Chiropractors.
People always chime in with stories about how chiropractors helped them with XY and Z problem they were having.
And overall I don’t doubt them. There’s a lot of things that can go wrong with your spine or other joints, and I’m certain that some of them can be addressed by physically manipulating and adjusting it.
But the basic premise of chiropractic treatments is that basically all human ailments can be fixed in that way, which should sound like total bullshit to anyone with half a brain. And that’s before you get into all spiritual nonsense that pervades a lot of the field.
Now some of them understand that that’s a load of bullshit and may even be realistic about the things they can treat, but it can be pretty damn hard to sort them out from the ones who think that your pancreatic cancer is caused by ghosts in your spine and they know how to get them out or some bullshit like that.
Now if you have a good idea what your issue is and what needs to be done to fix it, take the time to carefully vet your chiropractor to make sure they’re not going to try some crazy bullshit on you, you very well may be able to get a decent treatment from them. Maybe you’ll even be able to save some money going with that.
But for most of us who aren’t doctors and so only have kind of vague ideas what exactly the issue is and that the treatments we’re doing actually make any sense, and don’t necessarily have time to do all of that research and carefully vet that the person treating them isn’t secretly a quack, you could just get the same sort of treatments from actually physical therapists, orthopedists, physiatrists, etc. with the added benefit of them actually understanding the issues and how to fix them properly.
Chiropractors are kind of like the rednecks of the medicine world. Some of them know exactly what they’re doing with that harbor freight welder, they may not do things by the book but they know for certain what works and what doesn’t and more importantly know when something is beyond what them and their buddies can accomplish on a free Saturday with a case of beer and when they need to suck it up and limp their truck to the shop and let a professional deal with it. Others know just enough to be dangerous and while they can get the job done 90% of the time or at least not make things worse, that 10% of the time something is literally going to blow up in someone’s face. And still others are just meth heads looking to make a quick buck and it’s a miracle they’re not behind bars. And when you see them hanging around the local watering hole, it may not be totally clear which is which until it’s too late.
Even though this is top comment, this is an underrated answer.
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The entire industry is built on catering to the vast swaths of women who get ignored by doctors and need somewhere to turn.
I highly suspect doctors are taught in medical school, “women are over emotional and prone to exaggeration.”
Hell, “hysteria” was considered a valid diagnosis until the 1950s.
This guy gets it. Chiropractors are a scam, but scammers are drawn to people who “fall through the cracks” because they’re treated like their problems don’t actually exist. Finally, they meet someone who takes their pain seriously. It’s too bad the person who takes it “seriously” is a fucking charlatan.
It falls harder on women, who have more instances of pain that are ignored by the medical community, partially from the history mentioned above, claiming women must be experiencing “hysteria.”
It absolutely happens because of the failings of the medical community.
I was suffering from hyperemisis last year and it took 3 doctors before I finally found one to take me seriously, which I consider it lucky it only took 3. The last doc I was practically on my hands and knees begging them to take me seriously.
In the middle of all that I also ended up with pneumonia. Normally I never get sick so I was like wtf is going on. But anyways, a doctor finally took some chest x rays and 2 weeks later they call to tell me that my X-ray was clear. I. Went. Off. I ended up having to go to the ER 2 days after the doctor visit because I could no longer breathe, it was so painful. How is it possible that my x ray was clear??? Then another week goes by and the assistant calls to tell me that I do have pneumonia and a prescription has been sent in. I just hung up and filed complaints with everyone I could. That office was a hot mess.
I am so sorry. That’s devastating. You already have to struggle to fight your illness. But to have to fight that hard AGAINST YOUR DOCTOR when your doctor is supposed to be on your team? It’s a betrayal.
Also homeopathy.
Some homeopaths solve problems that allopathic doctors are unable to. Still it may be a placebo thing, but it is a valid option because it can work, and it is less quacky than quacks.
It is exactly as quacky as quacks.
“may be a placebo”
My friend, there is no “may”.
Also, you can buy Tic Tacs from any newsagent or gas station.
Not to defend homeopathy, but a big part of why placebo works is how we percieve the medicine/treatment.
Tic tacs wouln’t work as well as fake medicine (aka homeopathy) because they don’t look as “official”.
Not all chiropractors are the same, but not knowing who’s who is dangerous
There are physical therapists who know the actual manipulations that work and use them as needed for treatment. It’s the best of both worlds.
I agree. Physical therapists have to get a doctorate to get licensed, so they definitely know what they’re doing.
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.
Tipping in restaurants…pay the workers.
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.
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.
Exactly. It’s the opposite of the Costco model.
Absolutely targeted towards people who can’t afford regular sized/priced items, let alone bulk-for-discount.
I mean yeah, obviously they’re profitable. It’s the convenience though. Sometimes they have good deals if you don’t want to buy a giant pack of something.
Or can’t afford a giant pack, so you get poorer value. Being poor is expensive
I mean yeah. There are some decent deals sometimes though. The dollar store near me sells name brand dishsoaps and cleaning solutions in normal sized bottles. You just need to be smart about what you get.
Well they are good for things like cups and all , at least in india !
Well nowadays that’s every store. Shrinkflation dude
Just on a slightly grander scale. I feel like it’s malicious in a different way. Instead of tricking the unaware consumer into thinking they are getting the same product they are getting people to buy what they can now whether it’s due to distance or price
At this rate, toothpaste will soon be sold in tiny single-use tubes.
Soon? How about now:
Your ISP is suddenly asking for more money. What are you gonna do? Disconnect from the internet?
I’m lucky. For some reason after raising my rates from the introductory period they haven’t gone up in 4 years or so and they increased my service from 100mbps to 300mbps.
You could switch to any of their dozen or so competitors.
Wait until I tell who the “competitors” rent the infrastructure from
The way it works where I live:
Company A owns the physical fiber, they also own the point-of-presence where all the fibers end up (basically a room with lots of rack space). Company A does not sell Internet service.
Company X, Y and Z provide internet service to consumers. They rent the physical fiber from company A, they also rent rack space in the PoPs where their customers fibers terminate. Cost for electricity, air conditioning, in the PoP is shared by all companies that use that PoP, by ratio of number of customers. (e.g. if company X has 100 customers connected to one PoP and Y and Z each have 50, company X pays 50% of the utilities bill and Y and Z each 25%).
In case of company X/Y/Z, all the infrastructure is theirs with the exception of the physical fiber and the PoP room, that includes the fiber ‘modem’ (mediaconverter) or router on each side of the connection, switches, any backbone connectivity from the PoP onwards, all services, etc.
Some of these ISPs also resell their services to smaller ISPs, so company Q could simply be reselling a package from company X. Often they resell only a part of the service, e.g. they resell Internet from company X but add their own TV package.
They can of course also change this later on. My current ISP started by reselling services from one of the bigger ISPs, this basically gave them national coverage with little risk. Once they got established and had a decent number of customers they started rolling out their own network, city-by-city. They would install their own equipment into the PoPs in a city, change everyone over to their equipment (and distributed new media converters and routers) and they were no longer dependent on the big ISP. When they did this they cut the price of my internet connection by half while at the same time upgrading the speed from 200/200 to 1000/1000. Within a year or so they moved most customers to their own infrastructure.
And how do you get in such a situation? Very simple: company A wanted to install fiber and asked for a permit from the government to start digging up the streets and sidewalks. The government basically said: you can get a permit. but we don’t want a all this nuisance with digging up the streets every time someone wants to offer internet service, so you as a requirement for the permit you have to offer an open network with identical pricing to everyone who wants to use it.
Hugely location dependent.
Sure, but I live in ‘socialist’ Europe and I can already choose from 13 ISPs on fiber alone. I can only dream of the amount of choice people in ‘free market’ USA must have.
I am in the Communist country referred to as Italy, there are only 2 companies who actually have 4g infrastructures AFAIK, and the dozens of other carriers just rent the infrastructure from the tim/Wind3 duopoly
Sure, and that’s great for you! I am, honestly, envious.
However, you said “you could switch.” For many people, including me, we cannot switch while maintaining a reasonable connection. My options are my current ISP (really not too bad, for the first time in my life), an ISP that provides a maximum of 12Mbps, an ISP that still isn’t quite sure if it can provide service to me, or satellite (which is pretty awful for a variety of services I use regularly). Even discarding reasonable expectations, this is not a “dozen or so.”
While your proposal might be good for you and others in “socialist” Europe, many people (likely even outside of Europe and the USA) don’t have that option and it probably doesn’t help resolve the parent commenter’s complaint.
Edit: also, while the USA is behind Europe in many ways, I suspect this is not so much a Europe vs USA issue as a rural vs not issue.
Edit: also, while the USA is behind Europe in many ways, I suspect this is not so much a Europe vs USA issue as a rural vs not issue.
On the contrary, here the rural areas got fiber way before the cities did. It’s a lot less difficult to install fiber in rural areas compared to densely populated cities where the ground is already full of cables and pipes, and where the impact of having to close streets for digging are much bigger.
Even now, the fastest consumer internet is available in a small town in the middle of fscking nowhere, where they installed 10gbit fiber.
Gotcha, thank you for the edification.
The ISP have probably made careful calculations of how much they can increase the price before people start looking for alternative ISPs. So if we could collectively lower our thresholds to look for alternatives, we could probably achieve lower prices.
That only works in a competitive market. A lot of places, even in the developed world, have just a single provider in some of the areas people live in outside of major cities. And even in major cities there’s often not enough competition to find reasonably cheap internet, all the prices are within stone throw of each other. Essential utilities being privatized is a scam, especially when infra is funded by the public dollar.
I’ve noticed this starting to break, i.e. more actually starting to compete with each other and enter each other’s “turf”. Part of that I think is municipal fiber.
Here’s what happens. Say you have three businesses providing roughly the same service in your area. They know you are going with one of them.
If they compete too much on price is a race to the bottom. There’s a point at which one or more companies are losing money to compete. The ones with deeper pockets starve everyone else out then start raising prices.
Now, let’s assume these three are the ones that made it.
They are not allowed to collude on price. That’s illegal, they would be acting like a monopoly. Can’t have that so they passed a law.
What’s allowed? Publishing your pricing online. What’s crazy is the other companies can see this so it’s kind of light all three can still meet and compare pricing.
Because of this, you’ll be paying about the same no matter where you go. You might be able to find a reseller that provides the connection but no real service. That’s fine, but most people aren’t using that.
You might find services bundled with other services like a mobile phone plan, tv packages, etc. That’s even worse since they call use “price confusion” to make it look like price diversity but no one is letting anyone else eat their lunch.
All of this should be yelling at you full volume that this business is a de facto monopoly so therefore should be regulated heavily or run as a government utility.
The absolute failure to enforce antitrust laws is possibly the single biggest contributor to all problems in the western world right now.
And different towns can be charged wildly different amounts for the same service
I’ve somehow been stealing internet from my ISP for like 2 years.
So I moved in to my new apartment. Go down to the local ISP monopoly’s physical store and pick up a modem so I can just plug it in and not wait for a tech or anything. They tell me since it’s been over 5 years since my address was connected they have to send a tech out anyway. Fine. But they let me pay my first month’s service and give me the modem.
Well I get home and plug it in. It works perfectly. Call the ISP and tell them to cancel the tech appointment, they say no problem. An hour later my account to login to the ISP’s website is made inactive. In the next few days I get a full refund for what I paid.
So I figure I’ll call them once my internet stops working and resubscribe. But it has never stopped working. I keep getting mailings from them with deals to sign up for internet. They even knocked on my door once to try to sell me it.
This is a dangerous game you’re playing (despite the Robinhood like dynamic – trust me I hate ISPs too, though I will say AT&T fiber has been quite reasonable). You can be sued for all the lost payments plus interest, and likely will be when/if they find out.
It’s the same thing as getting an unexpected raise on your paystub, if it’s in error and a reasonable person would believe it’s in error, they’re within their legal right to take the money back.
You’re not wrong. Though I’ll be leaving here soon enough, and I think the risk:reward ratio is good enough to continue until then. And if they’ve let me go this long I doubt they’ll somehow retroactively figure it out after I’m gone.
That depends only on the competition.
20 years ago I payed €65 for 4Mbps. Now I m paying €25 for 200Mbps + a landline with unlimited local calls + an android box (that I use for PLEX and retro gaming) that provides 50+ channels through an app.That was the last renewal.
I also switched my cell provider. I used to pay €42 for unlimited calls, SMS and Data. Now I pay €25 for the whole package.
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.
First Past the Post voting at elections.
Car based infrastructure
the stock market
capitalism
Unregulated capitalism imo. I don’t buy the idea I’ve seen around here that capitalism itself is the problem and switching to communism would solve all the problems. Both are systems that have merit, but when left unchecked all the power and money will go to the few, like we have now.
If by “have merit” you mean “has some positive aspects”, sure. Every system has merit. Slavery had merit (slave owners got cheap cotton). The Holocaust had merit (antisemites felt better). The issue is weighing the merit against the negatives. You can’t just say two systems have positive aspects and call it a day.
Are you a fan of democracy or authoritarianism? Capitalism is a system where productive forces are driven undemocratically, in the name of profit instead of by worker democracy. The commodification of everything exists in a world of private property:
- our bodies (labor power)
- our thoughts (intellectual property)
- the specific ordering of bits on a hard drive you own (digital media, DRM)
- the means of production (which exist as a result of collective knowledge, infrastructure, and labor)
These things being commodified and privatized are ridiculous in any democratic, non-capitalist system.
However, these ridiculous conditions are absolutely necessary in a capitalist society. Without them the system falls apart. And as society continues to progress, the situation gets more and more ridiculous.
What about when AI “takes away” jobs for 50% of Americans (as in capitalists fire humans in favor of AI)? That’ll collapse our society. Less work would be a good thing in any reasonable system, but not in capitalism. Less work is an existential threat to our society.
If we ever have an AI that is as capable as humans are intellectually, the only work left for us will be manual labor. If that happens, and robots get to the point of matching our physical abilities, we won’t be employable anymore. The two classes will no longer be owners and workers, they’ll be owners and non-owners. At that point we better have dismantled capitalism, because if we don’t then we’ll just be starving in the street, along with the millions who die every year from starvation under the boot of global capitalism.
Everying in your comment can be solved with regulation. A capitalist society can enact socialist policies to take care of the lower class or unemployed. It’s not a “pick one” situation.
You’re arguing against the unregulated capitalism we live in, but also comparing capitalism as it exists today to fuckin slavery is just a ridiculous false equivalence.
I didn’t compare capitalism to slavery. I said the word slavery. The first paragraph wasn’t demonstrating a comparison, it was demonstrating a principle (principles are universalized, comparisons aren’t). The idea that every system has positives, but those systems can still be horrifically bad.
I don’t know if it’s emotion that’s clouding your reading comprehension, I hope it is, because then you can calm down and have a reasonable conversation. If it’s not, then this conversation isn’t worth having because you won’t understand half of what I’m saying. Literally 50% of your last message was you misrepresenting what I was saying.
A capitalist society cannot enact socialist policies. It can enact “social” policies. These policies are inspired by socialism, and often advocated for by socialists, but the policies themselves are not socialist policies. Capitalism is an economic system where the means of production are privately owned, and socialism is an economic system where the means of production are socially owned. If private (not personal) property exists, it’s not socialism. It’s not necessarily capitalism (you could have other systems with private property), but in our world it always is.
Welfare capitalism, where these social policies exist, is a well established ideology that has been around for about 80 years in any serious form, and yeah welfare can be used to address some of the negative tendencies of capitalism, but it doesn’t fix them. It’s applying a band-aid fix, not addressing the problem. In the real world what this means is there’s a class of people always working to remove those regulations and welfare because their class interests are opposed to ours.
Class distinctions cannot be solved with a regulation, they have to be solved with a societal restructuring. Our legal system does not support the idea of abolishing private property and by extension classes.
Yeah bud, I’m not reading past your second paragraph. Go gaslight and be and be an asshole on Reddit.
IMO American style capitalism is completely broken, but that’s not the only way to run your economy and still call it capitalism. Particularly in the EU area companies don’t always have the upper hand. Consumers and employees have the kinds of rights Americans can only dream of.
Don’t really know much about communism, but clearly USSR didn’t survive, and that may have something to do with the system. ML-people here can probably tell me how China, Cuba and other communist countries are doing today.
Arguably, socialism is a bigger scam given its history of failure.
What do you mean?
That socialism has always failed, but because it sounds good in theory, people like to argue for its use.
A lot of people are saying Capitalism. Is it straight up capitalism that is the scam or the myth of financial mobility? (the American dream)
How do you figure financial mobility is a myth? I’ve altered my own financial situation successfully. That wouldn’t be possible if it were a myth.
There’s a lot of trouble with definitions regarding capitalism. (I’d call them intentional since muddying the waters serves the people who benefit from our current system.)
Pick any person who is complaining about “capitalism” right now.
If you proposed a system where everything was structured the same as it is right now, HOWEVER instead of shareholders and owners possessing companies, every, single company was a worker cooperative (owned and controlled by its workers) then I am 95% sure the anti-capitalist you picked would
- Not consider that capitalism, and
- Vastly prefer that over what we have right now
With some minor variation. (Tankies don’t think it’s possible to maintain such a system without monopolizing violence. Anarcho-communists wouldn’t be too happy about the scope and financial power of state and federal governments, and would seek to pare them down. Democratic socialists would think it was perfect. Little disagreements like that.)
But I think most other people (people who aren’t anti-capitalists) would think “that’s just a form of capitalism” if I described the above.
In fact, if I said,
A free market system, but ownership and control of the means of production is only allowed collectively and democratically. No shareholders allowed, no transferable individual ownership allowed.
Most ordinary people would consider that a form of capitalism. (Even though calling it capitalism is, technically, highly inaccurate). So it’s a difficult conversation to have. Because most “anti-capitalists” disagree with most “pro-capitalists” on the basic definition of what they are fighting or defending.
I’m actually convinced that a lot of “pro-capitalists” are more eager to defend the free market system than they are to defend transferable, stock-marketable, individual ownership of the means of production. I think they would compromise on the latter if they could safeguard the former.
That’s almost anarcho-syndicalism, which I am a proponent of some of the ideas of, but it leaves capital and government generally intact. That’s probably the easiest way we could transition away from capitalism as we know it and not collapse the system entirely. It sounds almost feasible.
Oh yeah, certainly. And one of the first steps in that direction – the corporate death sentence – is just common sense.
(The corporate death sentence is basically “any company that does more damage than it can reasonably repair gets converted into a co-op controlled by its workers / victims. The investors’ shares get dissolved.”)
I don’t think anyone would have a reasonable objection to allowing the voters of East Palestine, Ohio and the workers for Norfolk Southern to elect all of the company’s board members from here on out. And I don’t think anyone would weep for Norfolk Southern’s shareholders if their shares got dissolved.
Capitalism and the 5 day 9 to 5 work week
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Usually 8-5 with an hour lunch break
Yeah I never understood why it’s called the 9-to-5
Because the hour lunch used to count as working, IIRC.
Capitalism and religion, easily the top two scams.
Bank fees
I see you have no money… I’m going to have to charge you for that
My bank wanted my to pay to have an account. I asked why and the answer was some bullshit about having access to their expertise on growing wealth. I told them, I would be growing wealth more quickly if I didn’t have to pay monthly fees, canceled my account and took my money to a bank that doesn’t charge for a basic money dump account.
It’s ridiculous, banks make money by investing the trusted money of their customers. Why would I need to pay them in order to let them make money. They should pay me.
Credit unions are a much better option.
Credit unions aren’t always perfect either. I switched unions because one started adding fees.
They are exceptionally shitty for cash accounts since they are absolutely using the money for their own profit.
If everyone took out all their liquid cash, the bank would crash (see; recent events.)
I don’t know if it is quite as simple as that. Most recently the bank failures were because those banks got upside down on bond holdings due to rate increases. If everyone chilled out and took their money out in appropriate time, then the bank would have had all the money. They just couldn’t get all the money immediately due to the duration of their bond holdings.
Credit scores
Tipping
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.
