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Add to that the conflation of health insurance with health care. The former is, at best, a means for the latter. Although the reality is it’s more an obstacle or corruption of it.
Depends on the country I believe. I’ve got a refund for my sixth eye surgery a couple of months ago thanks to my insurance.
Wow, how do you manage? Like - do they even make glasses for people with that many eyes?
I laughed out loud in class at this
religion
Banks.
Using YOUR money to make a lot of money from investing in horrible companies.basically everything,i guess.
copyright
Countdown-Timer on e.g. Amazon that try to FOMO-pressure me into buying the item. Edit: typo
Pretty sure most of us realize thats a scam.
college textbooks. have to have the latest edition for class, but almost nothing is different from the two-years-old one.
This is why I try, if possible, to find them online for free. That’s been my first step whenever needed. Last time I needed a book and lab access code, it cost a little over $150USD!
I once had a professor who gave assignments with the last several editions page numbers because he thought it was bullshit too.
in roughly half of my classes; my professors were the authors of the of the books that they were selling so they made photocopies of them to distribute to the student for free.
it was one of two benefits to attending the largest university in the country (at the time).
I walked my students through where to find the pdf of the text book in the first class after we covered the syllabus.
For my classes, anything that was graded was not done from the textbook it was either online questions or from a worksheet. Any work given from the textbook was just for our practice and not graded. They’d usually just call out sections of questions based on that day’s lesson.
For some people? Pre-ordering digital games. I mean huh? What are ye even doin there Jimmy-Bob? You afraid they’re gonna run out of copies? O.o
Lottery tickets, its everywhere. It gets shoved in my mailbox all the time. To me its just gambling but then with worse odds… How is it legal to market it so much?
Here in Texas at least, the lottery is state run and much of the money goes to help fund public schools and other charities or state programs. I’ve also never seen an ad for it in my mailbox. Just at gas stations and billboards.
I view it as a voluntary tax, with a chance to win big. Though of course any kind of gambling is problematic, I see this kind of lottery as one of the least problematic types of gambling.
Online gambling is a much bigger problem. I can’t believe that’s legal.
Prediction markets and recently-legalized sports gambling says hi.
It gives hope to poor people
Peak capitalism
Private Equity
Credit Score
Derivitives
Interest on Loans
Money
Loan interests and money I disagree with. Unless we get to a point where everything is in abundance and commerce isn’t needed anymore I feel like a common item we can agree the value of for goods and services is a pretty neat idea.
Similarly I don’t think interest is inherently evil. If i lend you money to buy something large that will take years to pay off, I wouldn’t want to lose a bunch of money with inflation. But predatory rates that bet on you defaulting can burn in hell. It’s disgusting that the whole fintech industry exists purely to maximise interest and debt at the cost of those who depends on those services the most.
For loans interest I think it should be bog simple to give and receive a loan as in “you’re borrowing $200. Please give me $210 by X date” and its done. No number that increases infinitely, the common person can easily understand it and it can be easily taught in schools.
Money being necessary is incidental to how our society is structured. There’s a lot of ways society can and has functioned without a universal equivalent, regardless of the state of abundance.
Similarly, interest not being evil is actually fairly new and unique to modern society. It’s pretty common historically and in different cultural contexts for interest-free debt to be a norm.
Which suggests these norms are likely specific to capitalism and its ideology rather than universal common sense.
Graeber’s Debt and The Dawn of Everything are anthropological works relevant to this topic that you might find interesting.
Loan interest is one of the main reasons we operate in a “line-must-go-up” society right now. If you loan out money and require that that much money plus a percentage be paid back, you are requiring that money spent returns back a surplus somehow. Making even is considered a failure in this system.
You have a point, but originally interest was both compensation for the lander for offering you the loan, and a way to mitigate risk in case you fail to pay. Without interest, why would anyone lend a random stranger some money? Interest is basically the only things that props up an unsecured loan.
Generally you would loan someone money without interest because the result would be mutually beneficial. We already do this in smaller social circles like our families, and then our close friends. The problem is that most lenders arent local and dont live in the community. They have no shared interest with the borrower.
In some cases communities do come together and raise funds interest free, and use them for something that benefits society in some way, we just wouldnt describe it that way normally.
Without interest, why would anyone lend a random stranger some money? Interest is basically the only things that props up an unsecured loan.
believe it or not, it’s very common.
•Buying home •Private insurance •New cars •Haircuts •Eating at expensive restaurant •Fast food •Subscriptions instead of owning •Brands •Cotton-swab not for ear •Jiffylube •Carbon emissions from consumer vehicles •Tariffs •Freetrade agreements •Food deliver services
cotton swabs?
Name brand Q-Tips
How do you think used cars exist if there aren’t people that buy new ones?
And… owning a home? Huh?
You never truly own the home due to property taxes.
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Why did you say the same thing three times?
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Is it? I think it got normalized as a scam.
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I mean that people instantly know it’s a scam nowadays.
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Taxes
