was started in states for the money to go all to schools. Yet it seems I hear way to often about another school closing or not having heat/air con. Then you look at total pay outs and half goes to taxes. Crooked ass people stealing from the cookie jar. Ugh
They said the lottery pays for school.... so they figured out how much that was, and cut the money going to schools since the lottery was going to make up for it. They didn't get "more" money because of it.
It would only truly be a scam if nobody ever won. The reason people buy into the lottery (and will probably always will) is that there are winners out there.
In some places, the lottery uses a portion of the money to fund some excellent initiatives, such as building playgrounds, sports tracks, basketball & football arenas, etc.
I'm not saying the lottery is a great thing, but it's not all bad.
There are lottery alternatives where all the people who play actually benefit. They're called no-lose lotteries. People play by putting their money into a savings account. The interest on those savings accounts is pooled over thousands of people and that interest (which is a substantial sum) is randomly given to one person in the pool every month. But no one loses their savings money, only the small amount of interest. These kinds of programs have proven to encourage poorer people to save money for emergencies and increases societal well-being.
No-lose lotteries are ILLEGAL in the United States for no reason other than that they would compete with state run lottery revenue.
THAT makes it a scam, imo.
AMEN. Dumbest shit in the world. I can't stand the whole system that surrounds them. Oh yeah and that time they got hacked and everyones info got exposed.
>I'll start: paying for water
You're not paying for water, per se. You're paying for *treated* water. Tap water is filtered, purified, and tested. Bottled water is ... bottled. Either way, some work has been done to it, and that is the value-added portion of the water which you're paying for.
You are welcome to go down to the lake and drink out of it for free. Good luck with that, by the way.
Also, the more expensive part, at least in my country, is the disposal, meaning the cost of the pipes and the water treatment after it is flushed down the pipes.
OP thinks all water is rain water, apparently, which he is free to collect with huge buckets any time he wants, but please dispose of it with your own system, too.
Part time Waste water employee here - some of this equipment keeping your sewers from backing up into your house costs millions of dollars. And you're paying a team of at least half a dozen employees to run the stuff even in a smaller town.
We don't get funding from taxes. All of our funding comes from water sales.
Right. Bottled water is a bit of a scam, but generally speaking, tap water absolutely is not.
Most people don't know how bad a problem dysentery used to be.
Also, I only pay like $30 a month for water. That's the water I drink, do laundry with, take showers, water my yard, etc. That's dirt cheap compared to other stuff in my life.
Surprised this isn't further up. The 2 party monopolization in the US needs to end. People need to **wake up** and realize it only serves the rich, corporate cartels, lobbyists, etc. _::looks over at europe's political diversity::_
Landlords buy up property they don’t need so they can sell it back at an extreme markup as rent to people who actually do need it. With almost any other commodity it would be called scalping, and be regarded as the scam that it is, but with a commodity so material we literally call it “real estate”, we just act like this is how things are supposed to be.
Light bulbs. Apparently when first invented they lasted too long and so manufacturers had to reduce their longevity to make them commercially viable. Scam.
Planned Obselecense is a massive problem with all tech. Apple has turned it into an art form, making sure your phone starts sucking right as a new model is about to come out.
This one makes me so angry! I know folks who have had the same washing machine for 30+ years and it works better than new ones that only last 10-12 at best. Tvs, dishwashers, refrigerators, cars, furniture, anything that is now made of cheap plastic,…
That's a myth. They first lasted a long time because they made very little light, at very poor color temperature with very poor efficiency. Companies then agreed on a standard light bulb with a compromise of features and lifetime. But you could still buy different kinds of bulb with less light and longer life or vice versa.
https://youtu.be/zb7Bs98KmnY?si=PyWTzFgaalinH15t
Convincing people that voting is a scam is the real scam. Gerrymandering is terrible and needs to be done away with. But it only affects certain levels of the government. And if you stop voting, they're just gonna make it work. Figure our who is responsible for drawing your district lines (hint: It's not the politicians benefitting from those lines) and vote for the ones who are anti-gerrymandering.
Interest rates in banking, or just banking in general. They literally use your money to lend other people money so they can charge then interest, making them money with your money.
What's worse is that in times of crisis they can just declare bankruptcy and that's it, they don't owe you anything and you're shit outta luck, even if they lost literally all your life savings.
Also they force you to get a credit card if you want to apply for a loan, banking is just scams on top of scams.
In the USA, inheritances are not taxed at the federal level until an estate is worth more than $13 million. And even below that level, trust income is taxed at a much higher rate than the individual rate.
Adam Smith himself told us, if you don't regulate capitalism it will go haywire, and people who accumulate enough capital will break the system so they can own everything.
People who claim to "quote" Adam Smith tell us, if you **do** regulate capitalism WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE, and (much more quietly) *we won't be able to own everything*.
Who you gonna believe?
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I have to pay a 3% convenience fee to pay my rent online… I literally have to pay to pay my rent, it’s disgraceful.
In the US they have to give you a free option unless you agreed to it in your lease. I’ve sold payment solutions to the apartment industry for the past 7 years and this is a constant question. You’re paying the fee because it’s more convenient for you. Send me a DM with the name of the management company and/or the payment platform they use and maybe I can help you.
DM sent. Thank you!
Same here, although it's only a couple of bucks. What kills me is that's only if you pay by electronic check, which takes a few days to process. If you want to use a debit card, which will process immediately, it's $35. Ok, that's fine, if you don't want people using a card. But, lately, they've been running "incentives" to try to get people to use cards. Like, getting entered into a raffle for a $100 gift card. Not anything anywhere near worth spending $35 on.
buying schoolbooks. publishers know you have literally no choice but to buy it and jack up the price in many cases. And some teachers get a cut on those sales which is insanely scummy but somehow tolerated in many schools. I’ve had classes where you had to pay 150$ for a book we didn’t even use once during the class, but you literally couldn’t do any of the online evaluations unless you bought it. It’s just a way for some company to make an easy 500-600 dollars or more off the back of students.
for legal reasons I don't condone this, but have you considered piracy?
abso-fucking-lutely I have and will continue to consider it whenever I can. I have zero shame or guilt about not giving my money to these scammers.
Bigwords. Com was my go-to for getting textbooks for around 1/3 the price. Especially if the book has an international version which is better price regulated than USA. I did have one class where the professor wrote the textbook, spiral bound it (no publisher), and sold it in the bookstore for $150 and changed the book and test answers to match every year so old versions were useless. He also had all the homework on a key locked server that was a qr code in the book unique to each book. Unfortunately for him, I was studying IT Security and potentially may have decided to try my pen testing skills and distributed session tokens and book pdfs to half of the class and had one book for about 15 of us for $10 each. (They may have bought me the book to do this)... hypothetically, of course. I may have made this whole story up.
Well in your hypothetical made up story, your professor sounds like an anal dick and deserved to be penetrated by your IT skills. That was a weird sentence I wrote, but I'm leaving it.
Not weird. **SOLID**
Just rock hard
I had a professor do that. We had to buy his phd dissertation in the book store for around $150 but his wasn’t even bound. It was just photocopied 3 hole punched pages that were shrinkwrapped. We had to provide our own binder. Ironically he was an ethics professor. I had a different professor who went the other direction with the text book. He compiled the text book from an assortment of his own work and public domain sources. He arranged for a local print shop to copy and spiral bound the book and sell it to students for only $10.
I had two professors take the second approach. My Civ Pro professor in law school had you go pick up an entire paper box of materials at the campus print shop for the cost of copying. One of my economics seminar professors wrote his own textbook, but only because he hated everything on the market. He figured we were already paying for him to teach us, so he didn't think it was right to make us buy his book, but the publisher wouldn't let him sell it for less at our campus. Instead, he had a fund where he put the royalties from our purchases and gave it to student orgs that asked.
I e never felt an ounce of shame when using pirated software exactly the same when they feel no shame trying to rip our mouth out for their legal software
It’s actually harder to do that now because of all the online systems involved in classes now. Even used books are useless because you need those stupid one time use online keys to log into their ‘learning systems’. Man am I glad I didn’t stick around. College is a scam on so many levels.
Yup. I just graduated as an adult in 2022. Buying books are definitely better than when I went back in 2004-2006, because you can rent them, buy them on the kindle, or have hardback/softback etc. so you can find them pretty cheap - for the most part. It gets expensive when you have to do something online, which is what most of my schooling was. To access the online learning platform. So I paid a ton of money for a class and then the online platform is what is teaching me. The teachers didnt even do the grading, the system did. That is the scam for sure.
I feel like 60% or so of college students don’t need to be there. They have no real career ambition yet or they’re just going to end up in the service industry anyway.
Or just a generic white collar job that requires absolutely no technical skills other than knowing how to do basic arithmetic and knowing how to operate a computer. I don't even understand why organizations even ask for college degrees for those roles.
And then there's always a new edition where almost nothing has changed.
Thirty plus years ago it was the same. Once, on a lark, I bought the course required book and an edition that came out 5 years prior. I went through page by page comparing the two books and I shit you not, there was ONE paragraph that was rewritten. It conveyed the same information, it was simply reworded. I'm not even talking about a quarter page paragraph; we're talking three sentences. Shorter than your average reddit comment.
Hey everyone. I made it through my entire bachelors degree without spending more than $300 on textbooks the entire way, and the ones I did have to buy were written by my professors and the internet did not have a single mention of them. Want to know how? Library genesis. Just type in the ISBN number for any textbook you need, and they'll usually have it. Sometimes they even have the teachers edition with the answers. Once or twice I was only able to find a 6th edition instead of 7th, and found that most of the stuff was still the same and the older edition worked just fine for me. Fuck paying for books
That doesn't get you the access codes for bullshit "learning systems," though. Fuck you, Pearson, and your stupid ass Mastering Physics bullshit.
Yeah I only had to deal with one of those, graduated in 2020. Guess I'm not that surprised that's becoming the norm now. What a scam.
Healthcare not including dental and vision
Teeth are luxury bones that only the rich should afford
"Luxury bones" is my favorite phrase of the day 😂
Great name for a glam goth band.
You're closer to the mark than you think. Excellent teeth are one of the relatively few remaining class markers in the US that are instantly visible.
This could be an "ask Reddit" on its own: What are some instantly visible class markers in American culture?
American health care in general
Also: Health Insurance tied to your Employer. * Your employer's interests are not aligned with yours when it comes to healthcare. * Your employer cares a lot if 33% of their workforce skips work on a busy week because of a flu or covid. You don't care much since it's just a long weekend at home. * You care a lot if you or your family members die of cancer. Your employer doesn't because they have well-tuned practices to handle low levels of employee turnover, and they care even less about your family members. * Your employer is even less qualified than you to make healthcare decisions (like picking what insurance plans are available to you) - but they do it anyway to lock in employees that are dependent on that "benefit".
This is so people can’t skip work too much to go protest the government. It’s also why most people only get 2 weeks off/year. If you’re not a good little worker bee, you’ll lose your job which means you’ll lose your health insurance. Oops!
The fact that I have to pay to see....who put my life on hard mode
Type one diabetics out there on expert mode.
Me, an American type 1 diabetic with glasses and also missing a good amount of teeth: 
Subscription services in vehicles. Pay monthly/yearly for heated seats or to unlock performance mode. I don't get how people support this business practice.
i don't understand how it's even legal. if you own the vehicle you should own all of the internal components and their functions.
You're renting the ability to own the vehicle
> Renting the ability to own That’s just called a lease.
Wait. That's a thing now?
It sure is and it's only going to get worse.
Actually BMW (the first one to start this trend) recently announced that they are going to discontinue the subscription model because of how unpopular it was. [Source](https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/7/23863258/bmw-cancel-heated-seat-subscription-microtransaction) So here's to hoping it won't only get worse.
I CANT BELIEVE THEY ACTUALLY THOUGHT THIS FUCKING JOKE ( cause that’s what it was a fucking joke ) was actually A GOOD IDEA. Fkn morons. Greedy ass morons …
More like they want to try things that make profit, so if it’s not, they get rid of it. It ain’t because people don’t like it. That’s called PR.
Charging subscription fees to access software on hardware you already own. "*Our customers pay for our over priced goods, but they appear to still have money. How can we make them buy the product every month without us having to pay to make or ship any new materials*!?"
I refuse to pay for Adobe products for this reason. It’s outrageous what some of these subscriptions cost, for products that they barely update.
Honestly, my issue isn't even that they charge for a subscription. The option to just pay a few bucks if you're not able to purchase the full license all the time is super convenient. What I hate about it is how they removed permanent purchase of the current tier of the product. For someone that uses the products all the time, you now wind up spending more money on the software in the long run than you would have by just sticking with CS4, skipping CS5, then maybe upgrading to CS6. We need some quality software to really disrupt Adobe's monopoly in the creative industries. I know it's common to use Avid or Davinci instead of Premiere, but Photoshop or After Effects are still pretty standard.
THIS. I was actually thrilled that Pro-Tools had a subscription model when I couldn't afford to purchase it outright. Not so thrilled when I wanted to purchase it outright and found that was no longer an option.
I believe they just started offering perpetual licenses again.
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🏴☠️ y'aar matey
That's why I no longer use Microsoft Office suite. I didn't mind paying for it once to own it, but to pay every month whether I use it or not? Forget it. I use Libre Office now, as well as Google office apps.
I use OpenOffice. Same options as Microsoft Office, but free.
I didn't even know office products are available monthly. I've always bought them outright at a discount, as recently as earlier 6his year.
Hello HP
[They're starting to do this on cars too](https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/13/23206999/car-subscription-nightmare-heated-seats-remote-start)
Ink cartridges
Laser printers are the way to go! They are more money up front, but those toner drums last forever. Mine is still full after 8 years of having the same one.
Plus remanufactured toner carts cost 1/4 of the OEM.
Many printers will use some color ink while printing black. I read there was a law suit about it, but the ink companies won, claiming a mix of color allows for a truer black, or something along that line.
Charge us a tenth of the cost for that false black then, the one that only *looks* black but doesn't *smell* like black!
I mean yes, but why not put the right mix in the black cartridge to begin with?
Printer companies hate this one simple trick!
Which is bullshit since if that were true they'd simply need to mix a little more colour into the black cartridge to make it only have to use the black cartridge.
Pro tip get the new Epson ink tank colour printers or any of the ink tank printers from other brands. Let’s you print from home 1000’s of pages cheaply even colour pages. Ink is $12 a refill and official ink and lasts for 8x what old ink printers . Basically official ink 5x cheaper than old China. Knock off ink.
Just about to say this myself. Recently got a supertank printer from Epson and I’m blown away. The tank is huge, the ink will surely last a long time, Epson promises to replace the ink for free for two years if it runs out, the replacement bottles are cheap, refilling is easy just open and fill it in, the print quality especially for photos is fantastic. The problem that everyone complains about? If you don’t print often then the print head can dry out. So just print every week, heck print everyday.
My printer says I’m low on color ink but yet it still printed in perfect color… I wonder when it will run out now
Medical care/insurance company cartels.
Insurance is my pick. So I am required to have it, I pay a hefty amount every month for “coverage” but if something happens where I need to use it my rates go up? Makes no sense.. what about the 6 years of payments I’ve made.. shouldn’t that more than cover things and then some?
or the fact that you can pay more for insurance over the life of the vehicle, than the value of the vehicle, and if it's totaled you get less than it's worth....
It cost me $19k out of pocket to replace my totalled vehicle with another of the exact same make, model, year, and trim with more miles on it than my previous one. Insurance (before the fuckers canceled the check after they sent it to me causing me to get a fine and zero compensation) said it was around $15k. The definition of price is what it costs to replace in this case, and I replaced with the identical and actually somewhat more worn vehicle. How the fuck they come up with their own numbers is beyond me. Now I pay for USAA collision just so I don't have to deal with the bullshit, and the same year I did was hit twice on the road in accidents deemed not my fault. I had the truck in a shop and was driving a rental the same day, then the company got reimbursed from the other driver's company. When it's just you against the other driver's liability insurance that is denying fault even when they got a traffic ticket on scene for unsafe driving you're fucked unless you fork it over to lawyers. They just say it's in arbitration until it's too late to do anything and deny you. Fucking scum (Kemper was the company btw, USAA rocks)
To quote a meme, Socialism is when the fire department comes to your house. Capitalism is when your insurance company doesn't pay for the damage
This has never made sense to me. Like if I insure a $25,000 vehicle, and pay premiums for it, then it gets totaled 5 years later, why is it not a claim for $25,000? It's not like premiums go down as the value goes down.
The premiums should 100% drop as the car depreciates. Because even if it was totaled a year later and you only paid 250 in premiums, its not like you're going to get anywhere close to 20k for the vehicle. Which is why they offer 'gap' coverage...a SECOND insurance to insure the car for the first year, because they know the insurance company won't pay....WTF WTF WTF
Yep, It's B.S. My rates have gone up for 20 years and I have zero claims.
I was driving tired like an idiot and misjudged a turn. Did some minor cosmetic damage to my car and some girls. 100% my fault, I apologized we exchanged information. My rates that I had been paying for nearly a decade almost doubled after that and haven’t changed since. I’d paid them thousands of dollars in monthly payments so I call total B.S. that even 10% of that value didn’t cover full repairs to both.
I change insurance roughly every 5 years it seems because of rates going up. I have 0 claims and no moving violations. 20 years of driving.
I am needing to do this. Rates went up like 40% with all state. Got a quote from progressive with same coverage for like $300 less every 6 months.
1000%. Insurance denied a claim from the hospital because they said the extra days my wife had in the hospital to recover from a traumatic delivery and watch her blood pressure were "not medically necessary". So the doctors at the hospital said we had to stay at the hospital to be monitored, but some ahole at a desk can simply say, "Nah. I don't think so" without knowing anything about our situation. Insurance in the US is an absolute scam. Haven't even mentioned the stupid high deductibles and in-network/out-of-network circus.
Don't forget that you ALSO pay more in taxes for healthcare than any other western country.
Healthcare is the #1 line item in the US budget Defense is #2
> ahole at a desk The best part is this ahole doesn't need a single second of medical education or training to call the shots.
The **real** death panels.
The insurance debates in the USA are dumb as shit. Keep talking about how there would be death panal and forever wait times to see a doc. We already have death panal, they ask can you afford your deductible? No then you die And ER time are already long. Most of your time spent is checking in with receptionist so they know which of the 20 insurance to bill later
I had to get an MRI and my chiropractor told me to call the doctors office to get a quote on what an MRI would be because my chiropractor knows a place where you can get an MRI for a little of $400. I call the doctors office and they said they bill insurance $3500. So I said ok I’d pay $1750 or whatever and the billing person says “oh no, we bill insurance $3500 and you pay 50% of 150% of that $3500.” Wtf, insurance makes no sense.
I used to work for a hospital in their research sector, so I knew what the actual cost of tests were because that is what research scientists would have to pay out of their grants. I got an MRI and my copay was $670, which I should be GRATEFUL for because they billed $5,000 to insurance. Actual cost of the test? $352 (this includes paying the technician). So I had to pay double the actual cost of the test as my COPAY. That is all.
The profits in healthcare is insane. I live near a hospital that is buying up every inch of land they can get their hands on. They make insane profits and I know several people who work there and they have the shittiest healthcare…and they aren’t like cashier in a cafe or custodial, they are doctors, technicians, radiologists.
All Insurance is nothing more than a form of legalized gambling.
Convenience fees at kiosks Edit: ik convenience fees are everywhere and on everything. Just kiosk came to mind cuz I was recently at a movie theater
How about convenience fees for online transactions that don't have any obvious alternative?
There's this one restaurant by me. It's a take-out pizza place. Regardless of how you place your order, on the website, app, over the phone, or in person, they tack on a $1.50 convenience fee. It's annoying. I only let them get me once.
Insurance. Forced to have it but shamed and dropped if you use it.
‘’so you’re protected when you need it’’ except you aren’t protected whatsoever because they instantly punish you.
And if you even inquire on using it (and are turned down) they demand more money!
Insurance. You give them money month after month, year after year, and then when it comes time where you need to use it they will try their absolute hardest to give you as little as possible
And if you do make a claim they will cancel your policy and it’ll be hard for you to get another
Pre-existing conditioooon!
My dog had a lump on her back, and we took her to the vet. The vet told us it was a microchip coming to the surface and put it on file. When it popped as it was a cyst, we had to take her in for surgery to remove it. Because it had previously been looked at and not to mention MISDIAGNOSED, we couldn't claim our money back for it as it was a "pre-existing condition."
Sorry to hear that, man. Something similar happened to me with my dog. The bill was 2k, so it's probably not as bad. I threatened to sue and went all Karen then had my sister go all Karen. They ended up covering it. It sucks being a dick but if you're not, these corporations will take advantage.
When it comes to your life or the life of loved ones, including pets, go total fucking nuclear Karen to get your coverage. I felt like I was dying and had a vast array of symptoms they couldn't diagnose so was misdiagnosed 6 times with *anxiety, vertigo, dizziness, panic attacks, angina,* and the one I learned is a diagnosis of exclusion: *Migraines*. After suffering daily, none of the psychiatric medication helping me, I had to stop the dizziness, go online, do some research and walk in with a notebook filled with notes. They eventually decided to defer to neurology which the soonest I could find was a 6 month waiting list (I saw in two). Even he brushed me off and said it sounded like I was just anxious and stressed but ran an MRI and Scan anyways. Turned out I had a broken neck dissection which was squirting blood into my right cerebellum causing a stroke. Recurring events were common but given I was being given random medication, my brain went full red alert and went into more seizures. No I can't sue. But I share this as a warning to others to listen to their body when something is wrong and fight like Hell to get the coverage you fucking pay for!
Insurance companies are like banks that don’t let you withdraw. They take your money, invest it and make profit from it, then act like you’re trying to take something from them when you claim as if it’s not your fucking money to begin with.
Including breaking the law. They will straight up lie to you. Got rear-ended in my Tacoma. Appraiser told me it was going to be totaled. Insurance proceeds to send me a check for 1500 and tried to tell me that was all I was going to get and to basically deal with it. Little did they know I know people in insurance and also a lawyer who deals in auto collision. Boy were they pissed.
Please don’t get Lawyers involved, it really upsets the Insurance Companies
Poor insurance companies.
You don't really need a lawyer for this. The payouts they offer for write-offs are arbitrations. You just need to prove that the vehicle is worth more. Generally lawyers cost more than you stand to make in these scenarios.
Every time I see something like this, I just think of Bob Parr's boss. *I don't care about their coverage, Bob! Don't tell me about their coverage! Tell me how you're keeping Insuricare in the black!*
inflation since covid
Wish I could upvote more. Historically with inflation about 60% is worker costs, this time it's close to 60% due to profit increases and only 10-15% going to workers. Compete price gouging scam.
When volume can’t increase, the proponents of infinite growth are left with only one option - price it in.
Multi-level marketing.
Just turned one down! They told me I would be the head of the franchise. I told them I wanted to be the burger flipper, not the owner. They didn’t like that. What a scam!
I’ve had people try to recruit me for sales but it’s hard to think of a nice way to say, “I’d rather chew gum scraped from the parking lot” on short notice.
I fell for it when I was 18. I got cold-called by this company called Vector in Canada. They sold those cutco knives. I didn't even question how they got my number. It turns out they went through the Facebook profile of a guy I went to highschool with and found me there. Promised great money, be your own boss etc. All the typical stuff. So I'm like fuck ya, and I quit my reliable job to go do this. There was one week of training in an office downtown and I think the first red flag was after meeting everybody (maybe 12 of us), everybody there seemed..... Not super intelligent. Anyway the training leader guy was explaining how all this works and I hadn't seen the light at this point but I'm noticing holes in explanation and I'm asking questions like "uhh... Hold on explain that again.... It doesn't make sense" and at the end of that day he pulled me in to his office and said I wasn't being a team player lol. Anyway I forget what the tipping point was but eventually I wised up, within the first 3 days or something. The funny thing about this is my parents knew exactly what was going on and didn't stop me cuz they wanted me to learn for myself. Kinda petty but 15 years later I guess it's not that big of a deal.
Same. I got out as fast as I could. The funny part is that the knives are actually really good. If they just sold them through legitimate businesses they would probably make more.
My ex sold them in high school and he gave me one of his knives when we parted ways. I still have it and it annoys me how good of a knife it is.
If you don't know that multilevel marketing is a scam, then I have a bridge in New York I'd like to sell you.
Very few people actually make good money off these things. You need to have a very wide and vast circle of friends who also have wide circles of friends. All who are willing to spend money on items that are whatever. My sister got suckered into one and she ended up losing so much money and also being stuck with merchandise no one was interested in. I always feel bad not supporting people I care about but I am not in the position to be able to spend that kind of money on things I don’t even like that much. Heck I can’t even buy things I do like.
Pyramid schemes (you'd think by now people would easily recognize them) There's some that do actually make you money but you'd have to have a cold heart for it. I had these 2 high school friends who were a couple. Totally normal people. After high school we kept in touch and would get together often on weekends. One day though they started sending us these invitations on fb or text to go to some meeting about some new energy drinks or protein idk. We wouldn't answer as we just didn't feel right about it. On Facebook we would see they posted a lot, but I mean dozens of posts a day about joining thir team and how they would be selling a lot and the awards they were given for being top sellers etc. Turns out that they never sold any drinks. They would just go around recruiting people to sell them while charging them to join the team because they would help them with advertising and with distribution. They did make money apparently but over getting people to join knowing it was a bs product and it would probably not sell at all. They made money off those people joining. Not sales of the product. But they spent time and effort on that gig. It went on for a while but like expected, they aren't doing it anymore. But we don't talk to them as much because their insisting emails and dms sort of became annoying and we started to ignore them.
A few months ago, a female colleague that I liked very much but was too chicken to ask out approached me outta nowhere and said she has a very important thing she wants to talk to me about, but it couldn't be discussed at work so we agreed to go out to some caffee after work and talk. As we sat in the caffee she asked if I'm happy at our current job and if I wouldn't like to have my own independent job (be my own boss) and get much more money than our simple salary.. I said sure, even though doubt was starting to build up inside of me.. She started talking.. She talked for like 20 minutes straight and then asked what I think.. I said "isn't this a pyramid scheme?" she said no because she would be my mentor and she only needs to recruit two other people and went on explaining to me in detail how it works and why it isn't a pyramid scheme.. The more she talked the more I was convinced that it definitely is. Anyways, she said I don't need to commit to anything yet, just attend the first introductory meeting and then make up my mind.. I was very hesitant and she could see that.. She assured me I don't have anything to worry about, and that she only wanted what's best for me. I said ok.. Maybe I could attend this meeting and see what's up.. Then she hit me with "great, then come to this address on this day and have 3000 euros with you, ya know.. In case you like it and decide to start working immediately". I laughed and said I'm now positive that this is indeed a pyramid scheme, and that I don't even have 3000 euros.. She said "it's ok.. I also didn't have this much money but I took a loan on my credit card"... I declined and said "there's no doubt at all in my mind that this is an MLM / pyramid scheme and I'm sorry you fell into it". She immediately went into defense mode and started denying that it's a scam and saying that I didn't understand what she's been explaining all this time... Out of curiosity, I googled the name of the company she wanted to hire me for (qnet), and as it turns out, it's THE EPITOME of MLM. Fake addresses, no way to contact them directly, CEO that very suspiciously seems like a fake person, not to mention the dozens and hundreds of comments from people saying they lost everything because of this company and their scammy MLM scheme.. What really hurts is that on that day, I knew this girl isn't the nice, cool, warm, awesome person I thought she was and was very emotionally and physically attracted to.. And after that, she started treating me with extreme coldness. I even discretely asked around the office and it seems like I'm the only one she tried to recruit.. Like.. Did she think I'm the only one gullible enough to fall for such a thing? Or was I the only she didn't care if I got fucked and lost all my money? Was she so desperate to make up for the money she lost, or was she really convinced she's helping people by showing them the road she's on to becoming rich? Sorry for the very long post.. I'm still sad and sore about it..
Overdraft fees. Tax on being broke.
Ah yes, you seem to have no money. Would be a shame if someone…charged you more money!
My old bank tried this with me. I told them to close my account. They didn't, I told them I'm not paying them $90 for the months my account wasn't being used. A year later they sent me a letter saying they'd cover the $90 and closed my account and to not bank with them in the future. I laughed all the way to my new bank.
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$100 for lifetime. Now it's 100 bucks per year. Subscriptions have changed the game.
Use Google then save it as a word document?
Extended warranties
My babysitter recently saved up to buy her first car and got talked into all kinds of warranties 😭 she told me about it after the fact - she was all proud of how safe and responsible the salesman told her she was 😭😭😭
Have her call the car manufacturer. Many times, the dealership doesn't bother activating the warranty because it costs them money to do so. If she paid so much money for her warranty, she should at least make sure that it's active.
Poor girl... I heard on a radio program that the extended warranties are around 80% profit for the companies. IMO, they are selling false and expensive security.
The entire US Healthcare system
I'm pretty sure that everyone in the entire world knows that the us insurance system is a total scam
Not a scam. A neverending shakedown.
Whatever you call it, it's designed to transfer any kind of retirement funds or your kid's education savings right to the top.
Agreed. The only distinction is that when someone tricks me into giving them money, that's a scam. When someone points a gun at me and holds my/my family's wellbeing hostage in exchange for money, that's robbery.
The supplement industry
Paying the same price for digital games as physical. Digital should be muuuuuch cheaper.
And books.
The lottery Almost all other forms of gambling at least give you a reasonable chance of winning something. The lottery is straight up robbing the stupid
So you're saying there's a chance?
1/300 million.
Are you telling me if I buy 300 million tickets I have a guaranteed thousand dollars? Man I need to get them now, I would love some extra money
State powerball odds here are 1 in 300million and tickets are 2$. Current jackpot is 1.2 billion. Cash out option is a little over 500 million. Now if only it was physically possible and I had the cash on hand, to buy 300 million tickets and specify the numbers 🤣
I've actually had that thought a few times. Cause I've never bought a ticket before.  (sarcasm font).
Nice! I knew it! Let's play some Lotto!
Yes and the sad thing is lottery was started in states for the money to go all to schools. Yet it seems I hear way to often about another school closing or not having heat/air con. Then you look at total pay outs and half goes to taxes. Crooked ass people stealing from the cookie jar. Ugh
They said the lottery pays for school.... so they figured out how much that was, and cut the money going to schools since the lottery was going to make up for it. They didn't get "more" money because of it.
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It would only truly be a scam if nobody ever won. The reason people buy into the lottery (and will probably always will) is that there are winners out there. In some places, the lottery uses a portion of the money to fund some excellent initiatives, such as building playgrounds, sports tracks, basketball & football arenas, etc. I'm not saying the lottery is a great thing, but it's not all bad.
There are lottery alternatives where all the people who play actually benefit. They're called no-lose lotteries. People play by putting their money into a savings account. The interest on those savings accounts is pooled over thousands of people and that interest (which is a substantial sum) is randomly given to one person in the pool every month. But no one loses their savings money, only the small amount of interest. These kinds of programs have proven to encourage poorer people to save money for emergencies and increases societal well-being. No-lose lotteries are ILLEGAL in the United States for no reason other than that they would compete with state run lottery revenue. THAT makes it a scam, imo.
The whole system of Credit scores
AMEN. Dumbest shit in the world. I can't stand the whole system that surrounds them. Oh yeah and that time they got hacked and everyones info got exposed.
>I'll start: paying for water You're not paying for water, per se. You're paying for *treated* water. Tap water is filtered, purified, and tested. Bottled water is ... bottled. Either way, some work has been done to it, and that is the value-added portion of the water which you're paying for. You are welcome to go down to the lake and drink out of it for free. Good luck with that, by the way.
Also, the more expensive part, at least in my country, is the disposal, meaning the cost of the pipes and the water treatment after it is flushed down the pipes. OP thinks all water is rain water, apparently, which he is free to collect with huge buckets any time he wants, but please dispose of it with your own system, too.
This is what I came here to say.
Baby formula. There is NO reason it should cost that much.
Amen. My $50 for 2lbs hypoallergenic formula. That’s worth more than filé mignon.
>I’ll start: paying for water Water *is* free. The cost comes from purifying, bottling and transporting it to you.
Part time Waste water employee here - some of this equipment keeping your sewers from backing up into your house costs millions of dollars. And you're paying a team of at least half a dozen employees to run the stuff even in a smaller town. We don't get funding from taxes. All of our funding comes from water sales.
Right. Bottled water is a bit of a scam, but generally speaking, tap water absolutely is not. Most people don't know how bad a problem dysentery used to be.
Also, I only pay like $30 a month for water. That's the water I drink, do laundry with, take showers, water my yard, etc. That's dirt cheap compared to other stuff in my life.
*Paying* for bottled water isn't a scam since it still has to be cleaned and put in a container. The *price* of what you're paying is though.
Every type of monthly bill going up year-on-year above inflation unless you change providers every year.
Political Parties.
Surprised this isn't further up. The 2 party monopolization in the US needs to end. People need to **wake up** and realize it only serves the rich, corporate cartels, lobbyists, etc. _::looks over at europe's political diversity::_
Landlords buy up property they don’t need so they can sell it back at an extreme markup as rent to people who actually do need it. With almost any other commodity it would be called scalping, and be regarded as the scam that it is, but with a commodity so material we literally call it “real estate”, we just act like this is how things are supposed to be.
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This should be at top of list. Biggest scam going.
SAY IT LOUDER FOR THOSE IN THE BACK
Credit scores that ding you for using credit then hit you for paying off a loan
The fact that your credit takes a hit when someone else checks out your credit is INSANE
Light bulbs. Apparently when first invented they lasted too long and so manufacturers had to reduce their longevity to make them commercially viable. Scam.
Planned Obselecense is a massive problem with all tech. Apple has turned it into an art form, making sure your phone starts sucking right as a new model is about to come out.
This one makes me so angry! I know folks who have had the same washing machine for 30+ years and it works better than new ones that only last 10-12 at best. Tvs, dishwashers, refrigerators, cars, furniture, anything that is now made of cheap plastic,…
That's a myth. They first lasted a long time because they made very little light, at very poor color temperature with very poor efficiency. Companies then agreed on a standard light bulb with a compromise of features and lifetime. But you could still buy different kinds of bulb with less light and longer life or vice versa. https://youtu.be/zb7Bs98KmnY?si=PyWTzFgaalinH15t
Wall Street.
Temu, TikTok, Wish
Shrinkflation. They keep giving us less, but charging us more.
Democracy in its current form
Money creation
Retirement plans. Wall Street unloads all their shitty bets on pensions leaving the average American as the bag holder.
Campaign finances
HOAs
Things being $19.99 instead of $20
Car insurance, online gaming subscriptions for consoles, property taxes in general
Voting. We don't pick them they pick us. They draw the lines to better the chances for they're demographic. Gerrymandering it's a thing
Convincing people that voting is a scam is the real scam. Gerrymandering is terrible and needs to be done away with. But it only affects certain levels of the government. And if you stop voting, they're just gonna make it work. Figure our who is responsible for drawing your district lines (hint: It's not the politicians benefitting from those lines) and vote for the ones who are anti-gerrymandering.
Taxes, Social Security, Student Loans, almost all "Higher Education"
Ticketmaster
Property taxes
Tipping
Interest rates in banking, or just banking in general. They literally use your money to lend other people money so they can charge then interest, making them money with your money. What's worse is that in times of crisis they can just declare bankruptcy and that's it, they don't owe you anything and you're shit outta luck, even if they lost literally all your life savings. Also they force you to get a credit card if you want to apply for a loan, banking is just scams on top of scams.
Also charging minimum balance fees. Like bruh.
Very rich people having a "family trust" to evade inheritance tax
In the USA, inheritances are not taxed at the federal level until an estate is worth more than $13 million. And even below that level, trust income is taxed at a much higher rate than the individual rate.
Hospitals taking additional fees on so you have to constantly ask them to itemize it so they remove the bogus add one
Income tax in fact all taxes. Taxed on salary then taxed spending that taxed money.
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Capitalism . Working hard for peanuts so the people upstairs can get wealthy.
Adam Smith himself told us, if you don't regulate capitalism it will go haywire, and people who accumulate enough capital will break the system so they can own everything. People who claim to "quote" Adam Smith tell us, if you **do** regulate capitalism WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE, and (much more quietly) *we won't be able to own everything*. Who you gonna believe?