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 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
Fools up your game. Tom’s toothpaste is so absolutely classy. My gums never felt this good. Better ask jeeves.good ass toothpaste.
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
y’all need to stop buying printers from HP
Hardly “unnoticed” - it’s just a fundamental part of the business model.
I just assumed the manufacturing process required unicorn blood or something.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
I was gonna write about the fascist aspects of the country, but I wouldn’t say that it’s something completely unknown; many of my peers are okay with fascism just because there is no centerist alternative, as what we have already seen leftists are not going to be better given the same amount of power.
When it comes to religion, it should have been a personal thing rather than systematically integrating it with each aspect of our lives like how it was initially intended.
Sometime earlier in my life I took a decision of not going to my place of worship; this helped decouple my belief in something bigger that I don’t understand, and a cult made by man.
Religion is used as a scam by many people. It is also used in other ways by other people.
Oh my god, isn’t Christianity kinda a pyramid scheme?
Old Egypt was full of pyramid schemes way back then
That 90% of the people who don’t watch sports on Cable TV subsidize it to the tune of 10% of their bill for the 10% of people who watch it
Homeopathy, acupuncture, ozone therapy… all “alternative medicines” basically.
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.
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.
I think chiropractors also fall under this
Theranos ‘company’.
Oh yes, I’ve heard about this. Thanks for reminding.
Adding more details for others:
Founded in 2003 by then 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos raised more than US$700 million from venture capitalists and private investors, resulting in a $10 billion valuation at its peak in 2013 and 2014. The company claimed that it had devised blood tests that required very small amounts of blood and that could be performed rapidly and accurately, all using compact automated devices which the company had developed. These claims were later proven to be false.
ESG and carbon offsets as an effective way of combating climate change
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.
The Bernie Madoff investment scandal. Started in the 1970’s and continued into the 2000’s. It eventually dissolved in 2008 during the financial crisis. There’s a really great documentary on Netflix about it.
Religion. The absolute first.
Agree to disagree.
Then why did the religious schidm happen that created the Protestant faith?
I’m Muslim, don’t know much about that. Wasn’t it politically motivated though?
according to the history of the world video (you should know what im talking about) it started because you were able to buy yourself out of hell
HR departments in corporate jobs.
I’m not sure you know what the word “scam” means.
You don’t want to deal with the shit HR handles for you.
I’m sure there are plenty of bad, bureaucratic messes, but 3/4 of the HR departments I the last 10 years have been quite helpful.
The outlier was just not very communicative, but otherwise good.
Maybe it’s the industry. I work in clinical so we’re used to documenting the fuck out of everything. HR mandated documentation is just another step to cover all of our asses.
My experience with them is basically them trying to convince people to stay at the job when the job is overworking people underpaying people etc. Staying never payed off. More of a dead end job scenerio
Bitcoin
Nah not really
Capitalism
Let’s lump organized religion in with this one.
It’s not called the opium of the masses for nothing.
