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).
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).
Religion was needed, but at some point logic and critical thinking should have been enough.
The issue is the wealthiest benefit when the masses don’t have the tools to use that. They want people who won’t question rules and blindly follow them.
Humans are just animals, we’re not born with those abilities, we need to be taught.
So we see education outright cut or forced to focus on rote memorization rather than the process to understand and figure shit out on our own.
We should be past religion as a species, but it’s not automatic, we have to continually teach the next generation to think for themselves
Just imagine what could have been done in the last 300 years if every dollar that was donated to churches went to some other cause, or back into the pockets of the masses. There is an immense amount of wealth that is trapped in the collective real estate, bank accounts, etc owned by churches. I’m not even talking about megachurches or the mormon’s giant stack of cash, just mom’n’pop little parishes that are everywhere across the US.
If ALL that money was still kicking around in the economy and in the pockets of people to spend on real things, building real businesses, etc…we’d be way better off.
Always makes me sad when I visit my in-laws who live in a particularly bible thumpy area and you go and there are spots there where churches outnumber normal businesses. It seems like it’s just a huge drain on the local economy devoting that much money into propping up churches of various kinds…
There’s a church across the street from my home in a small rural town in Oklahoma. It sits completely empty except for about 90 minutes from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM when about 6 cars pull up into the parking lot and maybe 15 people saunter in for Sunday service after ringing a loud bell announcing to the whole neighborhood. None of these attendees live in the neighborhood I might add.
There are literally dozens of other churches just like it throughout the town. It blows my mind that a religion that claims to be about spreading the love of their savior and saving as many people as possible from literal damnation would let a resource like that go unused. They could have volunteers there every day of the week helping to improve the community and help people in need but they couldn’t care less.
Churches do an immense amount of charity work and helping their communities.
Sometimes I mull over what state we’d be in as a society if instead of celebrating a man’s deeds we had been celebrating nature and the environment that hosts us since the beginning.
I can’t help but think there would be a lot less damage to the environment and less greed.
Obligatory George Carlin clip. https://youtu.be/iouZYYzQEjU
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/iouZYYzQEjU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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.
thrives on polarizing people in the name of religion
things have been like this for a long time, irrespective of the parties. but this has been going too far for the past two decades, especially after the current prime minister started his period.
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.
The American healthcare system.
Depends on how you define capitalism.
According to the modern (very intentionally altered) definition of capitalism,
“a system allowing the exchange of goods and services for currency, where different skill sets can result in different compensation”
… everything, including the USSR [1][2] has been capitalism. And even most Marxists are pro-capitalists.
The definition above encompasses everything that ever was, and everything that ever will be. (And that’s only a slight exaggeration)
Which – just fyi – makes the word one of the most useless words in the history of language.
If, however – just hypothetically – you wanted to have a productive dialogue with a self-described anti-capitalist, you would need to carry out the entire conversation pretending the word “capitalism” referred to something a hell of a lot more specific. A single mechanism within market society. A single kind of contractual relationship between worker and company.
Which is an exercise in imagination and in the algebraic concept of substitution that most people have a rather stubborn aversion to.
A hybrid system Whereby capitalism in a regulated form can go on pretty much as usual, but government run companies provide affordable alternatives for basic necessities (food, water, housing, communication, mass transit etc). The government run companies hire anyone who wants a job. Unemployment is reduced, cost of living is reduced, and no ones freedom is stepped on.
idk - only 63% of Americans support single-payer healthcare, nearly half of Americans still haven’t caught on at least
Homeopathy, acupuncture, ozone therapy… all “alternative medicines” basically.
Like the old joke, “What do you call alternative medicine that works?” “Medicine!”
If some herb, plant or extract has a proven effect it will be adopted by real medicine, and all that is left in alternative medicine is the scams that do not work.
You’re almost right. Modern medicine needs to synthesize natural compounds to profit fully from them. They can’t just use natural remedies and present them to patients because they can’t patent them.
I’m sure that’s a major part of it, but I also wouldn’t want to live in a world where we could only get aspirin from willow bark. We either wouldn’t have enough aspirin or we wouldn’t have any more willow trees. Medicines derived from the actual source aren’t possible on a global scale in most cases.
Capitalism is a blight on society and has lead to countless deaths. But in a utopia where money doesn’t exist and people create medicine for the world only to help people with no profit they still need to synthesize it.
There’s a slight gotcha here:
I’m in Asia and a lot of traditional chinese medicine you can buy is just regular medicine with a marketing disguise hiding the fact. Why yes, this is a box of whatever the fuck extract, very interesting, old northern recipe to cure the shit, let me just check what’s written on this paper, and, yep, there it is, it’s just Loperamide but with an additive to make it taste like Ginseng. Got it.
I worked for a medical clinic years ago.
One doctor was pushing natural hormone therapy.
I asked one of the other doctors. He wouldn’t touch it.
He told me he sees thousands of patients each year. Some number will get cancer, and some number of them will sue him.
If he prescribes a medication, he can defend himself by pointing to the medical studies showing the safety of the medication.
If he prescribes anything natural, there are no studies showing safety, because nobody can patent natural substances. Therefore there isn’t much money to be made, so nobody spends the money to do good studies.
Even if it was a miracle drug, he wouldn’t prescribe it.
He is wrong tho, natural substances can and are regularly patented when a use is found for them or a production method that’s better is discovered.
Medicine is any substance that has a demonstrable healthcare effect (demonstrated through double blind tests and not some rando’s anecdote). That includes natural substances.
To put it another way, medicine and natural substances are not two mutually exclusive (i.e. disjoint) sets, as you and/or your doctor friend appear to be implying.
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
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.
I have a pinched nerve. I went to many doctors, done many tests, went to months of PT and was still in pain. I went to my acupuncturist and she is able to release the muscles around the pinch enough that my right arm doesn’t feel constantly numb. I a man of science. I don’t believe in he Chi traveling my body etc but the physical result of the acuponcture cannot be denied.
And there are physical therapists who do acupuncture strictly for muscle release without all of the chi stuff.
Acupuncture has actually been shown to help in some cases beyond a placebo effect.
I feel the same about chiropractic - many people call bullshit, but I’ll be damned if they don’t help me. Like you, I don’t believe “your spine is where all your problems originate” like some chiropractics try to peddle, but the dude pushes on my back and it pops and it feels better.
My brother was in total kidney failure and his chiro said the pain was likely “toxins” released from his session. Utter quack. They arent all hacks, but they can do real damage. They can paralyze you for life or even worse. I hope you will not have firsthand experience
The issue with chiropractors is that they treat the symptom and not the cause. If your back is misaligned, it’s because your muscles are pulling on it the wrong way, the chiro will pull it back in place but now your muscles are still pulling the wrong way and they may have pulled on the muscle to make it move and may have injured it, now your muscle says hell no you don’t and starts pulling even more. It’s instant relief with little lasting result. which is a great business model, instant result and returning customers because the problem isn’t treated. It’s like going to the mechanic because your motor is out of oil but not trying to fix the leak so you come back every week to refill the oil.
The few things they do that are effective are better delivered by an evidence-based provider (e.g., physiotherapist, massage therapist) without the pseudoscience.
See an osteopath instead, in the UK at least, they are trained and regulated unlike chiropractors who regularly kill or permanently disable people with unsafe and inappropriate “manipulations”.
my statutory health insurance (germany) pays for acupuncture. so it seems to be proven that it works so well that they cover the costs for the treatment
It just depends how you define the chi.
One simple way might be “responsiveness”. Chi is present wherever your body is capable of receiving and transmitting information.
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.
Ponzi schemes, especially the insurance companies. They really are a Ponzi scheme.
Think about it, they promise you things asking for money, then when you need their services they decide where you go, how much they will pay (leaving the rest for you to pay as a deductible), then they turn around and increase your costs for their services, that they fight tooth and nail not to pay anything.
I argue insurance in and of itself is no ponzi scheme. Working together is the basis of all civilisation. Trying to make a business out of a social service however … that’s rife for abuse, yes.
Depends on how you define a Ponzi scheme. Personally I define it as pay us money in return for a service, then run with the money or come up with ways to deny that service, once again keeping the money or as much as possible by telling businesses how much they can charge for their services.
If I ran my own company, I would be damned if someone is going to dictate my prices to help their bottom line.
IMHO, that is what has caused health care cost to be untenable for someone who cannot afford health insurance or makes like $3 too much to qualify for the likes of Medicaid.
I work in the insurance industry and I 100% agree with this.
The only time it’s wise to take out an insurance policy is when
A) It’s legally required (though this is sometimes due to lobbying by the insurance companies themselves)
B) When you absolutely will not be able to actually pay for a potential, but necessary expense by yourself (cancer treatments and stuff like that)
So Health Insurance, Auto Insurance (even if your car is cheap and self-insurable, the car you hit may not be), Home-owners insurance and stuff like that are necessary and generally a good financial bet, even if they are crooked af.
Any “micro-insurances” though? All total scams. Travel insurance, phone insurance (or “Extended Warranties”), Apple Care, all that kind of shit is 100% going to cost you more money to have than it’ll save you - unless you get really really lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it). You’d be better off spending what you’d pay on those insurance premiums on a hand of blackjack, I’ll bet the odds would be slightly more in your favor that way
Ugh my parents both insist on travel insurance. What if you get sick?? Idk, I’ll cancel the stuff I can and take the loss on what I can’t, for all the travel I’ve done the amount of times that has happened does not even remotely come close to how much I would have paid each time for travel insurance.
No mom, I’m not going to insure our 2 night stay at the Hilton in (mid sized city). I’m sure it’s going to be fine.
Last time I did was for a very very expensive flight across an ocean, just because it was like, 15 dollars on a 2000 flight for a few people. Fine, but everything else we took the risk. (And we did not use it)
Travel insurance is especially terrible, because a lot of the time it’s a pretty substantial premium, and actually filing a claim on it is a HUGE PITA.
I worked for a traveler insurance company before, and we denied most claims that came in. People would buy insurance on a $100 concert ticket, paying a $10 premium for the insurance, then when they’d go to file the claim, we’d require a doctors note, so now they also have to cough up a $20 copay and a whole afternoon just to get a note saying “yup, this person is sick”. And that’s just one of the many ways people got fleeced. During COVID, a lot of travel insurance claims got denied because illnesses resulting from pandemics aren’t covered in some policies as well
Thanks for your input, it helps not make me sound like a conspiracy theorist or anti-biz whack job
nothing conspiracy theorist about it at all. If anyone gives you sideways looks when you mention that insurance is a scam, just point out the very simple and undeniable fact that insurance companies are (very) profitable. That means, by definition that the average customer pays more in premiums than they get in payouts, and not just a bit more, a lot more, as that profit they make is after they pay their thousands of employees, award multi-million dollar bonuses to their executives, pay for their bigass skyscrapers, and all that other shit. If insurance was a “fair” deal, they’d be losing money from the administration costs
Always self-insure if you can afford it
Travel insurance is my big one. Why would you not get that? That seems like such a stupid risk not to get that.
Like if I get hit by a car in the middle of nowhere and they got to fly my home because the medical care there sucks. That’s going to cost an absolute fortune. Even having to send my dead body home will cost my family loads.
Why would you not get that? That seems like such a stupid risk not to get that.
Pretty much for all the reasons I said in my comment - you’ll almost certainly spend more on premiums for travel insurance than you’ll ever claim (this is true of all insurance) and the expenses incurred by self-insuring are generally manageable. Even in the two situations you refer to, we’re “only” talking about costs of a few thousand, and both of those are highly unlikely events that most people go their whole lives not dealing with. you’re much better off putting the money you’d spend on that travel insurance into an emergency fund to cover those kinds of unexpected expenses.
Insurance is only a good financial call if you risk completely bankrupting yourself by not having insurance, otherwise you’re just trading potential lump sum costs for small continuous costs, and the premiums will generally always wind up being more than what you’re saving (because if they weren’t, then the Insurance companies wouldn’t be making so much money).
That being said, it’s your money, if you’d rather accept that you’re paying more over a lifetime on travel insurance than you’re saving just to have the peace of mind that you won’t have to dip into savings for any incident that happens before or during the trip (assuming your incident doesn’t fall under one of the many carefully crafted exclusions that the insurance companies add to their policies to prevent paying out, which it probably will), then by all means, buy it - but if you’re buying it because you think it’s the financially savy move, and you have at least a few grand in your bank account for emergencies, then you’re kidding yourself.
I got travel insurance recently for a hiking trip with my wife. We had an emergency and my wife had to be airlifted out by helicopter, and we were so glad to have the travel insurance because it covers emergency evacuation up to $10,000 (and the helicopter costed around $5,000). Awesome, right?
Well… actually no. Turns out, the terms of our policy dictate we needed to call insurance first and have them organize the airlift. Since we dialed 911 and organized the helicopter ourselves, our insurance won’t cover it. I guess it’s my fault for not reading the fine print, but it feels pretty scummy from the insurance company. Even if we had read the fine print, in the moment I don’t think I would have remembered as my immediate instinct is to contact emergency services.
That’s not a Ponzi scheme. Sorry, but this misuse of the term really grinds my gears.
A Ponzi scheme is a specific scam promoted as an investment, but in reality the payouts made to early victims come from the incoming money paid by new investors.
Oh my god, thank you so much! I’m glad I’m not the only one that sees it. They get money, they invest that money in pension funds, and then they try not to pay that back. The only things stopping it from being one legally are some slight changes such as the investment part and the part where they pay back to people in need, not people at the top.
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.
My personal conspiracy theory is that almost all art the public is exposed to is a forgery. Why show the plebs the real thing? We wouldn’t notice a difference anyway.
Maybe whenever you hear those stories about a famous work of art being stolen and later recovered, they’ve actually just stolen the forgery and the galley just puts up a new fake one.
The robbers then can’t sell it because they have a worthless fake and the ‘real’ one is clearly on display in the gallery, and they can’t expose the fraud because then they’d out themselves and go to jail.
The perfect scam!
