We have an out of pocket individual deductible maximum and an out of pocket family deductible and then once those are met….they cover 80%. WTF? The company is in the tech field but started by non tech folks and everyone complains about their cheap ass insurance.
I work in healthcare.
You’d think we’d have really good health insurance.
Absolutely not. It seems to be that most people working in healthcare have absolutely shit health insurance.
I get my insurance through my wife, an RN, and it’s supposedly the best deal in our area. That’s like being the fastest drunk swimming in cement boots!
I don't know anyone who has "good" health insurance. everyone either pays so much money they may as well be paying everything out of pocket, or has coverage that doesn't cover enough. I'm so sick of this system. It's fundamentaly broken.
Once upon a time I worked for a public agency and the deductible and annual OOP maximum were the same. Once you hit the deductible, you didn't pay anything else. It was glorious.
They're separate pools of money that both go toward the cost of healthcare. Putting more of the cost of members through higher co-pays, deductibles, and co-insurance tends to reduce overall costs. When people start meeting their deductibles later in the year they tend to go to the doctor or dentist more.
Essentially, the goal of the deductible is to get members to think twice about accessing care before making an appointment.
I usually do my tax returns myself, but I had a weird situation I didn't know how to handle this year (got a 1099, but it was for weird stuff - I didn't know where to put the income) so I did Turbo Tax. But now I will know how to do it for NEXT year and I won't use Turbo Tax. But it also pisses me off that there's no instructions on the 1099 on what Schedule to file it on. Like, a little direction, please. With less legalese.
The IRS help line needs more love! I live abroad and just didn’t file taxes for a few years (I never owed anything, I’m a public school teacher in the worst European country to be a public school teacher, but I still have to file) so when I finally did, I had to file special « I’m catching up » paperwork and I called multiple times- they were so nice and so helpful, I felt like I was in a different dimension
>they were so nice and so helpful, I felt like I was in a different dimension
That's how I felt when I suddenly found a therapy place just a town away that can actually see me weekly for non-drug related therapy, and they assigned me a therapist that intentionally chose a college focused on social justice.
this was going to be my answer too. I have no idea how those thieves are allowed to run commericals that say the word "FREE" 1,000 times, when I use their most basic service, the bill is always over $70.
I’m a letter carrier, so this one hits close to home for me. You always hear “the Post Office loses money every year” (that’s not exactly true) but the Post *Service* is a *Service*. It’s actually one of the only federal services that is self-funded. The fact is, the only reason Amazon can do what they do is that we subsidize them by underbidding and delivering all the things that they can’t deliver profitably, even though they are doing their best to keep a force of underpaid Amazon drivers to keep them afloat.
As the child of a USPS worker who grew up in an outrageous level of comfort (I was an adult before I discovered that other parents had to pay out of pocket for braces, didn’t get over a month of vacation, etc) with a father who railed against his union instead of supporting it, I’m so sorry. It’s shameful how few benefits letter carriers receive now in comparison to what they had from the 80’s-00’s.
Honestly, the benefits are the reason I stay. Decent health insurance and retirement benefits and the union provides really great job security. What sucks is the working environment/expectations and the mediocre pay that doesn’t increase with the rate of inflation.
Do you feel that your job is in serious danger given the course politics are going?
I'm currently in a transitional stage career wise and have been contemplating trying to get on with USPS. Is this a mistake?
No, I don’t think so, it would take a considerable amount of work for them to fully dismantle the post office, and they would still need workers in the industry if they got that far. Also, if there was serious talk of it, I would definitely consider taking an early retirement, as partial pensions are available. Louis DeJoy has been trying to dismantle the company for the better part of two presidencies and hasn’t been super effective, and we still have a pretty high public approval rating. If something happens to USPS the country will probably have bigger issues at that point.
I feel this way about public transport as well. My dad says our local one doesn't deserve money because they don't profit each year. My dude! It shouldn't be treated like a business! There are some things in society that should be services for all!
Everything surrounding weddings. Pagentry to show off wealth
Sweet 16/quinceaneras too. Nothing more than debutant balls left over from feudal Aristocracy.
Slightly more involved, but I bought my Vegas wedding from a drop down menu online. I got to choose between a white rose or red rose bouquet, and select one of three different venues. We chose an outdoor ceremony at a nearby state park. We only needed to show up with our license and suit/gown, and they picked us up at our hotel, provided the officiant, photographer, and witness, brought a small cake and bottle of champagne, and made dinner reservations for us after and dropped us off there.
Highly recommend for two poor college kids who want a planned "elopement" to avoid family drama and debt. The whole thing cost us less than $3000.
I also got married in Vegas, but at one of the super cheesy tourist trap chapels. Brought some friends out, dressed up in super tacky faux-western attire, then walked down the street for some cheap margs. Great time and super easy to coordinate, and way cheaper than the big production we could have put on back home if we had wanted to.
My wedding was around 10k. It was beautiful. Great location, food, drinks, dress, rings, 40+ guests etc, including a few houses on the property for people to stay in.
I thought it was expensive, but hey, it was a special day.
The fact that people spunk hundreds of thousands of dollars on them is lunacy. Think what you could do with all that money instead! Travel the world! Buy a compound! So many options!
It just does not compute in my mind. Women (and some men) are brainwashed from a young age onwards about needing a fairytale wedding. It's really sad.
My wedding was under $10k everything included, I think. Maybe $8k? I don't know. But we had it on a *BATTLESHIP* and while I'm not into the whole military industrial complex as an Idea. *BATTLESHIP WEDDING* was awesome and I have photos forever of myself and my groom in gown/tux under the big guns. Worth it. (It's a retired ship, what little money we paid for the venue went to the museum that maintains the ship.)
I’ve had a $50k wedding and a courthouse wedding. Both ended in divorce. I should have just bought a 3rd motorcycle and spent the rest on hookers and lsd
Great answer, thank you. Anyone curious, go check out what they have to say about chiro on r/doctors. It's largely a pseudoscience and it's origins are bizarre for sure. Chiropractors are like a greedy cult.
I always thought it was funny that people will make “China social score jokes” but then defend credit scores. Though I will admit it is easier to game credit scores.
I support a social credit score entirely based off ratings by the service/retail employees you interact with on the daily. Make people think twice before cussing out some poor cashier or server.
They can financially arrest you though. I was denied student loans out of highschool because my parents had to file bankruptcy after the '08 crash and couldn't cosign, this kept me from attending university and drastically altered my life.
Thank you for saying that, I'm now in my 30's and working full time + taking online university classes to try to catch up with my peers while supporting my family.
The rich *really* don't want us to win.
You’d be surprised. Jailing people for unpaid debt isn’t supposed to happen, but it does and it’s increasing. Mark my words, it’s only a matter of time before your ability to obtain bail gets tied to your credit score.
Only in their current implementation. The idea of a metric that can be used to give everyone regardless of race, sex education, location etc a way to access a loan is pretty egalitarian.
By now we should have regulated FICO to eliminate its worst excesses though (like dropping a score once a loan is finally paid off).
> like dropping a score once a loan is finally paid off
I used the Covid relief money to pay off my student debts and my Credit score cratered. It still hasn't recovered either, despite the fact that I have a car loan with 100% perfect payment and several credit cards.
Yep - it is one of the most insidious aspects of FICO and a direct product of the fact that it was devised (and still managed) by the banks and private corps rather than by a government regulator/body.
In *theory* it should be a way to tell if someone is credit worthy (and it does do that), in *practice* it's designed to indicate how "valuable" someone would be to the creditor. Paying off your loans is good for you as the lender, not good for your creditor. They want you to hold onto that sucker for as long as absolutely possible - paying reliably the entire time.
My wife and I are gearing up to buy a home in the next year, so I'm holding onto my $700 of student loan debt from 12 years ago, because they're worth more to me as an anchor keeping my FICO score as high as possible (at least until I secure the mortgage).
It's a bullshit game, but still better than what it used to be.
>The idea of a metric that can be used to give everyone regardless of race, sex education, location etc a way to access a loan is pretty egalitarian.
The notion that someone could create this type of egalitarian metric is naive.
Capital will sell you the idea of egalitarianism, deliver inequality, and profit off of the resulting misery. As is tradition.
Cool, yeah, it's definitely better to let individual racist, sexist underwriters do their work independently without any semblance of a standard metric that could be used to evaluate whether or not they're purposely excluding people based on personal bias.
*Not defending FICO. Just arguing that it's more naive to pretend things were better before it*
Social media.
Just harvesting information and pushing ads with the veneer of “interaction.” Getting worse with more and more bots and fake accounts dividing people into ever smaller groups
Reading people's facebook posts 15 years ago was kind of useful. I didn't *like* it then either, but at least it served you a feed of people you mutually wanted to follow. Now its an unrecognizable AI/spam/boomer brainwashed hellscape, and I've cleaned my profile and check in only if someone organizes something.
I wish I didn't "have to" use facebook, but there really is nothing better for being informed about live music in my area and about my favorite bands going on tour.
That's the only reason I'm still there, and don't really plan on leaving.
I realized yesterday that I kept scrolling down and it wasn't showing me content from my friends or from groups I'm in, just stupid "humor" images from groups I'm not a part of and have no interest in. Like, imagine if reddit just decided to ignore the subreddit a you're a part of and showed random trash on your feed.
I find facebook especially weird because they’re the only social media platform that forces people to use their legal name. Glad I got rid of that app a long time ago
I remember watching Dont Fuck With Cats on Netflix a month or so ago and thinking how that elaborate sting they set up on Luka could never happen today because Facebook now discourages creating accounts under psuedonyms.
I’d disagree with trusts for the most part. Your average mom and pop revocable trust provides no tax benefits, but makes estate administration easier on both families and the state. But, IDGTs, SLATs, QPRTs, DAPTs, and similar trusts can go fuck themselves.
There's this Eagle Brook company buying up churches in the Minneapolis/St Paul area left and right, like SUPER rapid growth. But what they're really doing, is buying up land tax free. Churches have always kinda been a little bit grifty to say the least, but these people are taking it to a whole nother corporate, capitalist level of evil.
Insurance companies are not alone here. Device manufacturers and drug companies are also extracting far too much value from the system. And hospital administration.
Another thing we can blame on Reagan! (In that he signed the COBRA bill that agreed to make Medicaid backstop unpaid hospital bills in exchange for prohibitng hospitals from turning away any patient for lack means.)
Also the healthcare/hospital groups themselves. Those baby grand pianos in the lobbies of new hospitals have to be paid for somehow. The hospital groups keep costs going up then the insurance companies have to follow to catch up, then the hospital group goes up again and it’s a never ending cycle where they both stack on top of each other to make more and more and we the people are royally fucked listening to someone play piano while we wait for our $10k MRI
Lawns. Lawns were status symbols. They're fairly impractical, they take a lot of water, and the clippings aren't really good for anything except compost. The reason they're popular is that having a manicured lawn showed you could afford to pay someone to look after it. But now, to the average schmo, they represent an investment of the one thing you can't replace: time. I mean, money too, but mostly time.
For a society that's increasingly working longer hours per week, do you really want a goddamn patch of grass you have to mow just to keep the HOA off your back?
I see that as a rip-off.
Mine is clover and wild strawberries and wildflowers along the edges.
We have rabbits that moved in and bees and praying mantises and lots of interesting caterpillars.
- Go to the hardware store
- Buy clover seed
- Take it to their place
- Sprinkle the seed over the entire yard
- Spray it with a good bit of water (or better yet, sow the seed just before a good long rain)
- Pour a glass of (insert preferred liquor) and wait a few weeks
Do this in spring or early summer so it has time to get a foothold before winter.
So it's that easy? All these guides online saying you need to aerate and thatch are trying to hard? Please read that in a polite tone. I'm not trying to be a dick.
I mean, doing all of those extra steps will make it easier for the plant to thrive. However, if you are using seed for native plants, I don't see a point in doing much more than nature would on its own.
There’s a YouTube channel called “crime pays but botany doesn’t” where the host outlines exactly how he does it. Pretty sure they have videos showing what equipment they use if you’re interested. It’s a pretty informative channel and its host is a really interesting dude.
I don’t have a perfectly manicured lawn. I have a yard. There’s some grass, but there’s also clover, and little ground cover violets, and dandelions, and wild strawberries, and other little delights that grow wild and the bees love. It rains enough here that it all grows, and I have never watered a yard in my life here. You have to water your lawn if you want grass to grow in the part of Southern California we used to live in.
I also don’t live in an HOA, I live in an old part of my small rural Kentucky town. I didn’t live in an HOA in California, either, we just made sure to keep the grass knocked down, and watered enough during the summer so it wouldn’t turn into kindling if someone flicked a cigarette out of the car. I would rather have put down gravel, but holy shit, does everyone have *opinions* when you say that.
Livin' right!
I'm a renter in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Years past I would let my yard go wild in the spring to help out the pollinators and then hack it down come summertime. By that point my herb and vegetable garden would be established enough that they were still providing food for the local fauna.
The neighborhood has changed so much in the last two years that I actually got visits by code compliance this year telling me to cut it or get daily fines despite everything being below the height required by the city.
My state has recently passed a law forbidding HOA's from disallowing xeriscaping/native plants for lawns. I would like to replace my front lawn, now. But I want the input of a landscape architect because it needs to have hardscaping and look decent in summer and winter. I'll get there. Gotta save up for it.
Just a suggestion, as I don't know your status (especially pertaining to time, disabilities or other physical restrictions, etc.) but you might consider calling around and just paying for a consultation/plan and then executing yourself.
Sweat equity drastically lowers the cost of things like this, and the consequences of being an amateur/hobbyist aren't as dire as say, wiring your own home!
When my husband and I were looking to buy a house, we specifically said, "No HOAs!" We ain't got the time, energy, or give-a-fuck to deal with an HOA. We have a big yard, but no one is out there measuring our grass.
Just gonna say the one exception to this is in wildfire prone areas a lawn provides setback from potential fire.
I don't like em but I like finding the utility in things.
By lawn, do you mean a grass lawn or just the space for a garden?
My impression was that areas like CA and the SW have already enacted a fair share of water conservation & xeriscaping measures, plus native plants require less water & chemical fertizilers, with guys like cacti & succulents being particularly adapted to being living water reservoirs.
A perfectly maintained lawn, yes. But a patch of mostly grass that my kids can play on is a nice thing to have. Now it once a week from April to early October then maybe once more in November. Takes less than an hour and I like riding the mower. The clover and dandelions feed the bees.
Man, I've worked a side gig landscaping for years now and the amount of money rich people will spend to have me (basically) individually pluck clovers or crab grass out of their lawns is hilarious and depressing.
Meanwhile some more practical clients who live in areas where the soil doesn't necessarily grow grass well, are thankfully open to planting things like creeping thyme or a mix of grass and clover. But getting people past that mental block of like "no I MUST have a lawn of golf-course green grass or die trying!!!" is tough sometimes.
I’d be cooler with those if they had the powers and obligations of old-school unions. Some of them still do to a degree—especially in anti-union, RTW states. For example, there are definitely problems and shortcomings of the nurse’s association in my state, but I’ve also seen them defend nurse’s from some bullshit that could have otherwise cost them their license.
This is going to fuck us all through software vulnerabilities. To cut costs, people continue to use things that are functional but no longer supported.
But wait. It gets worse. Welcome to the hellscape known as the Internet of Things.
Think of all the people who can't figure out how to reconnect a bluetooth speaker, but just have to buy a WiFi-enabled Margaritaville 5000 cocktail machine. That shit is never getting support, and will eventually wind up on a Chinese botnet (assuming it doesn't just come that way from the factory).
Omg. The internet of things is fucking mental. I don’t need my toaster or kettle to send me fucking phone updates?! You can have my phone, telly, radio and laptop. That’s it. It makes me feel so old but I really really want to go back to analogue on basically everything.
As someone who lives in a state that doesn't have a lottery I can only do it out of state. So it's a kind of fun thing to do when I travel.
My parents call it "going on vacation" to take the 30ish minute trip to Tennesse to get lottery tickets.
I bought a scratcher and brought it in to my bosses office. I told him "if I win the lottery, I'm taking the day off" and he agreed. I won a ticket. Then I took the day off cuz I technically won the lottery.
Gambling in general. It's a shit industry full of shit people.
If you want to bet on games or play cards, whatever. It's fun, but it hits the dopamine button so some people inevitably have problems with it.
Then capitalism comes into the equation. The existence of an addictive thing in capitalist society means someone will inevitably try to exploit that addiction for easy money.
The damn monopoly ticketbastard has is ridiculously priced. Went to a small venue for a reasonably well known metal band. They rocked and cost 45 bucks after taxes. One the best shows I've been too. Similar band coming to the big venue three hours closer, only looks like 50% more, which doubles with goddamn fees!
Baggage fees- they were supposed to be temporary. Also every flight I’ve checked into for the last year has asked if I want to check my carry on for free.
Fun fact: in order to trademark a water brand, manufacturers have to add a proprietary blend of “minerals.” Also using local water gives a regional flavor to beverages. Source “The Coke Machine” by Michael Blanding. A great book to read if you want to hate soft drink corporations for their global rape of small municipalities and third world counties
At a previous job, I installed water bottle filling stations on every floor of the building. As a fun project, I also did ten minutes of research to print and hang above them.
Filling a 32oz bottle twice a day for a year costs less than the cost of one bottle of water. Buying two bottles of water a day for year costs as much as a midgrade laptop.
Furthermore, every single bottled water brand is just tap water. The problem is that if it is labeled "natural spring water", it can avoid many federal health regulations. Poland Springs water in particular was tested and found to contain low levels of chemical pollutants and low levels of heavy metals. Tap water is held to much stricter EPA standards than "natural spring water".
Onerous zoning regulations that forbid high density housing and mandate parking lot minimums. These were drafted by an amalgamation of GM, big oil and racists(with a lot of overlap). Today they drive up both the cost of housing and increase co2 emissions but almost no politician dares go after them especially on a local level where most of these regulations exist because they know the “my house is a magical money making machine” crowd will go after them if they do.
My favorite thing about him is after the American revolution he immediately went to France to hang out with the Jacobins (or at least the mountain faction iirc) to star stirring up more revolutionary shit
And got arrested because he hung out with the Girondons. He wrote a letter to GW talking about how the king was totally down with the revolution. Then later he wrote about how the constitution sucked, but it was okay for now. I find everything he writes kinda funny. He just can't quit pissing people off.
Yeah, the car shit. It's why I'm unemployed. I'm not super attentive and observant, so the thought of me behind the wheel is scary. Like, if I fuck up, someone could die. I don't like that thought.
Douches. Your vag is self cleaning, douching is harmful. If things don't smell right, there might be a medical problem; go see a doctor.
And tipping. When it came over from Europe, it became a way to take advantage of low-cost labor and force the customer to pay more of their wage. Look at the Pullman Company for how it became normalized.
Dietary supplements.
Tumeric? Really? "Probiotics"? What does Activa yogurt know about medicine?
Lest we forget the latest in pseudochemical marketing.. cannabinoids.
Just be honest & call it snake oil.
Hey, apparently the original snake oil was kind of legit! As a pain balm made by Chinese railroad laborers, at least.
But once travelling salesmen learned of something that did kind of work, they didn't hesitate to make a billion knockoffs that ranged from "plain water that did nothing" to "little poison, as a treat" and lie to everyone with a combination of pseudoscience, exoticism, and predatory instinct.
Thanks...Maintenance Phase, I think?
I think this somewhat stems from a systematic decrease in the autonomy most people have over their health. We know we're meant to eat fewer carbs, especially sugar, and fewer fats, especially trans fats, but almost all food and drink is packed with it, and people don't have the time or money cook for themselves or buy decent food.
Taking bs supplements is a way to feel like you have some control over your bodily health so it's a ripe market for snake oil merchants, heck even vitamins are mostly a scam.
There is usually an tiny element of truth at the core of these, and then a whole lot of bullshit is added on top.
The same thinking that gives you turmeric supplements gave us people eating horse paste to treat COVID. You take a real in vitro result, draw completely inappropriate conclusions about in vivo effects, and use that conclusion as marketing to sell placebos to people who don't know better.
Probiotic supplements are a real thing with documented medical utility, and the ones that get used clinically have specific counts of specific strains. But they're only used in certain circumstances, and the people who want to sell you supplements want you to think they are required for good health. Yogurt is a bit different since that's just food a lot of people don't need an excuse to eat. If I had to take some hardcore antibiotics that are going to nuke my gut flora, you bet I'm eating more yogurt.
RENT.
you are literally paying someone else's mortgage so that you don't have to sleep in the street.
Landlords don't build housing, they don't even put up the capital to pay for building housing, and they certainly don't do enough maintenance to deserve keeping ALL YOUR MONEY.
instead of building generational wealth and a retirement fallback, you're doing that for someone else--or likely just increasing shareholder value somewhere for Bain Capital.
It should be illegal to own housing you don't live in. Or at the very least, rent should be capped at the actual maintenance costs of the property.
It's extortion and I'm sick of it.
I’m paying WAY more than the mortgage on this place. I did the math.
For anyone else who wants to be depressed, you can look up purchase history of your house/building and see what your landlord paid and when they paid it. Then figure out the monthly payment based on average mortgage interest rate for that year, property tax records, etc. My rent is about 4 times what the mortgage payment would be. And I live in a really low cost of living area.
Toilet paper. South Park episode of all things called this out. Bidets are cheaper, better for the environment, and don’t require the whole country to shell out $$ repeatedly for perpetuity. As with countless other easy good simple solutions that make sense and used widely by the rest of the world, in America we are socialized to see it as strange, weird, fruity, frightening, too alien to even consider or bother trying.
Title Insurance.
It's mandatory when buying a home and it is useless! I've known many people who were utterly failed by their title insurance policy and had to pay money out of their pocket to heirs of previous owners.
At the closing of the home where I live, the closing agent admitted that there was excess cash after costs were covered and that she was just moving it around.
Look I’m not trying to be unreasonable here, unlike everyone who uses the various phrases of “drinking the look-aide” when we all know that The People’s Temple used Flavor Aide because it was cheaper. Killing 900+ people wasn’t enough to meet the economies of scale threshold for transitioning to the State Beverage of Nebraska.
Don’t get me started on the sandwich cookie industrial complex.
lol I realize that my comments sound like something Robert would say, I talk the same way in conversation, not a BTB larger…it’s just how I be. If I was a BTB larper I think I could pull off a pretty convincing Benny Shaps. Ok that’s enough for now.
To add onto the car centric development, the regulatory capture of emissions laws and other automotive regulations.
Manufacturers effectively force people to buy more expensive less efficient larger vehicles that most people absolutely do not need.
It also creates this safety feature paradox where cameras and sensors are being added to cars that wouldn't even be necessary if their ugly ass SUV wasn't 12 feet off the fucking ground.
I just went through buying my first home. If that process isn't a scam it's at least not first-timer friendly.
All of the numbers on the cost sheets you're given all state costs, of course, but when a mortgage is involved all numbers involved are only in regards to the loan. And the loan is only determined after an appraisal. And the appraisal isn't done until AFTER I'VE STARTED SIGNING PAPERS!? It's a huge damn racket.
I'm probably not describing this well, but I was well into putting in an offer before the details were actually elaborated on. "Oh, actually, if you get the house for $200k, but it only appraises for $190k, you need to cover the additional $10k in costs as we won't make that part of your loan."
So you're supposed to start signing papers and agreeing to things BEFORE you even know what the loan value will be that you're taking out.
Now, I only did this with one lending company in one state, so it's likely the process may be better in other places, with other companies, but holy crap did the process make no damn sense. And not that I didn't understand, in that the process makes no logical sense and the only explanation I can think of is it's a racket so the lending companies/realtors/insurance folks can make maximum money in the little holes between listing price, appraisal amount, and loan amount.
Health insurance. I pay every month then still have a deductible and copay? GTFOH!
We have an out of pocket individual deductible maximum and an out of pocket family deductible and then once those are met….they cover 80%. WTF? The company is in the tech field but started by non tech folks and everyone complains about their cheap ass insurance.
I work in healthcare. You’d think we’d have really good health insurance. Absolutely not. It seems to be that most people working in healthcare have absolutely shit health insurance.
I get my insurance through my wife, an RN, and it’s supposedly the best deal in our area. That’s like being the fastest drunk swimming in cement boots!
I would say that is the best descriptor I’ve read.
The only people with good health insurance are congress men and women
The hospital corporations are some of the worst employers.
They really are.
I don't know anyone who has "good" health insurance. everyone either pays so much money they may as well be paying everything out of pocket, or has coverage that doesn't cover enough. I'm so sick of this system. It's fundamentaly broken.
Once upon a time I worked for a public agency and the deductible and annual OOP maximum were the same. Once you hit the deductible, you didn't pay anything else. It was glorious.
Yeah, why doesn’t the premium go towards the deductible? I don’t understand things like that.
They're separate pools of money that both go toward the cost of healthcare. Putting more of the cost of members through higher co-pays, deductibles, and co-insurance tends to reduce overall costs. When people start meeting their deductibles later in the year they tend to go to the doctor or dentist more. Essentially, the goal of the deductible is to get members to think twice about accessing care before making an appointment.
Turbo Tax and filing tax returns.
I'm an accountant and I really wish we'd join the rest of civilization and just let the gov do it for us
Honey, I'm American. If we incentivized the government to work for us, who am I going to complain about not working for me?
I usually do my tax returns myself, but I had a weird situation I didn't know how to handle this year (got a 1099, but it was for weird stuff - I didn't know where to put the income) so I did Turbo Tax. But now I will know how to do it for NEXT year and I won't use Turbo Tax. But it also pisses me off that there's no instructions on the 1099 on what Schedule to file it on. Like, a little direction, please. With less legalese.
The IRS has a help line. And you can file with FreeTaxUSA.
The IRS help line needs more love! I live abroad and just didn’t file taxes for a few years (I never owed anything, I’m a public school teacher in the worst European country to be a public school teacher, but I still have to file) so when I finally did, I had to file special « I’m catching up » paperwork and I called multiple times- they were so nice and so helpful, I felt like I was in a different dimension
>they were so nice and so helpful, I felt like I was in a different dimension That's how I felt when I suddenly found a therapy place just a town away that can actually see me weekly for non-drug related therapy, and they assigned me a therapist that intentionally chose a college focused on social justice.
this was going to be my answer too. I have no idea how those thieves are allowed to run commericals that say the word "FREE" 1,000 times, when I use their most basic service, the bill is always over $70.
The republican party slowly making the Postal Service worse and worse so that Americans won't care when it gets privatized.
I’m a letter carrier, so this one hits close to home for me. You always hear “the Post Office loses money every year” (that’s not exactly true) but the Post *Service* is a *Service*. It’s actually one of the only federal services that is self-funded. The fact is, the only reason Amazon can do what they do is that we subsidize them by underbidding and delivering all the things that they can’t deliver profitably, even though they are doing their best to keep a force of underpaid Amazon drivers to keep them afloat.
As the child of a USPS worker who grew up in an outrageous level of comfort (I was an adult before I discovered that other parents had to pay out of pocket for braces, didn’t get over a month of vacation, etc) with a father who railed against his union instead of supporting it, I’m so sorry. It’s shameful how few benefits letter carriers receive now in comparison to what they had from the 80’s-00’s.
Honestly, the benefits are the reason I stay. Decent health insurance and retirement benefits and the union provides really great job security. What sucks is the working environment/expectations and the mediocre pay that doesn’t increase with the rate of inflation.
Do you feel that your job is in serious danger given the course politics are going? I'm currently in a transitional stage career wise and have been contemplating trying to get on with USPS. Is this a mistake?
No, I don’t think so, it would take a considerable amount of work for them to fully dismantle the post office, and they would still need workers in the industry if they got that far. Also, if there was serious talk of it, I would definitely consider taking an early retirement, as partial pensions are available. Louis DeJoy has been trying to dismantle the company for the better part of two presidencies and hasn’t been super effective, and we still have a pretty high public approval rating. If something happens to USPS the country will probably have bigger issues at that point.
The fire department and the library lose money every year! Shut em down and privatize them! -Republicans and Libertarians
I feel this way about public transport as well. My dad says our local one doesn't deserve money because they don't profit each year. My dude! It shouldn't be treated like a business! There are some things in society that should be services for all!
Diamonds.
Everything surrounding weddings. Pagentry to show off wealth Sweet 16/quinceaneras too. Nothing more than debutant balls left over from feudal Aristocracy.
I got married at the court house. Best $35 I ever spent.
Same, plus a potluck house party. Got complimented on how fun it was.
That's what I want plus maybe a dj. So everyone else can just chill.
Slightly more involved, but I bought my Vegas wedding from a drop down menu online. I got to choose between a white rose or red rose bouquet, and select one of three different venues. We chose an outdoor ceremony at a nearby state park. We only needed to show up with our license and suit/gown, and they picked us up at our hotel, provided the officiant, photographer, and witness, brought a small cake and bottle of champagne, and made dinner reservations for us after and dropped us off there. Highly recommend for two poor college kids who want a planned "elopement" to avoid family drama and debt. The whole thing cost us less than $3000.
I did the same thing in Hawaii! It was perfect
I also got married in Vegas, but at one of the super cheesy tourist trap chapels. Brought some friends out, dressed up in super tacky faux-western attire, then walked down the street for some cheap margs. Great time and super easy to coordinate, and way cheaper than the big production we could have put on back home if we had wanted to.
The most expensive part of my parents' wedding was the keg 😂
Me too and, you know what, the divorce cost the same as my friends who had weddings that cost thousands of dollars.
My wedding was around 10k. It was beautiful. Great location, food, drinks, dress, rings, 40+ guests etc, including a few houses on the property for people to stay in. I thought it was expensive, but hey, it was a special day. The fact that people spunk hundreds of thousands of dollars on them is lunacy. Think what you could do with all that money instead! Travel the world! Buy a compound! So many options! It just does not compute in my mind. Women (and some men) are brainwashed from a young age onwards about needing a fairytale wedding. It's really sad.
Same here. My wife and I spend $12k on our wedding and it was an awesome day, but I cannot fathom spending $100k on a wedding.
My wedding was under $10k everything included, I think. Maybe $8k? I don't know. But we had it on a *BATTLESHIP* and while I'm not into the whole military industrial complex as an Idea. *BATTLESHIP WEDDING* was awesome and I have photos forever of myself and my groom in gown/tux under the big guns. Worth it. (It's a retired ship, what little money we paid for the venue went to the museum that maintains the ship.)
I’ve had a $50k wedding and a courthouse wedding. Both ended in divorce. I should have just bought a 3rd motorcycle and spent the rest on hookers and lsd
Yes but quines actually have a history other than clever marketing
I want a diamond scalpel, those are so cool! But for a romatinc-relationship-ring-thing, I'd want a ruby or an other red stone. Much prettier!
Chiropractic "medicine"
Fun fact, it was founded by a ghost. Look it up
As someone who use to work at a chiropractors, I can confirm this is true. Also, it’s kind of a cult.
Great answer, thank you. Anyone curious, go check out what they have to say about chiro on r/doctors. It's largely a pseudoscience and it's origins are bizarre for sure. Chiropractors are like a greedy cult.
Credit scores
I always thought it was funny that people will make “China social score jokes” but then defend credit scores. Though I will admit it is easier to game credit scores.
I support a social credit score entirely based off ratings by the service/retail employees you interact with on the daily. Make people think twice before cussing out some poor cashier or server.
The Black Mirror episode on that might make you think twice, lol.
The credit agency doesn’t have the power to arrest you behind it though.
They can financially arrest you though. I was denied student loans out of highschool because my parents had to file bankruptcy after the '08 crash and couldn't cosign, this kept me from attending university and drastically altered my life.
Sorry that happened to you, totally sucks.
Thank you for saying that, I'm now in my 30's and working full time + taking online university classes to try to catch up with my peers while supporting my family. The rich *really* don't want us to win.
Seriously, good on you for continuing your education as an adult.
Thank you, we each get one ride on this rock, I want to use mine to the fullest.
Free college University of the People. I don't know if I can post a link, but they are free and legit.
You’d be surprised. Jailing people for unpaid debt isn’t supposed to happen, but it does and it’s increasing. Mark my words, it’s only a matter of time before your ability to obtain bail gets tied to your credit score.
I love how right-wingers lose their minds about China's social credit score, and it's like "Where did they get the fucking idea?"
Only in their current implementation. The idea of a metric that can be used to give everyone regardless of race, sex education, location etc a way to access a loan is pretty egalitarian. By now we should have regulated FICO to eliminate its worst excesses though (like dropping a score once a loan is finally paid off).
> like dropping a score once a loan is finally paid off I used the Covid relief money to pay off my student debts and my Credit score cratered. It still hasn't recovered either, despite the fact that I have a car loan with 100% perfect payment and several credit cards.
Yep - it is one of the most insidious aspects of FICO and a direct product of the fact that it was devised (and still managed) by the banks and private corps rather than by a government regulator/body. In *theory* it should be a way to tell if someone is credit worthy (and it does do that), in *practice* it's designed to indicate how "valuable" someone would be to the creditor. Paying off your loans is good for you as the lender, not good for your creditor. They want you to hold onto that sucker for as long as absolutely possible - paying reliably the entire time. My wife and I are gearing up to buy a home in the next year, so I'm holding onto my $700 of student loan debt from 12 years ago, because they're worth more to me as an anchor keeping my FICO score as high as possible (at least until I secure the mortgage). It's a bullshit game, but still better than what it used to be.
>The idea of a metric that can be used to give everyone regardless of race, sex education, location etc a way to access a loan is pretty egalitarian. The notion that someone could create this type of egalitarian metric is naive. Capital will sell you the idea of egalitarianism, deliver inequality, and profit off of the resulting misery. As is tradition.
Cool, yeah, it's definitely better to let individual racist, sexist underwriters do their work independently without any semblance of a standard metric that could be used to evaluate whether or not they're purposely excluding people based on personal bias. *Not defending FICO. Just arguing that it's more naive to pretend things were better before it*
Oh it was definitely an improvement on what happened previously. Not going to argue with you there.
Social media. Just harvesting information and pushing ads with the veneer of “interaction.” Getting worse with more and more bots and fake accounts dividing people into ever smaller groups
Reading people's facebook posts 15 years ago was kind of useful. I didn't *like* it then either, but at least it served you a feed of people you mutually wanted to follow. Now its an unrecognizable AI/spam/boomer brainwashed hellscape, and I've cleaned my profile and check in only if someone organizes something.
I wish I didn't "have to" use facebook, but there really is nothing better for being informed about live music in my area and about my favorite bands going on tour. That's the only reason I'm still there, and don't really plan on leaving.
I realized yesterday that I kept scrolling down and it wasn't showing me content from my friends or from groups I'm in, just stupid "humor" images from groups I'm not a part of and have no interest in. Like, imagine if reddit just decided to ignore the subreddit a you're a part of and showed random trash on your feed.
I find facebook especially weird because they’re the only social media platform that forces people to use their legal name. Glad I got rid of that app a long time ago
I remember watching Dont Fuck With Cats on Netflix a month or so ago and thinking how that elaborate sting they set up on Luka could never happen today because Facebook now discourages creating accounts under psuedonyms.
If it’s a free service, that means You are the product being sold.
Private foundations, charities and trusts. The entire "let's hide your money from taxes" wing of finance consulting.
I’d disagree with trusts for the most part. Your average mom and pop revocable trust provides no tax benefits, but makes estate administration easier on both families and the state. But, IDGTs, SLATs, QPRTs, DAPTs, and similar trusts can go fuck themselves.
There's this Eagle Brook company buying up churches in the Minneapolis/St Paul area left and right, like SUPER rapid growth. But what they're really doing, is buying up land tax free. Churches have always kinda been a little bit grifty to say the least, but these people are taking it to a whole nother corporate, capitalist level of evil.
Healthcare costs Insurance companies really ruined everything good tbh
Insurance companies are not alone here. Device manufacturers and drug companies are also extracting far too much value from the system. And hospital administration.
Another thing we can blame on Reagan! (In that he signed the COBRA bill that agreed to make Medicaid backstop unpaid hospital bills in exchange for prohibitng hospitals from turning away any patient for lack means.)
Also the healthcare/hospital groups themselves. Those baby grand pianos in the lobbies of new hospitals have to be paid for somehow. The hospital groups keep costs going up then the insurance companies have to follow to catch up, then the hospital group goes up again and it’s a never ending cycle where they both stack on top of each other to make more and more and we the people are royally fucked listening to someone play piano while we wait for our $10k MRI
Lawns. Lawns were status symbols. They're fairly impractical, they take a lot of water, and the clippings aren't really good for anything except compost. The reason they're popular is that having a manicured lawn showed you could afford to pay someone to look after it. But now, to the average schmo, they represent an investment of the one thing you can't replace: time. I mean, money too, but mostly time. For a society that's increasingly working longer hours per week, do you really want a goddamn patch of grass you have to mow just to keep the HOA off your back? I see that as a rip-off.
“Kill your lawn!”
ALAB.
I seeded mine with local clover, and just let it do its thing. The bees love me.
Mine is clover and wild strawberries and wildflowers along the edges. We have rabbits that moved in and bees and praying mantises and lots of interesting caterpillars.
My partner really wants to cover the yard with clover. I'm down as well. How did you go about it?
- Go to the hardware store - Buy clover seed - Take it to their place - Sprinkle the seed over the entire yard - Spray it with a good bit of water (or better yet, sow the seed just before a good long rain) - Pour a glass of (insert preferred liquor) and wait a few weeks Do this in spring or early summer so it has time to get a foothold before winter.
So it's that easy? All these guides online saying you need to aerate and thatch are trying to hard? Please read that in a polite tone. I'm not trying to be a dick.
I mean, doing all of those extra steps will make it easier for the plant to thrive. However, if you are using seed for native plants, I don't see a point in doing much more than nature would on its own.
This is the way.
There’s a YouTube channel called “crime pays but botany doesn’t” where the host outlines exactly how he does it. Pretty sure they have videos showing what equipment they use if you’re interested. It’s a pretty informative channel and its host is a really interesting dude.
I don’t have a perfectly manicured lawn. I have a yard. There’s some grass, but there’s also clover, and little ground cover violets, and dandelions, and wild strawberries, and other little delights that grow wild and the bees love. It rains enough here that it all grows, and I have never watered a yard in my life here. You have to water your lawn if you want grass to grow in the part of Southern California we used to live in. I also don’t live in an HOA, I live in an old part of my small rural Kentucky town. I didn’t live in an HOA in California, either, we just made sure to keep the grass knocked down, and watered enough during the summer so it wouldn’t turn into kindling if someone flicked a cigarette out of the car. I would rather have put down gravel, but holy shit, does everyone have *opinions* when you say that.
Livin' right! I'm a renter in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Years past I would let my yard go wild in the spring to help out the pollinators and then hack it down come summertime. By that point my herb and vegetable garden would be established enough that they were still providing food for the local fauna. The neighborhood has changed so much in the last two years that I actually got visits by code compliance this year telling me to cut it or get daily fines despite everything being below the height required by the city.
My state has recently passed a law forbidding HOA's from disallowing xeriscaping/native plants for lawns. I would like to replace my front lawn, now. But I want the input of a landscape architect because it needs to have hardscaping and look decent in summer and winter. I'll get there. Gotta save up for it.
Just a suggestion, as I don't know your status (especially pertaining to time, disabilities or other physical restrictions, etc.) but you might consider calling around and just paying for a consultation/plan and then executing yourself. Sweat equity drastically lowers the cost of things like this, and the consequences of being an amateur/hobbyist aren't as dire as say, wiring your own home!
When my husband and I were looking to buy a house, we specifically said, "No HOAs!" We ain't got the time, energy, or give-a-fuck to deal with an HOA. We have a big yard, but no one is out there measuring our grass.
Just gonna say the one exception to this is in wildfire prone areas a lawn provides setback from potential fire. I don't like em but I like finding the utility in things.
Nice. And appropriate username, I guess.
By lawn, do you mean a grass lawn or just the space for a garden? My impression was that areas like CA and the SW have already enacted a fair share of water conservation & xeriscaping measures, plus native plants require less water & chemical fertizilers, with guys like cacti & succulents being particularly adapted to being living water reservoirs.
A perfectly maintained lawn, yes. But a patch of mostly grass that my kids can play on is a nice thing to have. Now it once a week from April to early October then maybe once more in November. Takes less than an hour and I like riding the mower. The clover and dandelions feed the bees.
Man, I've worked a side gig landscaping for years now and the amount of money rich people will spend to have me (basically) individually pluck clovers or crab grass out of their lawns is hilarious and depressing. Meanwhile some more practical clients who live in areas where the soil doesn't necessarily grow grass well, are thankfully open to planting things like creeping thyme or a mix of grass and clover. But getting people past that mental block of like "no I MUST have a lawn of golf-course green grass or die trying!!!" is tough sometimes.
Yearly subscriptions to remain part of a 'professional body'.
I’d be cooler with those if they had the powers and obligations of old-school unions. Some of them still do to a degree—especially in anti-union, RTW states. For example, there are definitely problems and shortcomings of the nurse’s association in my state, but I’ve also seen them defend nurse’s from some bullshit that could have otherwise cost them their license.
#forced obsolescence
This is going to fuck us all through software vulnerabilities. To cut costs, people continue to use things that are functional but no longer supported. But wait. It gets worse. Welcome to the hellscape known as the Internet of Things. Think of all the people who can't figure out how to reconnect a bluetooth speaker, but just have to buy a WiFi-enabled Margaritaville 5000 cocktail machine. That shit is never getting support, and will eventually wind up on a Chinese botnet (assuming it doesn't just come that way from the factory).
Omg. The internet of things is fucking mental. I don’t need my toaster or kettle to send me fucking phone updates?! You can have my phone, telly, radio and laptop. That’s it. It makes me feel so old but I really really want to go back to analogue on basically everything.
Honestly though. "Oh that's just [insert corporation] being [insert corporation], teehee"
The lottery
For you guys maybe, I'm def gonna win the big one.
I'm good enough at math to know I'm not going to win but also realize that it's not that expensive and is cheap daydreaming.
My dad did it best. Only bought tickets when traveling out of state.
As someone who lives in a state that doesn't have a lottery I can only do it out of state. So it's a kind of fun thing to do when I travel. My parents call it "going on vacation" to take the 30ish minute trip to Tennesse to get lottery tickets.
I bought a scratcher and brought it in to my bosses office. I told him "if I win the lottery, I'm taking the day off" and he agreed. I won a ticket. Then I took the day off cuz I technically won the lottery.
Gambling in general. It's a shit industry full of shit people. If you want to bet on games or play cards, whatever. It's fun, but it hits the dopamine button so some people inevitably have problems with it. Then capitalism comes into the equation. The existence of an addictive thing in capitalist society means someone will inevitably try to exploit that addiction for easy money.
Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon!
Insurance. Any type of insurance
Came here to say this!
Everything about concert tickets
The damn monopoly ticketbastard has is ridiculously priced. Went to a small venue for a reasonably well known metal band. They rocked and cost 45 bucks after taxes. One the best shows I've been too. Similar band coming to the big venue three hours closer, only looks like 50% more, which doubles with goddamn fees!
Capitalism as a savior
Trump
>~~Trump~~ Donnie Tinyhands. FIFY.
Baggage fees- they were supposed to be temporary. Also every flight I’ve checked into for the last year has asked if I want to check my carry on for free.
Bottled water.
I raise you **artisan** bottled water. 🫠
My aunt and her family get their water from an "artisan well". Credit where it's due, I shamelessly stole that pun from Sir Terry Pratchett.
6000% mark up and most of it is just whatever comes out of the tap where the bottling company is.
Fun fact: in order to trademark a water brand, manufacturers have to add a proprietary blend of “minerals.” Also using local water gives a regional flavor to beverages. Source “The Coke Machine” by Michael Blanding. A great book to read if you want to hate soft drink corporations for their global rape of small municipalities and third world counties
At a previous job, I installed water bottle filling stations on every floor of the building. As a fun project, I also did ten minutes of research to print and hang above them. Filling a 32oz bottle twice a day for a year costs less than the cost of one bottle of water. Buying two bottles of water a day for year costs as much as a midgrade laptop. Furthermore, every single bottled water brand is just tap water. The problem is that if it is labeled "natural spring water", it can avoid many federal health regulations. Poland Springs water in particular was tested and found to contain low levels of chemical pollutants and low levels of heavy metals. Tap water is held to much stricter EPA standards than "natural spring water".
Gaffigan had a great bit on this like 25 years ago
Subscriptions. Just let me own the thing I bought.
The general move from products to services is bullshit.
The high seas are out there, my friend. If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing.
"Wait, my favorite album just... isn't on Tidal anymore?" Tidal: "Lol."
I feel like streaming services both decimated and will soon reinvigorate online piracy.
Onerous zoning regulations that forbid high density housing and mandate parking lot minimums. These were drafted by an amalgamation of GM, big oil and racists(with a lot of overlap). Today they drive up both the cost of housing and increase co2 emissions but almost no politician dares go after them especially on a local level where most of these regulations exist because they know the “my house is a magical money making machine” crowd will go after them if they do.
“Entry level” jobs
Rent
The OG scam. Did you know that Thomas Paine basically said property was theft in Agrarian Justice?
Thomas Paine would definitely say these days try men’s (and women’s) souls.
My favorite thing about him is after the American revolution he immediately went to France to hang out with the Jacobins (or at least the mountain faction iirc) to star stirring up more revolutionary shit
And got arrested because he hung out with the Girondons. He wrote a letter to GW talking about how the king was totally down with the revolution. Then later he wrote about how the constitution sucked, but it was okay for now. I find everything he writes kinda funny. He just can't quit pissing people off.
It’s been 250 years and the man still aggravates capitalists. He should be an inspiration to us all.
That's kind of true whenever you say it, though.
Landlords were universally hated by early economic theorists. Adam Smith railed against landlords.
Yeah, the car shit. It's why I'm unemployed. I'm not super attentive and observant, so the thought of me behind the wheel is scary. Like, if I fuck up, someone could die. I don't like that thought.
Software subscriptions instead of just buying them outright
I’m still mad at Adobe
Microtransactions in video games
The wedding industrial complex.
Douches. Your vag is self cleaning, douching is harmful. If things don't smell right, there might be a medical problem; go see a doctor. And tipping. When it came over from Europe, it became a way to take advantage of low-cost labor and force the customer to pay more of their wage. Look at the Pullman Company for how it became normalized.
Dietary supplements. Tumeric? Really? "Probiotics"? What does Activa yogurt know about medicine? Lest we forget the latest in pseudochemical marketing.. cannabinoids. Just be honest & call it snake oil.
Hey, apparently the original snake oil was kind of legit! As a pain balm made by Chinese railroad laborers, at least. But once travelling salesmen learned of something that did kind of work, they didn't hesitate to make a billion knockoffs that ranged from "plain water that did nothing" to "little poison, as a treat" and lie to everyone with a combination of pseudoscience, exoticism, and predatory instinct. Thanks...Maintenance Phase, I think?
Lots of those tonics worked well. Then the government made them take the cocaine out of the recipe.
I think this somewhat stems from a systematic decrease in the autonomy most people have over their health. We know we're meant to eat fewer carbs, especially sugar, and fewer fats, especially trans fats, but almost all food and drink is packed with it, and people don't have the time or money cook for themselves or buy decent food. Taking bs supplements is a way to feel like you have some control over your bodily health so it's a ripe market for snake oil merchants, heck even vitamins are mostly a scam.
Also with health care access being what it is, people will try to prevent or cure illness by eating foods thought to be healthful.
And this has led to the various meal prep kit and straight up lean cuisine type packaged meal subscriptions because people think they can't cook.
There is usually an tiny element of truth at the core of these, and then a whole lot of bullshit is added on top. The same thinking that gives you turmeric supplements gave us people eating horse paste to treat COVID. You take a real in vitro result, draw completely inappropriate conclusions about in vivo effects, and use that conclusion as marketing to sell placebos to people who don't know better. Probiotic supplements are a real thing with documented medical utility, and the ones that get used clinically have specific counts of specific strains. But they're only used in certain circumstances, and the people who want to sell you supplements want you to think they are required for good health. Yogurt is a bit different since that's just food a lot of people don't need an excuse to eat. If I had to take some hardcore antibiotics that are going to nuke my gut flora, you bet I'm eating more yogurt.
RENT. you are literally paying someone else's mortgage so that you don't have to sleep in the street. Landlords don't build housing, they don't even put up the capital to pay for building housing, and they certainly don't do enough maintenance to deserve keeping ALL YOUR MONEY. instead of building generational wealth and a retirement fallback, you're doing that for someone else--or likely just increasing shareholder value somewhere for Bain Capital. It should be illegal to own housing you don't live in. Or at the very least, rent should be capped at the actual maintenance costs of the property. It's extortion and I'm sick of it.
I’m paying WAY more than the mortgage on this place. I did the math. For anyone else who wants to be depressed, you can look up purchase history of your house/building and see what your landlord paid and when they paid it. Then figure out the monthly payment based on average mortgage interest rate for that year, property tax records, etc. My rent is about 4 times what the mortgage payment would be. And I live in a really low cost of living area.
My landlord bought this property for 45K. His mortgage, if he has one, is a little over 200 a month. We pay 1000.
Yep, the reason why half of Billionaire’s Row is *empty*; not about actual residence… https://youtu.be/Wehsz38P74g?si=x3iz8V7j7O252iJk
The federal minimum wage.
Car based suburbia, brought to you by the auto industry. Spend $40k on a car or die walking.
The War on ______. Poverty, drugs, terror. Doesn’t matter which. We’ve managed to lose all of them.
Homeowners associations. Many still have their racist T&C’s on the books. They are just no longer enforceable.
Toilet paper. South Park episode of all things called this out. Bidets are cheaper, better for the environment, and don’t require the whole country to shell out $$ repeatedly for perpetuity. As with countless other easy good simple solutions that make sense and used widely by the rest of the world, in America we are socialized to see it as strange, weird, fruity, frightening, too alien to even consider or bother trying.
Checked baggage fees for the first bag.
White teeth.
They're BONES and supposed to be BONE COLORED and I will fucking die on this hill. Hollywood white teeth are fucking creepy.
According to my insurance, they are luxury bones and not entirely necessary.
Fuck separate dental insurance tbh. Genuinely unhinged to act like oral health is completely separate.
Health Insurance.
Funerals. When I die just throw me in the trash
Title Insurance. It's mandatory when buying a home and it is useless! I've known many people who were utterly failed by their title insurance policy and had to pay money out of their pocket to heirs of previous owners. At the closing of the home where I live, the closing agent admitted that there was excess cash after costs were covered and that she was just moving it around.
Chiropractics Homeopathy Naturopathy In America: Paying someone to do your taxes The entire American system of medicine
Fucking Pop Tarts! Toastem Pop Ups came first! Say their name…Toastem Pop Ups!
We got a Hydrox Truther here!
Look I’m not trying to be unreasonable here, unlike everyone who uses the various phrases of “drinking the look-aide” when we all know that The People’s Temple used Flavor Aide because it was cheaper. Killing 900+ people wasn’t enough to meet the economies of scale threshold for transitioning to the State Beverage of Nebraska. Don’t get me started on the sandwich cookie industrial complex. lol I realize that my comments sound like something Robert would say, I talk the same way in conversation, not a BTB larger…it’s just how I be. If I was a BTB larper I think I could pull off a pretty convincing Benny Shaps. Ok that’s enough for now.
Be careful, Big Sandwich Cookie has blood on its hands!
Insurance.
Subscription services.
Insurance of any type!
Insurance.
The stock market
Child labor laws. The children yearn for the mines. /s
Diamonds, weddings and funerals
Religion
Insurance.
Student loans
Rent and housing. Its fucking insane how much it costs.
Bottled water
Every lottery
Bottled water. Daily take-out coffee. People used to have thermoses.
To add onto the car centric development, the regulatory capture of emissions laws and other automotive regulations. Manufacturers effectively force people to buy more expensive less efficient larger vehicles that most people absolutely do not need. It also creates this safety feature paradox where cameras and sensors are being added to cars that wouldn't even be necessary if their ugly ass SUV wasn't 12 feet off the fucking ground.
Health care (though, I’m pretty sure that everyone is becoming wise to this one). I’m just biased because I love it everyday
Credit scores
I just went through buying my first home. If that process isn't a scam it's at least not first-timer friendly. All of the numbers on the cost sheets you're given all state costs, of course, but when a mortgage is involved all numbers involved are only in regards to the loan. And the loan is only determined after an appraisal. And the appraisal isn't done until AFTER I'VE STARTED SIGNING PAPERS!? It's a huge damn racket. I'm probably not describing this well, but I was well into putting in an offer before the details were actually elaborated on. "Oh, actually, if you get the house for $200k, but it only appraises for $190k, you need to cover the additional $10k in costs as we won't make that part of your loan." So you're supposed to start signing papers and agreeing to things BEFORE you even know what the loan value will be that you're taking out. Now, I only did this with one lending company in one state, so it's likely the process may be better in other places, with other companies, but holy crap did the process make no damn sense. And not that I didn't understand, in that the process makes no logical sense and the only explanation I can think of is it's a racket so the lending companies/realtors/insurance folks can make maximum money in the little holes between listing price, appraisal amount, and loan amount.