Religion
I am an atheist and I believe the world would be much better without religions. Having said that, I don’t conisder it as a scam in itslef. Instead they must have been something evolved over the time due to our ignorance, fear and helplessness. The very same factors that still keep them going.
But hell yeah, people are exploited in the name of religion. I’m from India, one of the largest so called democracies, currently under the governance of a fascist hindutva party that thrives on polarizing people in the name of religion.
BTW I was actually looking for specific instances of scams carefully plotted by known people, companies or even countries instead of broad answers like religion.
Religion was needed, but at some point logic and critical thinking should have been enough.
The issue is the wealthiest benefit when the masses don’t have the tools to use that. They want people who won’t question rules and blindly follow them.
Humans are just animals, we’re not born with those abilities, we need to be taught.
So we see education outright cut or forced to focus on rote memorization rather than the process to understand and figure shit out on our own.
We should be past religion as a species, but it’s not automatic, we have to continually teach the next generation to think for themselves
Having said that, I don’t conisder it as a scam in itslef
I think the more correct thing to say is that Organized Religion is a scam. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being religious (provided you don’t force those views on others), but organized religion always winds up rotten at the top - and it’s not surprising. Organized religion is one of the most powerful tools for controlling people, even if it wasn’t (though it might have been) intended to be that way at the beginning. A king/president/dictator can threaten the lives of their subjects, but only a holy man can threaten their immortal soul (from the perspective of the devotee anyways).
Now that’s a take I completely stand behind and agree with. I couldn’t have put it better myself. That said, some religions were not made with the intent of controlling others. I don’t think Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism were made with the intent to control people. We can argue about Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as they were made for control by their founders, and what they intended for these movements after their deaths we do not know (or at least I don’t, maybe someone out there does).
Again - I’m not arguing necessarily that any of them started out that way, in fact - I’m willing to bet that very few (looking at you, Mormons) actually were. Most religion (in my humble opinion) just stems from folks trying to make sense of an unfathomable universe using what tools are available to them at the time. But once you have the religion, and you have holy men/women who have the ability to excersize some form of power over their flock, you’ll inevitably find corrupt people flocking to those positions, as they do in every position of power. Then over time they’ll carve out more power for themselves and more authority, find ways of extracting influence and power from their positions until soon you’ve got “holy men” living in palaces with the authority of kings.
It’s just human nature for positions of power to eventually become corrupted to some degree, and positions of religious authority offer an unparalleled lever in which to move the masses, which only serves to make it more attractive to would-be tyrants
Just FYI, that is specifically why The Baha’is don’t have clergy. They do have an administrative body with local, national, and global levels of influence, but those are 9 member councils that are elected by the members of the faith, who must use the Baha’i rules of Consultation to reach unanimous decisions. Also if any of them ever appear to want the position, they are automatically ineligible to hold said position. It’s worked well for about 60 years so far.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being religious (provided you don’t force those views on others)
Hum. That’s like saying “there’s nothing wrong with being convinced that 2+2=5”. There’s something intrinsically mistaken about it, and I don’t think it’s defensible.
Just imagine what could have been done in the last 300 years if every dollar that was donated to churches went to some other cause, or back into the pockets of the masses. There is an immense amount of wealth that is trapped in the collective real estate, bank accounts, etc owned by churches. I’m not even talking about megachurches or the mormon’s giant stack of cash, just mom’n’pop little parishes that are everywhere across the US.
If ALL that money was still kicking around in the economy and in the pockets of people to spend on real things, building real businesses, etc…we’d be way better off.
Always makes me sad when I visit my in-laws who live in a particularly bible thumpy area and you go and there are spots there where churches outnumber normal businesses. It seems like it’s just a huge drain on the local economy devoting that much money into propping up churches of various kinds…
There’s a church across the street from my home in a small rural town in Oklahoma. It sits completely empty except for about 90 minutes from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM when about 6 cars pull up into the parking lot and maybe 15 people saunter in for Sunday service after ringing a loud bell announcing to the whole neighborhood. None of these attendees live in the neighborhood I might add.
There are literally dozens of other churches just like it throughout the town. It blows my mind that a religion that claims to be about spreading the love of their savior and saving as many people as possible from literal damnation would let a resource like that go unused. They could have volunteers there every day of the week helping to improve the community and help people in need but they couldn’t care less.
Churches do an immense amount of charity work and helping their communities.
So do secular charities.
https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/who-gives-most-to-charity/
Once again, the biggest givers are found to be concentrated in “Bible Belt” states in the South or where Mormons make up a large portion of the population. On the other hand, scant-giving households are heavily concentrated in relatively wealthy and secular New England.
I’m not even religious myself, just find it annoying that reddit atheist cool guys think that religious people are all greedy and selfish, when this opposite is actually true.
A church in the city I work for is being used as an extreme weather shelter for homeless/at risk people. I received a couple dozen phone calls from the parish when it was first announced who were pissed about homeless people using their church for shelter. Any time I tried to explain the irony of their complaint it just made them angrier.
I’m not saying this to paint a picture of all religious people, but from my experience the one’s I have come across tend to not care about anyone in their community not in their circle.
Considering giving to any church 501©(3) themselves are considered “charitable donations” when it comes to taxes, this rings a little hollow. If you consider a church as a charity itself, and those churches are soliciting donations every week in services, of course you’re going to see higher charitable giving from areas with a lot of churches/religious. That said, my gripe is not with religious based charities, it’s with churches. Salvation Army can continue to do what it does, religious affiliated childrens hospitals, etc. The amount of money that is spent on congregations is just a waste and it’s a shame.
~signed, an atheist (ex)reddit cool guy
Yeh I hate that reddit atheist attitude, it embarrasses the rest of us atheists/agnostics. Of course it got brought over here too.
Organized religion has done a lot of bad, but they have done some good too.
Sometimes I mull over what state we’d be in as a society if instead of celebrating a man’s deeds we had been celebrating nature and the environment that hosts us since the beginning.
I can’t help but think there would be a lot less damage to the environment and less greed.
thrives on polarizing people in the name of religion
things have been like this for a long time, irrespective of the parties. but this has been going too far for the past two decades, especially after the current prime minister started his period.
True that.
BTW I was actually looking for specific instances of scams carefully plotted by known people, companies or even countries instead of broad answers like religion.
Lesson for next time, use the text part of your post to define what you are asking or are interested in hearing. Otherwise you get everyone giving glib answers that suck like the above.
BTW, I’m reading Smartest Guys In The Room, the book about Enron, you might be interested in looking up that company. They used very complex financial instruments to deceive shareholders and Wall Street and boost their stock price. Bunch of assholes, some of the shit they pulled was obscene.
Lesson for next time, use the text part of your post to define what you are asking or are interested in hearing.
Right, I should’ve seen it coming. But as long as the discussions are healthy, instead of mudslinging, I’m kind of okay with it.
Oh my god, isn’t Christianity kinda a pyramid scheme?
I wanted to post this
The American healthcare system.
deleted by creator
What is the alternative to capitalism?
Depends on how you define capitalism.
According to the modern (very intentionally altered) definition of capitalism,
“a system allowing the exchange of goods and services for currency, where different skill sets can result in different compensation”
… everything, including the USSR [1][2] has been capitalism. And even most Marxists are pro-capitalists.
The definition above encompasses everything that ever was, and everything that ever will be. (And that’s only a slight exaggeration)
Which – just fyi – makes the word one of the most useless words in the history of language.
If, however – just hypothetically – you wanted to have a productive dialogue with a self-described anti-capitalist, you would need to carry out the entire conversation pretending the word “capitalism” referred to something a hell of a lot more specific. A single mechanism within market society. A single kind of contractual relationship between worker and company.
Which is an exercise in imagination and in the algebraic concept of substitution that most people have a rather stubborn aversion to.
The barter system before currency was invented wouldn’t fit that definition, and strictly speaking Marx wanted Communism to do away with currency so if that ever happened anywhere, that would also be outside of that definition.
That being said, yeah the modern definition of “capitalism” is over-broad and mostly useless as a concept.
Right. That is a good point. Although Marx didn’t see the elimination of currency as a realistic goal attainable within the first few decades (possibly even the first century) of communism, he did believe a post-scarcity humanity would eventually transcend the need for currency.
However when it comes to barter, the thing is: even in societies dominated by barter, some commodity tends to become the standard against which the values of other commodities are measured. Cigarettes in POW camps, cacao beans in Mesoamerica.
By an admittedly-loose definition of currency, a currency does always emerge and end up being directly exchanged for goods and services, even in barter systems.
A hybrid system Whereby capitalism in a regulated form can go on pretty much as usual, but government run companies provide affordable alternatives for basic necessities (food, water, housing, communication, mass transit etc). The government run companies hire anyone who wants a job. Unemployment is reduced, cost of living is reduced, and no ones freedom is stepped on.
Scam for sure. Hard to say it’s been unnoticed for a long time though
idk - only 63% of Americans support single-payer healthcare, nearly half of Americans still haven’t caught on at least
“only”
That’s a clear majority. If we had a referendum about it we’d get it (but the US doesn’t have federal referendums.)
Homeopathy, acupuncture, ozone therapy… all “alternative medicines” basically.
Like the old joke, “What do you call alternative medicine that works?” “Medicine!”
If some herb, plant or extract has a proven effect it will be adopted by real medicine, and all that is left in alternative medicine is the scams that do not work.
You’re almost right. Modern medicine needs to synthesize natural compounds to profit fully from them. They can’t just use natural remedies and present them to patients because they can’t patent them.
I’m sure that’s a major part of it, but I also wouldn’t want to live in a world where we could only get aspirin from willow bark. We either wouldn’t have enough aspirin or we wouldn’t have any more willow trees. Medicines derived from the actual source aren’t possible on a global scale in most cases.
Capitalism is a blight on society and has lead to countless deaths. But in a utopia where money doesn’t exist and people create medicine for the world only to help people with no profit they still need to synthesize it.
major part of it, but I also wouldn’t want to live in a world where we could only get aspirin from willow bark. We either wouldn’t have enough aspirin or we wouldn’t have any more willow trees. Medicines derived from the actual source aren’t possible on a global scale in most cases.
Capitalism is a blight on society and has lead to countless deaths. But in a utopia where money doesn’t exist and people create medicine for the world only to help people wit
I agree with you but in that case, the need to synthesize it could be made entirely based on practicality rather than profit.
Not all countries have for profit medicine though. I’m sure it’s a factor, but it’s not a universal thing.
There are other reasons why “natural” remedies get more scrutiny in the medical community, and the other comments have touched on a few of them
There’s a slight gotcha here:
I’m in Asia and a lot of traditional chinese medicine you can buy is just regular medicine with a marketing disguise hiding the fact. Why yes, this is a box of whatever the fuck extract, very interesting, old northern recipe to cure the shit, let me just check what’s written on this paper, and, yep, there it is, it’s just Loperamide but with an additive to make it taste like Ginseng. Got it.
Tim Minchin
I worked for a medical clinic years ago.
One doctor was pushing natural hormone therapy.
I asked one of the other doctors. He wouldn’t touch it.
He told me he sees thousands of patients each year. Some number will get cancer, and some number of them will sue him.
If he prescribes a medication, he can defend himself by pointing to the medical studies showing the safety of the medication.
If he prescribes anything natural, there are no studies showing safety, because nobody can patent natural substances. Therefore there isn’t much money to be made, so nobody spends the money to do good studies.
Even if it was a miracle drug, he wouldn’t prescribe it.
He is wrong tho, natural substances can and are regularly patented when a use is found for them or a production method that’s better is discovered.
That was my initial reaction at first as well. However as far as I can tell, natural products are not patentable, unless the product in question has been modified, manipulated etc, to produce something that is deemed to have been significantly changed.
So, in the US, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that human DNA, being a naturally occurring product, cannot be patented. However, it also ruled that complementary DNA, essentially DNA that has been extracted and then modified in a lab, can be patented.
Monsanto has entered the chat.
DNA shouldn’t be patentable. I guarantee you that the scenario that Micheal Crichton laid out in Next will end up happening at some point unless we reign this shit in.
Medicine is any substance that has a demonstrable healthcare effect (demonstrated through double blind tests and not some rando’s anecdote). That includes natural substances.
To put it another way, medicine and natural substances are not two mutually exclusive (i.e. disjoint) sets, as you and/or your doctor friend appear to be implying.
That’s not what I’m saying.
I agree a natural substance can be medicine.
His statement - not mine - is that it couldn’t be patented.
Therefore the profit is limited.
Therefore there are fewer studies than a comparable pharmaceutical.
Therefore when (not if) he is sued, he will be less able to defend himself.
Therefore he won’t prescribe it.
Thanks for clarifying. Although I don’t agree with your doctor friend from an ethical standpoint, the point about natural products not being patentable is an interesting one and hadn’t occurred to me before.
Once I made a joke online about paying for homeopathy by dipping a dollar in a jar of water and giving them the jar, and like five people I know unfollowed me lol
Did you hear the one about the homeopathic who tried to commit suicide?
He took a 10X dilution of cyanide.
Lol yeh a surprising amount of people believe in it.
I once trained to work in pharmacies, we had companies present on their products and one of them was selling homeopathic products. One of the other students asked if it actually worked and the rep’s response was ‘if it didn’t do you think people would buy it?’ I didn’t say anything but I thought to myself yes, there absolutely are people who hand over money for dumb shit that doesn’t work lol.
I have a pinched nerve. I went to many doctors, done many tests, went to months of PT and was still in pain. I went to my acupuncturist and she is able to release the muscles around the pinch enough that my right arm doesn’t feel constantly numb. I a man of science. I don’t believe in he Chi traveling my body etc but the physical result of the acuponcture cannot be denied.
And there are physical therapists who do acupuncture strictly for muscle release without all of the chi stuff.
Yes absolutely. They call it needling though
Acupuncture has actually been shown to help in some cases beyond a placebo effect.
There isn’t much evidence there. There’s dry needling, which is the evidence-based alternative with different techniques - but much of that is built on the same evidence behind massage therapy.
I feel the same about chiropractic - many people call bullshit, but I’ll be damned if they don’t help me. Like you, I don’t believe “your spine is where all your problems originate” like some chiropractics try to peddle, but the dude pushes on my back and it pops and it feels better.
My brother was in total kidney failure and his chiro said the pain was likely “toxins” released from his session. Utter quack. They arent all hacks, but they can do real damage. They can paralyze you for life or even worse. I hope you will not have firsthand experience
I used to believe the “they aren’t all hacks thing” until I met more chiropractors. While I would like to believe that there’s a subset of them out there who treat it more like a science of doing adjustments and what not, I don’t think that’s actually the case. My mom works for a chiropractor and has gone to several of their conventions over the years, and from what it sounds like they are all nutjobs who believe aligning your spine will cure you of all disease.
I would really love to see the numbers of how many chiropractors are antivaxxers. I bet it’s in the high 90%.
I base that solely off the fact that some have MDs and a dislike of sweeping generalizations… no matter how true 😅
Yeah but so can regular doctors.
A friend went in for a colonoscopy and died from a series of complications. First they nicked the inside of her colon, and it started bleeding. Then there was a whole series of stupid responses, based on the meds she was taking and had disclosed. They just made one mistake after another, until she died.
None of us knew she was walking into that hospital for the last time, because we were all relying on the doctors to be masters of their craft.
To find religious behavior in the medical field doesn’t take long. Another friend has described being unable to process patients because the blood pressure equipment is broken. They’re down to one machine, and the manual squeeze bulbs have all failed, so there’s a massive backlog in their clinic.
Now, they know clinical outcomes are suffering as a result of the lack of throughput, but they have to take blood pressure on every patient before they do anything else. So they’re beholden to this policy, and can’t practice medicine in a rational manner. But they’re embedded in a system that won’t let them use their eyes and brains to operate on what’s in front of them.
So even without belief in the supernatural, doctors are serving a “false god” which is the bureaucracy, and because they can’t serve two gods that means actual medical practice itself takes a second seat.
Oh I know, and I don’t trust any that ask me what other non-skeletal ailments I have (I had one tell me my acid reflux could be cured by chiro). But I have a few skeletal problems I go to them for about 3 times a year, and it helps.
MDs give you incorrect information too. I had a GP for 5 years who, when I talked about my cataplexy - a well-documented condition that is directly related to my (at that time, undiagnosed) narcolepsy - he told me to go on birth control, then he changed my antidepressant meds, and then when those things didn’t help me, he said “try exercising more and lose some weight”. If he would had looked up the symptoms I was describing (like I eventually did), he would have probably recommend I see a sleep doctor, but instead, I lived with narcolepsy under his care for 5 years, almost getting fired for falling asleep at my job.
I know it’s not the same, as your brother had a life-threatening condition, but all this to say that MDs aren’t all outstanding professionals either.
It’s true that malpractice is a thing, and lord knows I’ve met plenty of doctors ranging from asshole to idiot. You’re especially at risk if you’re a female or minority which is just another layer of bullshit with healthcare outcomes. That said, I’ll take the person with a decade of school and required practice over a chiro any day. Sucks that it’s still something of a crapshoot :/
The issue with chiropractors is that they treat the symptom and not the cause. If your back is misaligned, it’s because your muscles are pulling on it the wrong way, the chiro will pull it back in place but now your muscles are still pulling the wrong way and they may have pulled on the muscle to make it move and may have injured it, now your muscle says hell no you don’t and starts pulling even more. It’s instant relief with little lasting result. which is a great business model, instant result and returning customers because the problem isn’t treated. It’s like going to the mechanic because your motor is out of oil but not trying to fix the leak so you come back every week to refill the oil.
The problem is I’ve been to numerous doctors, working with a pain management specialist now, done physical therapy with a few different places for months, do physical therapy every morning, do yoga, exercise every day, and still no relief. So, like, sometimes it gets so bad I go to the chiropractor because at least they can give me some relief.
Yeah and the idea that a doctor is going to treat the root cause is laughable.
You go to a doctor with pain caused by muscles pulling too much out of alignment and they (a) won’t recognize the fact about muscles at all, (b) will start talking surgery, and © will either give you a prescription for pain meds that you wouldn’t need if they simply fixed the pain, or make the whole thing about denying you the meds that you aren’t even asking for.
Doctors and root causes are like oil and water.
Have you tried visiting a register massage therapist? They can provide even better immediate relief without the pseudoscience. It pairs very well with physical therapy.
Not covered by my insurance, sadly. Chiropractic is, but not massage therapy. Plus, it’s very hard to find a pro massage therapist where I live. But thanks for the advice.
This is why you skip the chiropractor and go to the rolfer instead. They’ll free up the fascial tension and release the forces pulling your system out of whack.
rolfer
I had to look this up. Honestly, I think that the connective tissue is my problem as the ortho surgeon(s) have said there’s nothing wrong with my bone structure, but also said they have no idea what’s wrong. Same same with the pain management specialist, he is just out to treat my symptoms (something an earlier poster said was an issue with chiropractors).
I honestly think there’s a lot of types of medicine out there that work for people, even the “pseudoscience” or “new-age” ones. No one should put their lives in the hands of medicine that has no scientific basis (ie if you have terminal cancer), but when it comes to chronic pain and other non-urgent but life-impacting ailments, as long as you do your homework as to who you’re seeing and the potential risks of treatment, it’s your choice. I get that people had bad experiences (proposing chiropractic can cure kidney failure), but if you’ve tried the “scientific” avenues (even going to multiple doctors), and no one can give you relief, you have to look elsewhere.
Just FYI two options you have are myofascial release and rolfing. Rolfing is myofascial release plus an extra layer of theory about how to target and sequence the releases for maximum long-term effect.
Part of the theory is that these tension patterns tend to exist across the entire body at once, so a rolfer will work on multiple body parts that are all related to the same pattern. The idea is that releasing just one component will cause the tension to just re-form again quickly, because it’s also stored in the other places.
The few things they do that are effective are better delivered by an evidence-based provider (e.g., physiotherapist, massage therapist) without the pseudoscience.
Where’s the proof that massage therapy is more evidence-based than chiropractic? Honest question, a cursory search seems to show that it’s not. Also, interesting that my chiropractic and physical therapy visits are covered by my insurance, but massage therapy is not. Wish I could afford it.
I should probably specify that it does vary by jurisdiction when it comes to massage therapy. We have registered massage therapists here. Some massage therapists might employ some pseudoscience, but there’s solid evidence on the near-term therapeutic benefits of massage. For chiropractic, it’s pretty much entirely based on pseudoscience.
If you need to fix a problem, a physical therapist is the way to go. If you want temporary relief, a massage therapist can be helpful. There’s no good reason to see a chiropractor - and it’s unfortunate that insurance providers (including my own) don’t allow those funds to be spent on actual treatments.
See an osteopath instead, in the UK at least, they are trained and regulated unlike chiropractors who regularly kill or permanently disable people with unsafe and inappropriate “manipulations”.
osteopath
Thanks, I’ll check it out (though I’m in the US). Also, I researched my chiropractor very thoroughly to ensure that he’s not likely to kill or disable me.
edit: turns out my insurance covers osteopathic manipulative medicine, and there’s 1 practitioner in my area (25 miles, probably more in the 50 mile range since I’m close to a big city). I will be making an appointment with her. Thanks kind stranger!
Awesome I hope they are helpful to you ☺️
The guy who told you to see an osteopath is a little misinformed and had things a bit upside down. Osteopathy is basically just chiropractic and has the same pseudoscientific origins.
However, for historical reasons osteopaths are very different either side of the Atlantic.
In the UK, osteopaths are basically just chiropractors with pretensions. In the US, doctors of Osteopathy are basically just doctors who went to a school that teaches osteopathic nonsense alongside real medicine, and they are licensed and operate as real physicians.
My former boss, who is one of the biggest pieces of shit I know, has a severe back injury and goes to a chiropractor for it. Dude’s gonna end up paralyzed or worse. He works with doctors daily.
my statutory health insurance (germany) pays for acupuncture. so it seems to be proven that it works so well that they cover the costs for the treatment
I’d just caution that coverage doesn’t necessarily mean effectiveness.
Trust me bro.
I Trust you what we doin’?
It just depends how you define the chi.
One simple way might be “responsiveness”. Chi is present wherever your body is capable of receiving and transmitting information.
So nervous system…
The information being passed isn’t just nerve signals.
Basically, imagine a human body as being like a whip. If you take parts of the whip and make them stiff, then you can’t crack the whip. The whip in its pliable form is capable of conducting a wave down its length. The whip with a stiff section can’t conduct that wave.
In the whip, this wave is its “chi”. A stiff section of the whip blocks its chi from flowing. It has a chi blockage. If the whip’s chi channels are open, then it can be cracked.
The more of your body you can recruit into each movement, the more efficient that movement is. I believe that different parts of the body “communicate” (more precisely they respond to one another’s actions) via tension and pressure. When a section of your body is stiff, that tension and pressure is less readable across that barrier. Your neck muscles will have a harder time predicting and responding to – and ultimately optimizing – the actions of your quadriceps, for example, if your trunk doesn’t convey the mechanical “signals” well enough for your neck muscles to tell what’s going on at the other end of the body.
To understand what I mean about responding, think of the way your body wobbles when you stand on one leg. That’s tons of muscles in your body responding to information about your balance point. Your gut muscles might clench for a fraction of a second in response to your knee detecting that your leg has become less stable. Just an example. This action is coordinated, classically, by peripheral ganglia of the nervous system. But I believe it also relies on mechanical signals – waves of pressure and tension, because mechanical signals conduct faster than nerve signals. (nerve conduction is about 50 m/s, speed of sound in the human body is about 1500 m/s)
Think of a flock of birds. Those birds each carry about a swarming algorithm: they make real-time decisions based on the positions and velocities of the other birds. The result is a flock that moves like an intelligent amoeba in the sky. Now imagine if you created some visual barrier in the middle of the flock. Now the birds on one side of that barrier can’t effectively swarm with the birds on the other side. The flock has been split into two flocks. That visual information is the flock’s “chi”, and the blockage makes the flock less integrated.
Various body parts – muscles, organs, nerve ganglia, senses – are a swarm, and a chi blockage is something that splits that swarm into two or more smaller swarms.
I love how ruthless the wikipedia pages on these topics are, by the way. Do check them out if you get the chance.
Hey umm so … homeopathy. There is a case to be made --hear me out here please-- that it might have been effective once, but now we’ve got millions of “practitioners” doing things that clearly do not work.
The reasoning is obvious.
The concentration of practitioners within the population is clearly too damn high (insert meme here). To show how effective it can truly be, all we need to do is to dilute the ratio … by a lot.
Don’t you agree that this is worth looking into?
(/s in case anyone is in doubt)
A few weeks ago I got the flu and went to see my doctor. She wasn’t in so I got sent to a substitute who examined my ear with a weird beeping device. I asked her what it was and she just said that she practices “Chinese medicine”.
She told me her device indicated that I have huge problems with my thyroid and she said I should get some sort of crystal necklace that’s good for that and that I should apply some essential oils daily. Of course, she happened to sell those at a good price.
I went to have a blood test and my thyroid was fine, my values were right in the middle of the acceptable range.
Scams, all of 'em. But the medbed that I can sell you is totally real. /s
I think chiropractors also fall under this
I used to get acupuncture with a tend unit attached to the needles as a kid for my chronic pain. Holy fuck did I feel better afterwards. It was probably the tens unit. I have a small one at home and it is great for relaxing my tight muscles.
That you can get rich if you work hard.
Additionally, that it’s okay to work yourself until death, because when you die you’ll actually live a new eternal life of permanent luxury.
Someone already mentioned religion, yes.
Ponzi schemes, especially the insurance companies. They really are a Ponzi scheme.
Think about it, they promise you things asking for money, then when you need their services they decide where you go, how much they will pay (leaving the rest for you to pay as a deductible), then they turn around and increase your costs for their services, that they fight tooth and nail not to pay anything.
I argue insurance in and of itself is no ponzi scheme. Working together is the basis of all civilisation. Trying to make a business out of a social service however … that’s rife for abuse, yes.
Depends on how you define a Ponzi scheme. Personally I define it as pay us money in return for a service, then run with the money or come up with ways to deny that service, once again keeping the money or as much as possible by telling businesses how much they can charge for their services.
If I ran my own company, I would be damned if someone is going to dictate my prices to help their bottom line.
IMHO, that is what has caused health care cost to be untenable for someone who cannot afford health insurance or makes like $3 too much to qualify for the likes of Medicaid.
Ponzi schemes actually already have a clear definition, and what you’re describing isn’t actually a Ponzi scheme
I work in the insurance industry and I 100% agree with this.
The only time it’s wise to take out an insurance policy is when
A) It’s legally required (though this is sometimes due to lobbying by the insurance companies themselves)
B) When you absolutely will not be able to actually pay for a potential, but necessary expense by yourself (cancer treatments and stuff like that)
So Health Insurance, Auto Insurance (even if your car is cheap and self-insurable, the car you hit may not be), Home-owners insurance and stuff like that are necessary and generally a good financial bet, even if they are crooked af.
Any “micro-insurances” though? All total scams. Travel insurance, phone insurance (or “Extended Warranties”), Apple Care, all that kind of shit is 100% going to cost you more money to have than it’ll save you - unless you get really really lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it). You’d be better off spending what you’d pay on those insurance premiums on a hand of blackjack, I’ll bet the odds would be slightly more in your favor that way
Ugh my parents both insist on travel insurance. What if you get sick?? Idk, I’ll cancel the stuff I can and take the loss on what I can’t, for all the travel I’ve done the amount of times that has happened does not even remotely come close to how much I would have paid each time for travel insurance.
No mom, I’m not going to insure our 2 night stay at the Hilton in (mid sized city). I’m sure it’s going to be fine.
Last time I did was for a very very expensive flight across an ocean, just because it was like, 15 dollars on a 2000 flight for a few people. Fine, but everything else we took the risk. (And we did not use it)
Travel insurance is especially terrible, because a lot of the time it’s a pretty substantial premium, and actually filing a claim on it is a HUGE PITA.
I worked for a traveler insurance company before, and we denied most claims that came in. People would buy insurance on a $100 concert ticket, paying a $10 premium for the insurance, then when they’d go to file the claim, we’d require a doctors note, so now they also have to cough up a $20 copay and a whole afternoon just to get a note saying “yup, this person is sick”. And that’s just one of the many ways people got fleeced. During COVID, a lot of travel insurance claims got denied because illnesses resulting from pandemics aren’t covered in some policies as well
not surprised at all, I’ve found it’s just better to learn the cancellation policy of your items. Most hotels are full refund if they know >48 hours, and if less usually you’ll at least get points/credit back which for me I’ll absolutely use next time. Not worth the premium and the hassle to get cash back if I only find out less than 48 hours ahead of time
Thanks for your input, it helps not make me sound like a conspiracy theorist or anti-biz whack job
nothing conspiracy theorist about it at all. If anyone gives you sideways looks when you mention that insurance is a scam, just point out the very simple and undeniable fact that insurance companies are (very) profitable. That means, by definition that the average customer pays more in premiums than they get in payouts, and not just a bit more, a lot more, as that profit they make is after they pay their thousands of employees, award multi-million dollar bonuses to their executives, pay for their bigass skyscrapers, and all that other shit. If insurance was a “fair” deal, they’d be losing money from the administration costs
Always self-insure if you can afford it
Travel insurance is my big one. Why would you not get that? That seems like such a stupid risk not to get that.
Like if I get hit by a car in the middle of nowhere and they got to fly my home because the medical care there sucks. That’s going to cost an absolute fortune. Even having to send my dead body home will cost my family loads.
Why would you not get that? That seems like such a stupid risk not to get that.
Pretty much for all the reasons I said in my comment - you’ll almost certainly spend more on premiums for travel insurance than you’ll ever claim (this is true of all insurance) and the expenses incurred by self-insuring are generally manageable. Even in the two situations you refer to, we’re “only” talking about costs of a few thousand, and both of those are highly unlikely events that most people go their whole lives not dealing with. you’re much better off putting the money you’d spend on that travel insurance into an emergency fund to cover those kinds of unexpected expenses.
Insurance is only a good financial call if you risk completely bankrupting yourself by not having insurance, otherwise you’re just trading potential lump sum costs for small continuous costs, and the premiums will generally always wind up being more than what you’re saving (because if they weren’t, then the Insurance companies wouldn’t be making so much money).
That being said, it’s your money, if you’d rather accept that you’re paying more over a lifetime on travel insurance than you’re saving just to have the peace of mind that you won’t have to dip into savings for any incident that happens before or during the trip (assuming your incident doesn’t fall under one of the many carefully crafted exclusions that the insurance companies add to their policies to prevent paying out, which it probably will), then by all means, buy it - but if you’re buying it because you think it’s the financially savy move, and you have at least a few grand in your bank account for emergencies, then you’re kidding yourself.
I just read a news article this week about a young Australian man on vacation in Indonesia who got in an accident. His family now face costs of around $350,000 because his insurance didn’t cover riding motorized scooters.
I think travel insurance is generally wise to have, and to be aware of what you are covered for. This is an example both of the potential costs and how if you don’t read your policy carefully they will fuck you over.
you’ll almost certainly spend more on premiums for travel insurance than you’ll ever claim (this is true of all insurance)
Yes I agree but it’s about how you value risk. Losing $100 on travel insurance is better than losing $1,000,000 on hospital bills. The risk is different obviously but I’m not worried about $100 for peace of mind. I have even gone to war zones were my insurance was invalid but I had it in safer places because it’s all about risk.
Even in the two situations you refer to, we’re “only” talking about costs of a few thousand, and both of those are highly unlikely events
That’s just where your wrong and there is no point continuing this discussion. You don’t think people have to pay a fortune for medical cover when you have no insurance? Sure some countries might cover that and their might be mutual care agreements. But not having insurance in a place that won’t pay your hospital bills. That’s madness. Your argument works if you artificially make up costs sure.
I have personally know loads of people to get in accidents when travelling, I have myself. I have only heard one person being hospitalised and getting sent home but it happens and it isn’t cheap.
I think the main point is that the policies have so many exclusions in the fine print that you are unlikely to get them to pay even if something does happen. That seems pretty scammy to me. But I guess there is something to be said for the peace of mind you get when you buy it, eh? Even if it’s unfounded.
Yup - this is exactly it. I’m entirely certain that there are people out there who have had their financial lives saved from utter ruin via vacation insurance - but I’m also certain (because I’ve witnessed it myself) that far far more people who think they should be covered wind up in deep shit because their hospitalization came from an accident, or as the result of a crime, or some other edge case that happens to be excluded by the travel insurance policy (and make no mistake, these exclusions are carefully crafted to cover as many potential cases as humanly possible while still sounds decent on paper).
And you would be entirely correct - if insurance companies acted in good faith, the reality however, is that they don’t. Your comments are already littered with replies of people giving you examples that they’ve personally experienced of carefully constructed exclusions meaning that they can’t actually claim their policy.
I have no doubt that there are people out there for whom travel insurance has saved their ass, but I know from my own experience in the industry that the far more common experience for policy holders is to wind up with the insurance company finding a reason to not pay up, and now you’re left both with the cost of the emergency, as well as the cost of the policy.
Like I said, it’s your money, and I’m certainly not going to give a shit if you keep buying travel insurance policies, hell - people buying insurance policies pay my salary (though i don’t work in travel insurance any longer)
I got travel insurance recently for a hiking trip with my wife. We had an emergency and my wife had to be airlifted out by helicopter, and we were so glad to have the travel insurance because it covers emergency evacuation up to $10,000 (and the helicopter costed around $5,000). Awesome, right?
Well… actually no. Turns out, the terms of our policy dictate we needed to call insurance first and have them organize the airlift. Since we dialed 911 and organized the helicopter ourselves, our insurance won’t cover it. I guess it’s my fault for not reading the fine print, but it feels pretty scummy from the insurance company. Even if we had read the fine print, in the moment I don’t think I would have remembered as my immediate instinct is to contact emergency services.
That’s not a Ponzi scheme. Sorry, but this misuse of the term really grinds my gears.
A Ponzi scheme is a specific scam promoted as an investment, but in reality the payouts made to early victims come from the incoming money paid by new investors.
Might as well be, the patron still gets screwed
Aka social security…
Where is social security pitched as an investment?
Edit. Now that I think about it, government retirement funds actually kind of fill those requirements. At least where I live.
Oh my god, thank you so much! I’m glad I’m not the only one that sees it. They get money, they invest that money in pension funds, and then they try not to pay that back. The only things stopping it from being one legally are some slight changes such as the investment part and the part where they pay back to people in need, not people at the top.
Unfortunately, like all big business, they don’t care about anything but fleecing the little guy
A large portion of art/artifacts are forgeries. Everyone is alright with it because galleries and collectors want to brag about having some unique old art piece and forgers are very good at making pieces that would fool anyone who is just looking at it.
My personal conspiracy theory is that almost all art the public is exposed to is a forgery. Why show the plebs the real thing? We wouldn’t notice a difference anyway.
Maybe whenever you hear those stories about a famous work of art being stolen and later recovered, they’ve actually just stolen the forgery and the galley just puts up a new fake one.
The robbers then can’t sell it because they have a worthless fake and the ‘real’ one is clearly on display in the gallery, and they can’t expose the fraud because then they’d out themselves and go to jail.
The perfect scam!
That’s what they do with a lot more paintings that you would think. Not because they don’t want the plebs to look at them but because being exposed to the environment would cause irreparable damage to it. So they have experts make recreations and display those.
This isn’t really a conspiracy theory is it? I thought it was something they were open about that they often have replicas on display for security/preservation reasons
There was a fantastic interview on The Jordan Harbinger Show podcast with a professional forger. I’d recommend searching for it. I’ve been meaning to give it a second listen for a few years, but have too much other content.
Lotteries. They’re just tax for poor people.
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The people who do lottery tickets are poor people who need the money. The government funded programs should be coming from the rich people.
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rich people dont get taxed for shit, that’s the whole problem
I think most people buying a lottery ticket know that it’s a loss on average. I think people buy it for the experience and the dreams that it represents. From that perspective, I don’t think that it’s a scam for most people but rather just buying a slice of fantasy
You quite literally described the scam part though, selling false hope
Well no, because thousands of people have won it all over the world. Yes, it might be 14 million to one, but for a couple of quid I don’t care.
The McDonald’s Monopoly promotions
Wait, they were scams?
I knew employees fixed a couple, but…
It wasn’t McDonald’s themselves that were scamming, it’s more like the trusted 3rd party they engaged to run the promotion had a bad actor that used his position to fix the game.
He began stealing winning game pieces after a supplier mistakenly provided him a sheet of the anti-tamper seals needed to securely conduct the legitimate transfer of winning pieces. Jacobson first offered the game pieces to friends and family but eventually began selling them to Gennaro “Jerry” Colombo of the Colombo crime family, whom he had met by chance at the Atlanta airport.[11] Colombo would then recruit people to act as contest winners in exchange for half of the winnings.[9][10]
And that’s just the start.
I remember getting like 3 tickets for “part 1 out of 2 for a free car” a few months ago when they were doing the monopoly thing. I now realise that the employees probably just took all the part 2 ones for themselves.
They definitely didn’t because they count the sleeves that those prize pieces are on.
What really happens is they print 5 million part 1 pieces and like 10 part 2 pieces.
printer ink, it costs them like 3 cents to make each cartridge and they sell it for so god damn much.
they also go out of their way to have chips in the cartridges and in the printers that make the printer not function if any ink is even running low, doesn’t matter if you want to print something in black and white you had better fucking buy more cyan ink
The whole issue here is that people fall for the trick of buying the cheapest printer available, that is clearly way cheaper than what it costs to build. Then people get cranky for having to buy these proprietary cartridges which are way overpriced to cover the cost of the printer.
The easiest solution is to buy a laser printer (unless you need photo finish on your prints). It’s a higher initial cost, but it never dries out. Would it cost me more that an ink printer in the long run? Maybe, but with my infrequent printing, i wouldn’t have to replace dried out cartridges every year.
Anyone who buys a color laser printer should be aware that the initial cartridges, at least from HP, are not as full as refills, so you will have to replace them fairly soon and it is expensive. That being said, the refills will last a looooong time.
Also, and the main reason why I purchased one, the printer will just work, even if you don’t print anything for a couple of weeks, or months even. I went through a couple of inkjets (not the cheapest ones), which would constantly get dried out, a head clogged, etc, before I said “fuck it,” and sprung for a laser. My wallet isn’t that happy, but it sure is nice not gambling on whether the damn printer will actually print.
I had an amazing multifunction colour laser printer. It always worked. It scanned straight to OCRd PDF which it placed on an FTP server. It was full duplex, in printing and scanning. It copied ultra-quickly. The toner was endless, or so it seemed. It was everything I needed and wanted in a printer.
But my wife thought it was “ugly” and “too big”. It became a real sticking point, this thing. So eventually it was replaced by a shitty ink-jets so “we could print good photos at home”. Now it’s clogged up to fuck, no amount of head cleaning works and she’s complaining about the shitty quality prints.
Stand your ground on a good printer. Stand. Your. Ground.
Damn, that’s a nice printer you
havehad there.We need a law that makes it illegal for someone to cause you to lose your beloved printer, despite the way it may look. We need an anti-discrimination law to protect them because they can’t protect themselves. We can call it the Stand Your Ground Act…wait.
Yeah. And we should be able to legally marry our printers too. I’m sick of the fact that nobody recognized my relationship with my printer even though we sleep together every night. In ever sense of that term.
Your sheets must be tie-dyed at this point.
y’all need to stop buying printers from HP
y’all need to stop buying ink printers from HP
FTFY
Do yourself a favour and buy a Brother laser printer. You’ll thank me later
Did the same some years back. Only black and white laser, but this thing just works!
Hardly “unnoticed” - it’s just a fundamental part of the business model.
I just assumed the manufacturing process required unicorn blood or something.
Toothpaste.
You only need to squeeze out an amount the size of a pea on to the bristles of your toothbrush.
The image of squeezing along the entire length of the brush bristles was concocted by an ad agency, a la Mad Men, to make consumers use their toothpaste faster, hence buy more product.
I’ve never used that much. I just assumed it was to look nice since a pea sized about would look silly in a picture. I think it I used that much my mouth would be so full of foam it would be uncomfortable
I swear it’s also why they made that newer garbage cap design that slowly leaks toothpaste and gums up unless you carefully clean the end and fully close it every time. I know y’all know what I am talking about!
The garbage flip cap instead of the good old screw on lid
in fairness the directions on the back of the tube still state you should use a pea sized amount. i feel like that’s not all that helpful though, peas come in lots of different sizes.
Fools up your game. Tom’s toothpaste is so absolutely classy. My gums never felt this good. Better ask jeeves.good ass toothpaste.
Credit scores are a scam to sell credit cards.
You take small loans each month via a credit card that you have to pay back. This increases an imaginary number that lets you take out bigger loans in the furure.
This is all tracked by private companies that you trust with your personal data. That, or you’ll not be able to take out a loan if you want to buy a house or start a business.
If you have a good credit score it means that you don’t overspend or forget to pay, which you can also achieve with a regular debit card by default. This doesn’t serve people, only the banks who expect that a number of people will overspend or not be able to pay their loans back.
Credit cards alone aren’t the problem. Forcing them on people with the credit score system is.
Coming from a civilized country where the credit score is calculated by looking at income, taxes and property, I cannot fathom how the US credit score calculation is supported by anyone.
o / \ Morals / ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾ Money / ‾‾‾‾‾‾A lot of people actually like it because it really doesn’t work the way OP said it did. They are partially correct, but you also get rewarded for perverse incentives. If you double pay your CC, it will actually slightly lower your credit score. If you have a lot of credit cards with no balance, that can also lower your score. The quickest way to buildup credit in the US is to get a card that has a 0% 18 Month introductory interest rate. Pay the minimum balance each month, and save the cash to pay it all off in 17 months. You will accumulate credit like crazy, holding a balance strangely increases your credit (until the balance gets too high or you start missing payments, then it will take a nosedive).
Interest, late fees, holding a balance, a lot of the bad stuff is actually weirdly good for your credit in the US. I mean it makes sense… they want to reward people who are stupid and pay interest, but actually have enough income to keep making payments forever.
When someone from the US remarks about their credit score, it always causes me to raise eyebrows. You can be poor and have a high credit score, it’s incredibly common.
One way to make credit scores more consumer friendly would be to make it totally transparent what data is collected, retained and transmitted when calculating the score. If you want to open a new line of credit, instead of having businesses look up all this shit behind your back you’d request a letter of credit and provide it to the business yourself, knowing exactly what is in it.
But no, instead it’s a total mystery how it is calculated and you just have to hope that they don’t get confused and make a mistake because it can wreck your life if they do.
In many countries, mine included, there’s no credit score system. We recently took out a bigger loan to buy a house and what we had to provide was:
- proof of a steady income (in our case from our employer)
- 3 months of bank account history (to prove that we don’t overspend)
- written permission that they can request our data from the central (government operated) loan database
That’s it. From these they could tell that we are safe to loan money to because we’ll most likely be able to pay it back.
I don’t see how a credit score system is essential when you can provide them with the necessary data only when it’s needed.
You can “game the system” by picking credit cards that offer some kind of cash back incentive, and don’t carry balances month to month. For example the chase freedom card does 1% on all purchases and 5% on specific categories that change every quarter. I’ve had this card for like 9 years, I’ve never paid any interest because I pay it off monthly , and we make lots of “free” cash back. The key here is don’t go get a credit card and buy stuff you can’t afford, that should be hammered into youth from the beginning, just buy what you can afford, and if you’re disciplined enough you can put all of your purchases on the card and benefit from the card incentives for basically free.
I can’t agree with this more.
Transferring points earned to airlines can also net you some incredible deals on flights as well. I’ve booked several tens of thousands of dollars on business/first class travel over the years at a fraction of the cost. With the addition of free hotel upgrades and car rental upgrades, you can use credit cards to your advantage.
The caveat is that it takes some amount of expendable income to play.
Mormon church
Trim out the first half of that sentence and you’d have yourself a top comment.
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“I own this machine and everything you create with it” is a fundamentally flawed way to run a society.
Tax-free charitable organizations
In a society with capitalism at its core, externalities exist. That’s a fact that everyone agrees with. Nonprofits help mitigate those gaps. Calling all nonprofits scams is misguided at best. I think OP is looking for something more specific. What nonprofits?
Yes, I’m looking for more specific cases.
I was trying to be tongue-in-cheek but specifically the Roman Catholic Church in a historic context.
There are a lot who have an extremely positive impact. It’s a small minority that causes a huge number of issues.
I personally help out with a non profit charity and we get a lot done with not a lot financially. The reduced taxes are a huge help.
There are a lot who have an extremely positive impact. It’s a small minority that causes a huge number of issues.
I would argue it’s the other way around frankly
To be fair, there are some good ones out there. I worked for a drug-rehab company in the 90s as the IT head that got mostly government funding for a 6 month-rehab-program for non-violent drug offenders (mostly stuff like heroine, cocaine, etc.). We also had an in-prison program but I don’t think that was as effective. Of course to get government contact money we would have to meet lots of strict guidelines too.
I definitely more wary of ones that don’t get any public funding and therefore have practically no guardrails and less forced transparency.
Old Egypt was full of pyramid schemes way back then
