Asklemmy

Chiropractors.

Private health insurance is the biggest fucking scam ever. The private insurance companies benefit by getting the aggregate healthiest population into their plans (working adults). The most likely to be expensive people, i.e. old people (on medicare) or poor people (on medicaid, or not even on an insurance plan) are on government, tax payer insurance plans. There is literally no reason except for corporate profiteering that Medicare should not be expanded to cover all people.

Also all those conversations, especially in the 2020 election period, were totally bullshit. You say something like M4A will cost 44 trillion dollars or whatever, which sounds like an insane amount of money. What is often left out of the discussion is that estimated cost was 1) over 10 years and 2) has to be weighed against the current costs we already pay for insurance. So the deal was very simple: the overall costs would go down because the overall spending would be less, and at the same time millions of people without coverage would be covered, and at the same time you don't have to contemplate stupid bullshit like in network, out of network providers. Or ever again talk to your insurance about why something is or isn't covered. Boils my blood when I think too much about this.

Not even gonna weigh in on things like how medicare can't negotiate prescription drug prices (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/23/us/politics/medicare-drug-price-negotiations-lawsuits.html), or how dental, vision, and hearing are treated separately from general healthcare, or how med school is prohibitively expensive, or how the residents after med school are overworked because the guy who institutionalize that practice was literally a cokehead. Those are all just bonus topics. The point is we are getting fleeced.

The stock market and publicly traded companies. The idea that a business that is making consistent profits isn't good unless those profits are increased each quarter is asinine. This system of shortsighted hyper focus on short term quarterly growth for the sake of growth is the cause of so much pain and suffering in the world. Even companies with amazing financials will work to push workers compensation down, cut corners and exploit loopholes to make sure their profits are always growing. Consistent large profits aren't good enough.

Subscriptions.

People pay every month but most don't use the sub to it's full value, and forget how expensive it becomes over the years. And you don't own anything on a subscription, you just borrow it.

Also trial periods that prolong automatically into subscriptions.

Unpaid overtime.

Framing "fulfilling your contract" as "silent quitting".

In what other context would be "delivering what's in the contract" anything less than satisfactory?

When I buy a litre of milk and the box contains exactly a litre of milk it isn't "silent stealing" either.

My personal top 3:

• insurance
• subscriptions
• Google and similar data hungry companies (while not a financial scam but moreso a privacy scam, companies like Google and Meta profiteering on our personal data without our knowledge or awareness)

First Past the Post voting at elections.

Professors requiring their own, expensive textbook for their course.

Wedding rings/diamonds in general.

The tradition isn't as old as people think and was literally started by a jewelry company to sell more jewelry. Specifically diamonds, which are not as rare as commonly believed and if not for the false scarcity and misinformation, would be dirt cheap.

Car dealerships. They are awful on purpose. In many places car manufacturers are not legally allowed to sell their cars directly to customers, in order to create what is essentially legally mandated car dealerships, which all suck.

Car based infrastructure

the stock market

capitalism

Tipping in restaurants…pay the workers.

The price for glasses. It's like this because of a stupid duopoly

Insurance. A promise they try really hard to break.

Tipping

Homes as wealth-creators.

Americans take it as received wisdom that homes are meant to generate income through higher valuations over time. We just assume home prices go up over time and if it's not actively increasing in value, the home was a failure.

Many other countries don't treat homes this way. They are dwellings, invest what you want to your liking, but it's not a retirement account.

This focus on wealth generation creates lots of perverse incentives, such as exclusionary zoning, building on lots that are overly large, and suburban sprawl. These don't reflect people's actual, desired form of housing but rather maximize wealth for homeowners at the expense of everyone else.

We have a completely warped view of housing that causes us to be preyed upon by real estate agents, landlords, HOAs and the like.

Capitalism and the 5 day 9 to 5 work week

Private health insurance.

Banks.

Religion

Dollar stores. A lot of the time they are profiting by selling you a smaller quantity at a slightly lower price. They target low income communities.

Windows. You pay ~100€ just to give your personal data to MS and get a bloated OS that will use all of your resources. Even MacOS is a more fair deal than this.

Antivirus software

Most forms of insurance in the US

Insurance (am American)

Your ISP is suddenly asking for more money. What are you gonna do? Disconnect from the internet?

Service as a subscription, for me. It used to be you bought a product and then you owned it. Now if you want practically anything from streaming media to freaking car washes, you have to "subscribe".

Religion. Whole cloth.

Credit scores

Printer inkt. In our shop people are still buying them for a way to high price…

Real estate agents getting 6% commission from the seller.

Diamonds.

Giving money to politicians.