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)
Technically insurance only works if everybody pays in. Wouldn’t work as a concept if every tom dick and harry could pay them $100 then a week later need $100,000. They’d basically be out of business right quick with nothing to provide for anyone. Maybe as some believe it should just be provided through taxes, but it’s certainly not a scam.
The scam part comes when you are forced to fight tooth and nail to get money from them even when you are clearly covered
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.
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.
First Past the Post voting at elections.
Tipping in restaurants…pay the workers.
Yep, tipping is fundamentally unethical.
This one, every time. Imagine buying a product or service for an agreed price, and then being guilt-tripped into having to pay 20%, or more, on top because the owners don’t pay their staff enough salary to survive on. It should be fucking illegal. Pay your staff a proper salary and charge your clients the price you published on your menu/price-list etc. Running a business isn’t a god-given right, and if you can’t do it without screwing your employees over, then you’re not capable of running a business period. You should bugger off and let someone who is capable, and who isn’t an empathy vacuum have a go.
British royal family.
Religions that collect money from adherents.
Web 2.0 data harvesting.
For context I’m a Brit.
I would support a king, if I had a good one. I would hold a man not as equal but as above me, and have him experience and control the country. I would fight and die for that person.
But only if I got something back as an equal. My King should work tirelessly to improve the lives of their subjects.
Their majesty should humble capitalists and oppressors and keep them in check.
King Charles does cut some tape, do some humanitarian PR but frankly it’s clear that people like Bezos run rough shot over him and that’s essentially why I lose my respect.
If you think about, the benevolent dictator model of governance is pretty much the best type of hierarchy. It avoids the indecision of a democracy, the corruption of oligarchy and the tyranny of autocracy.
Rare to see examples of this form, especially at large scale. One notable exception is Thailand, a country that is one of a handful that has never been colonised. The Thai people revere their king but they also have a democratic process, which occasionally comes under some corrective influence, backed by the army. It’s definitely not a tyranny but it’s not a democracy either.
