Chiropractors.
Even though this is top comment, this is an underrated answer.
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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.
Also homeopathy.
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“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”.
It is exactly as quacky as quacks.
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.
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.
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.
Private anything is a scam because it doesn’t exist to resolve an issue or fulfill a need and instead pursues profit over any logic.
The only instances where privatized offerings may work IMO is if the government themselves are the competition, acting as a “control”.
Without a stable control that has the sole purpose of serving the people, fully privatized offerings will just squeeze more money out of already stretched households for profit as you’ve said… which is the case for practically everything RN
NoYeah no. Get out of US bubble.
Private and public are both viable models of operations with some applicability overlap. Private doesn’t necessarily pursue profit first, despite US literally enforcing it.
Basic needs that are either unchanging or change very slowly are the purview of public policy. Healthcare, infrastructure, etc. Privatize it and you’ll have a catastrophe.
Basic needs that benefit from variation and supply elasticity with a necessary baseline is where hybrid model works well. Public entrepreneurship provides variation, regulations or public enterprises cover baseline. Agriculture is a great example of such overlap. Private-only agriculture leads to profiteering on basic human need. Public-only agriculture leads to famines due to incompetence, malice, or lack of elasticity.
Desires that people can live without and can change on a whim is where private innovation thrives. Be it a product to sell or a charity project to pursue. Some of the results of said innovation can and will become matters of public interest. Forbid private enterprise here, and you’ll end up in a bleak reality of North Korea.
We literally had a case of “public everything” half a century ago and it didn’t fucking work. It needed serfdom and insane amounts of natural resources to prop itself up. It also left a mafia-led capitalism in its wake.
We also have a live case of blind trust in markets, as if information was immediately available everywhere. It leads to a very similar looking outcome.
Sadly one of the main exports of the US is its ideology, so many other countries want to implement the same heartless, profit-oriented privatizations of every state organism.
Welcome to the US
Private insurance (for the average person) in general is dumb. We have a collective need to insure various things against disaster, and realistically the federal government shells out huge amounts for most disasters anyways (after the so called insurance companies go bankrupt).
So why the heck are we paying a premium for all of the overhead of the insurance companies?! It’s this massive inefficient system that doesn’t work, while the “government as insurance” system works great, and doesn’t require nearly as much overhead. There’s no room for private sector insurance to inovate, because there’s nothing to inovate on; IMO, the private insurance industry contributes nothing of value to society except jobs that it pays for by forcing everyone to engage with it.
The insurance industry in general is betting you’ll be fine, and you’re betting “maybe I won’t.” It’s extra bad for medicine because they stick their head even into the small stuff, not just “I need a 10,000 unexpected hospital bill covered.”
Probably gonna anger both sides here, but I see both private insurance and single-payer healthcare as equally-evil scams. Why not focus on driving down costs of healthcare (i.e. EVERYTHING) so that you throw a couple bucks at the receptionist to cover your surgery then check to see if you have enough for a post-surgery soda?
One of the objectives of single-payer is to drive down the costs of healthcare by eliminating the overhead of an insurance bureaucracy. There are other aspects that can be considered like nationalizing hospitals to eliminate private run, for-profit hospitals. People like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCA_Healthcare are just as responsible for the high per-capita costs of healthcare we pay as are the insurance companies. And I agree with you, they shouldn’t be getting a guaranteed government handout.
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.
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)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Tipping in restaurants…pay the workers.
Professors requiring their own, expensive textbook for their course.
First Past the Post voting at elections.
Religion. Whole cloth.
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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.
Well nowadays that’s every store. Shrinkflation dude
At this rate, toothpaste will soon be sold in tiny single-use tubes.
Soon? How about now:
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
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 !
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.
