What's a scam that's so normalized that we don't even realize it's a scam anymore?

Chiropractors.

Even though this is top comment, this is an underrated answer.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/chiropractor-neck-adjustment-caitlin-jensen-b2363357.html
People always chime in with stories about how chiropractors helped them with XY and Z problem they were having.
And overall I don't doubt them. There's a lot of things that can go wrong with your spine or other joints, and I'm certain that some of them can be addressed by physically manipulating and adjusting it.
But the basic premise of chiropractic treatments is that basically all human ailments can be fixed in that way, which should sound like total bullshit to anyone with half a brain. And that's before you get into all spiritual nonsense that pervades a lot of the field.
Now some of them understand that that's a load of bullshit and may even be realistic about the things they can treat, but it can be pretty damn hard to sort them out from the ones who think that your pancreatic cancer is caused by ghosts in your spine and they know how to get them out or some bullshit like that.
Now if you have a good idea what your issue is and what needs to be done to fix it, take the time to carefully vet your chiropractor to make sure they're not going to try some crazy bullshit on you, you very well may be able to get a decent treatment from them. Maybe you'll even be able to save some money going with that.
But for most of us who aren't doctors and so only have kind of vague ideas what exactly the issue is and that the treatments we're doing actually make any sense, and don't necessarily have time to do all of that research and carefully vet that the person treating them isn't secretly a quack, you could just get the same sort of treatments from actually physical therapists, orthopedists, physiatrists, etc. with the added benefit of them actually understanding the issues and how to fix them properly.
Chiropractors are kind of like the rednecks of the medicine world. Some of them know exactly what they're doing with that harbor freight welder, they may not do things by the book but they know for certain what works and what doesn't and more importantly know when something is beyond what them and their buddies can accomplish on a free Saturday with a case of beer and when they need to suck it up and limp their truck to the shop and let a professional deal with it. Others know just enough to be dangerous and while they can get the job done 90% of the time or at least not make things worse, that 10% of the time something is literally going to blow up in someone's face. And still others are just meth heads looking to make a quick buck and it's a miracle they're not behind bars. And when you see them hanging around the local watering hole, it may not be totally clear which is which until it's too late.
The entire industry is built on catering to the vast swaths of women who get ignored by doctors and need somewhere to turn.
I highly suspect doctors are taught in medical school, "women are over emotional and prone to exaggeration."
Hell, "hysteria" was considered a valid diagnosis until the 1950s.
- This guy gets it. Chiropractors are a scam, but scammers are drawn to people who "fall through the cracks" because they're treated like their problems don't actually exist. Finally, they meet someone who takes their pain seriously. It's too bad the person who takes it "seriously" is a fucking charlatan.
  It falls harder on women, who have more instances of pain that are ignored by the medical community, partially from the history mentioned above, claiming women must be experiencing "hysteria."
  It absolutely happens because of the failings of the medical community.
- I was suffering from hyperemisis last year and it took 3 doctors before I finally found one to take me seriously, which I consider it lucky it only took 3. The last doc I was practically on my hands and knees begging them to take me seriously.
  In the middle of all that I also ended up with pneumonia. Normally I never get sick so I was like wtf is going on. But anyways, a doctor finally took some chest x rays and 2 weeks later they call to tell me that my X-ray was clear. I. Went. Off. I ended up having to go to the ER 2 days after the doctor visit because I could no longer breathe, it was so painful. How is it possible that my x ray was clear??? Then another week goes by and the assistant calls to tell me that I do have pneumonia and a prescription has been sent in. I just hung up and filed complaints with everyone I could. That office was a hot mess.
Also homeopathy.
Not all chiropractors are the same, but not knowing who's who is dangerous
- There are physical therapists who know the actual manipulations that work and use them as needed for treatment. It's the best of both worlds.

Private health insurance is the biggest fucking scam ever. The private insurance companies benefit by getting the aggregate healthiest population into their plans (working adults). The most likely to be expensive people, i.e. old people (on medicare) or poor people (on medicaid, or not even on an insurance plan) are on government, tax payer insurance plans. There is literally no reason except for corporate profiteering that Medicare should not be expanded to cover all people.

Also all those conversations, especially in the 2020 election period, were totally bullshit. You say something like M4A will cost 44 trillion dollars or whatever, which sounds like an insane amount of money. What is often left out of the discussion is that estimated cost was 1) over 10 years and 2) has to be weighed against the current costs we already pay for insurance. So the deal was very simple: the overall costs would go down because the overall spending would be less, and at the same time millions of people without coverage would be covered, and at the same time you don't have to contemplate stupid bullshit like in network, out of network providers. Or ever again talk to your insurance about why something is or isn't covered. Boils my blood when I think too much about this.

Not even gonna weigh in on things like how medicare can't negotiate prescription drug prices (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/23/us/politics/medicare-drug-price-negotiations-lawsuits.html), or how dental, vision, and hearing are treated separately from general healthcare, or how med school is prohibitively expensive, or how the residents after med school are overworked because the guy who institutionalize that practice was literally a cokehead. Those are all just bonus topics. The point is we are getting fleeced.

Welcome to the US
Private insurance (for the average person) in general is dumb. We have a collective need to insure various things against disaster, and realistically the federal government shells out huge amounts for most disasters anyways (after the so called insurance companies go bankrupt).
So why the heck are we paying a premium for all of the overhead of the insurance companies?! It's this massive inefficient system that doesn't work, while the "government as insurance" system works great, and doesn't require nearly as much overhead. There's no room for private sector insurance to inovate, because there's nothing to inovate on; IMO, the private insurance industry contributes nothing of value to society except jobs that it pays for by forcing everyone to engage with it.
The insurance industry in general is betting you'll be fine, and you're betting "maybe I won't." It's extra bad for medicine because they stick their head even into the small stuff, not just "I need a 10,000 unexpected hospital bill covered."
Probably gonna anger both sides here, but I see both private insurance and single-payer healthcare as equally-evil scams. Why not focus on driving down costs of healthcare (i.e. EVERYTHING) so that you throw a couple bucks at the receptionist to cover your surgery then check to see if you have enough for a post-surgery soda?
- One of the objectives of single-payer is to drive down the costs of healthcare by eliminating the overhead of an insurance bureaucracy. There are other aspects that can be considered like nationalizing hospitals to eliminate private run, for-profit hospitals. People like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCA_Healthcare are just as responsible for the high per-capita costs of healthcare we pay as are the insurance companies. And I agree with you, they shouldn't be getting a guaranteed government handout.

The stock market and publicly traded companies. The idea that a business that is making consistent profits isn't good unless those profits are increased each quarter is asinine. This system of shortsighted hyper focus on short term quarterly growth for the sake of growth is the cause of so much pain and suffering in the world. Even companies with amazing financials will work to push workers compensation down, cut corners and exploit loopholes to make sure their profits are always growing. Consistent large profits aren't good enough.

Instapot. Instapot made too good of a product, most people buy one and its good for years. That's good for consumers but terrible for investors. The company that bought them out and took them public saddled them with a ton of debt from other sectors and now they're bankrupt.
- Diamond Sports is suing Sinclair for doing the same, minus the "good product" part.
  Sinclair bought up the Fox RSNs a few years back, renaming the company as Diamond Sports and the channels as Bally Sports. Not too long afterwards, they went bankrupt. Diamond is claiming that Sinclair has saddled them with massive debts and extraordinarily high management fees. Sinclair also kept the funds from the sponsorship agreement with Bally.
  https://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bs-bz-sinclair-broadcast-sued-by-diamond-sports-20230722-ndvdj6btfreovbsyo7gk7eeony-story.html
  The lawsuit accuses Sinclair of receiving about $1.5 billion as a result of alleged misconduct, including fraudulent transfers of assets, unlawful distributions and payments, breaches of contracts, unjust enrichment and breaches of fiduciary duties.
  “Diamond Sports Group is seeking to vindicate its rights and protect the value of the Diamond bankruptcy estate, including by recovering value from Sinclair Broadcast Group that was improperly transferred from Diamond prior to its filing for bankruptcy in March 2023,” a spokesperson for Diamond said in a statement.
If you invest in the stock market and expect companies to be making large profits all the time then you're going to be very disappointed. That's not how it works. There are financial reports, market regulators, analysts. History tells us that awful companies with shady practices would always get caught in the end, no matter how big they are.
Everyone should invest, but investors should always do their research.
- This is not about small-time regular Joe investors, but about large institutional ones, who do exert pressure on companies to deliver strong profits and/or growth.
- A bad quarter isn't what this is about. It's about the idea that constant percentage growth is good or realistic. Any stock with flat growth over a decade will not be a good long-term investment. Your comment proves the point here.
I think a major problem with the stock market is the lack of long term planing. And we see that clearly with what's happened to Boeing with their planes falling apart

My personal top 3:

insurance
subscriptions
Google and similar data hungry companies (while not a financial scam but moreso a privacy scam, companies like Google and Meta profiteering on our personal data without our knowledge or awareness)

I was really surprised when I shipping forwarder I use after I upgraded from the "free" tier to the $10/month tier to save a few hundred dollars of state taxes, when I downgraded back to their "free" tier five days later once the package was out of their hands, the answer was "Your subscription will end at the end of your current paid month"
I expected worse
Yup, BandCamp all the way. Once you buy a song you own it, you can play it anywhere you darn well please. Even if BandCamp goes under, no worries, still got my music.
Same with DVDs. Yeah, I've definitely gotten movies I regret purchasing, but I think long-term it's more economical.

Car based infrastructure

the stock market

capitalism

Unregulated capitalism imo. I don't buy the idea I've seen around here that capitalism itself is the problem and switching to communism would solve all the problems. Both are systems that have merit, but when left unchecked all the power and money will go to the few, like we have now.
- If by "have merit" you mean "has some positive aspects", sure. Every system has merit. Slavery had merit (slave owners got cheap cotton). The Holocaust had merit (antisemites felt better). The issue is weighing the merit against the negatives. You can't just say two systems have positive aspects and call it a day.
  Are you a fan of democracy or authoritarianism? Capitalism is a system where productive forces are driven undemocratically, in the name of profit instead of by worker democracy. The commodification of everything exists in a world of private property:
  our bodies (labor power)
  our thoughts (intellectual property)
  the specific ordering of bits on a hard drive you own (digital media, DRM)
  the means of production (which exist as a result of collective knowledge, infrastructure, and labor)
  These things being commodified and privatized are ridiculous in any democratic, non-capitalist system.
  However, these ridiculous conditions are absolutely necessary in a capitalist society. Without them the system falls apart. And as society continues to progress, the situation gets more and more ridiculous.
  What about when AI "takes away" jobs for 50% of Americans (as in capitalists fire humans in favor of AI)? That'll collapse our society. Less work would be a good thing in any reasonable system, but not in capitalism. Less work is an existential threat to our society.
  If we ever have an AI that is as capable as humans are intellectually, the only work left for us will be manual labor. If that happens, and robots get to the point of matching our physical abilities, we won't be employable anymore. The two classes will no longer be owners and workers, they'll be owners and non-owners. At that point we better have dismantled capitalism, because if we don't then we'll just be starving in the street, along with the millions who die every year from starvation under the boot of global capitalism.
- IMO American style capitalism is completely broken, but that’s not the only way to run your economy and still call it capitalism. Particularly in the EU area companies don’t always have the upper hand. Consumers and employees have the kinds of rights Americans can only dream of.
  Don’t really know much about communism, but clearly USSR didn’t survive, and that may have something to do with the system. ML-people here can probably tell me how China, Cuba and other communist countries are doing today.
A lot of people are saying Capitalism. Is it straight up capitalism that is the scam or the myth of financial mobility? (the American dream)
- There's a lot of trouble with definitions regarding capitalism. (I'd call them intentional since muddying the waters serves the people who benefit from our current system.)
  Pick any person who is complaining about "capitalism" right now.
  If you proposed a system where everything was structured the same as it is right now, HOWEVER instead of shareholders and owners possessing companies, every, single company was a worker cooperative (owned and controlled by its workers) then I am 95% sure the anti-capitalist you picked would
  Not consider that capitalism, and
  Vastly prefer that over what we have right now
  With some minor variation. (Tankies don't think it's possible to maintain such a system without monopolizing violence. Anarcho-communists wouldn't be too happy about the scope and financial power of state and federal governments, and would seek to pare them down. Democratic socialists would think it was perfect. Little disagreements like that.)
  But I think most other people (people who aren't anti-capitalists) would think "that's just a form of capitalism" if I described the above.
  In fact, if I said,
  A free market system, but ownership and control of the means of production is only allowed collectively and democratically. No shareholders allowed, no transferable individual ownership allowed.
  Most ordinary people would consider that a form of capitalism. (Even though calling it capitalism is, technically, highly inaccurate). So it's a difficult conversation to have. Because most "anti-capitalists" disagree with most "pro-capitalists" on the basic definition of what they are fighting or defending.
  I'm actually convinced that a lot of "pro-capitalists" are more eager to defend the free market system than they are to defend transferable, stock-marketable, individual ownership of the means of production. I think they would compromise on the latter if they could safeguard the former.

Unpaid overtime.

Framing "fulfilling your contract" as "silent quitting".

In what other context would be "delivering what's in the contract" anything less than satisfactory?

When I buy a litre of milk and the box contains exactly a litre of milk it isn't "silent stealing" either.

Unpaid overtime is usually illegal too. Highly depends on your position though. A lot of software engineers are marked as exempt when they shouldn't be.
- The annoying thing is, depending on your job and financial situation, it hardly matters whether it's illegal or not. I'm not talking about my comfortable situation as a software engineer, but rather people working crap jobs and not having alternatives.
  If you know, you'll be out of work for longer if you get fired, you basically cannot report any illegal stuff your employer is doing.

Religion. Whole cloth.

- Religions promise anything and everything but don't actually provide anything in return for time or money invested. It's the very definition of a scam.
  It's no different than supplement scams or homeopathic pills.
- Anti-theist, thank you. Kill your god.
- What exactly is religion not as a business?
- I think it’s the opposite of what you’re saying (mostly bad, with some good apples), and in my years and years in and around all sorts of church’s it’s been the opposite - the good ones stand out, can get persecuted for it, and have an uphill battle ahead of them.
  The system is set up in a way that the Leadership and participants would have to actively push against it in order to not be exercising power over others inappropriately. The Bible makes the promises: invest 10% of your income to the church, listen to the men in charge, obey your husband.
- That would just be a life philosophy like Stoicism. Religion implies there are non falsifiable beliefs involved.
- If the wisdoms are wrong or sub optimal, but the followers treat them as dogmatic then its an issue.
Username checks out.

Wedding rings/diamonds in general.

The tradition isn't as old as people think and was literally started by a jewelry company to sell more jewelry. Specifically diamonds, which are not as rare as commonly believed and if not for the false scarcity and misinformation, would be dirt cheap.

Tipping in restaurants…pay the workers.

First Past the Post voting at elections.

Approval Voting and multi-winner districts let's gooooooo!
A great alternative is majority judgment!
Welcome to Canada.
- I'm still salty about that broken Liberal promise to reform our elections. None of the parties care about it and it seems no one wants to try to change it.
What country? In my country everyone knows that's a scam.
- UK
  We had a referendum and people voted to keep the scam.
- USA

Professors requiring their own, expensive textbook for their course.

Windows. You pay ~100€ just to give your personal data to MS and get a bloated OS that will use all of your resources. Even MacOS is a more fair deal than this.

Dollar stores. A lot of the time they are profiting by selling you a smaller quantity at a slightly lower price. They target low income communities.

- At this rate, toothpaste will soon be sold in tiny single-use tubes.
- Just on a slightly grander scale. I feel like it's malicious in a different way. Instead of tricking the unaware consumer into thinking they are getting the same product they are getting people to buy what they can now whether it's due to distance or price
Exactly. It's the opposite of the Costco model.
Absolutely targeted towards people who can't afford regular sized/priced items, let alone bulk-for-discount.
I mean yeah, obviously they're profitable. It's the convenience though. Sometimes they have good deals if you don't want to buy a giant pack of something.
- Or can’t afford a giant pack, so you get poorer value. Being poor is expensive

Car dealerships. They are awful on purpose. In many places car manufacturers are not legally allowed to sell their cars directly to customers, in order to create what is essentially legally mandated car dealerships, which all suck.

Cars in general are a scam
My younger coworker was just super stoaked that he only paid $3000 over MSRP for his new car. They gave him a year of oil changes and undercoat for free though!
- Yeesh.
  Man, I am so tired of feeling broke all the time... But I'd still rather get a used car than do that.
- Back when many of these laws were created, car manufacturers were way worse than franchise dealerships for the consumer.
- There are ways to do that that don't include a middleman that tries to legally swindle customers

Capitalism and the 5 day 9 to 5 work week

Usually 8-5 with an hour lunch break
- Yeah I never understood why it's called the 9-to-5

Diamonds.

This is pretty common knowledge these days.
- I didn't know it.
  For my enlightenment, can you tell me how a diamonds monetary worth is properly established so I can check if I'm to pay overprice?

Tipping

Private health insurance.

Banks.

Homes as wealth-creators.

Americans take it as received wisdom that homes are meant to generate income through higher valuations over time. We just assume home prices go up over time and if it's not actively increasing in value, the home was a failure.

Many other countries don't treat homes this way. They are dwellings, invest what you want to your liking, but it's not a retirement account.

This focus on wealth generation creates lots of perverse incentives, such as exclusionary zoning, building on lots that are overly large, and suburban sprawl. These don't reflect people's actual, desired form of housing but rather maximize wealth for homeowners at the expense of everyone else.

We have a completely warped view of housing that causes us to be preyed upon by real estate agents, landlords, HOAs and the like.

Insurance (am American)

British royal family.

Religions that collect money from adherents.

Web 2.0 data harvesting.

Why do people think this?
Some coins shouldn't be in the game, but overall crypto has good reasons to exist.
First of all, I don't like my bank because they don't pass on value. Crypto carries its value around all by itself.
Secondly, I don't want PayPal, or anyone like them, to pass on money that could have just been crypto.
- Crypto were a good idea on paper, they could have rid us of centralized banks and provide fully anonymous transactions, instead we got massive exchanges that require your identity to do anything, massive speculation, money laundry, ponzi schemes and GPU shortages.
  At this point I don't even care anymore about what it could have been, fuck crypto.

Real estate agents getting 6% commission from the seller.

Printer inkt. In our shop people are still buying them for a way to high price…

Epson is running the market hard with their EcoTank printer. I've seen one litre bottles for less than €50.
If not, go for refurbished/refilled cartridges.
I still remember the fun of refilling old HP cartridges for a dime a dozen.

Then stop selling it???

Bank fees

I see you have no money... I'm going to have to charge you for that
They are exceptionally shitty for cash accounts since they are absolutely using the money for their own profit.
If everyone took out all their liquid cash, the bank would crash (see; recent events.)
- I don't know if it is quite as simple as that. Most recently the bank failures were because those banks got upside down on bond holdings due to rate increases. If everyone chilled out and took their money out in appropriate time, then the bank would have had all the money. They just couldn't get all the money immediately due to the duration of their bond holdings.
My bank wanted my to pay to have an account. I asked why and the answer was some bullshit about having access to their expertise on growing wealth. I told them, I would be growing wealth more quickly if I didn't have to pay monthly fees, canceled my account and took my money to a bank that doesn't charge for a basic money dump account.
It's ridiculous, banks make money by investing the trusted money of their customers. Why would I need to pay them in order to let them make money. They should pay me.
- Credit unions are a much better option.

This is the third post I’ve seen on Lemmy recently where people seem to overwhelmingly think the word “scam” just means “something I don’t like”. To be a scam, something needs to be dishonest in its representation, usually either by falsifying the true cost to the buyer, or lying about what is being provided in return.

Homeopathy?

Is it normalized? I very rarely hear anyone taking homeopathic medicine or advocating for it. But I live in Norway, so maybe this is a thing elsewhere?
- I agree that I never ear anyone I know tell me they use it, but they are sold in every drug store here in Canada so people must buy them, otherwise they would be bankrupt.
  Maybe there's better examples. Maybe glasses. Like 500$ for plastic. More people are buying online though these days.
- It is very normalized in the south of Germany, but generally Germany is very pro homeopathy so so it is even subsided by the public health care system.
- Have you ever seen stuff like Occillococcinum or anything made by company Boiron? They don't advertise it as homeopathy, so even if you saw a homeopathic sugar pill you wouldn't necessarily know. That's a part of the scam
- In Germany, a lot of medicine can only be sold in very regulated apothecaries. Those stores are allowed to recommend and sell homeopathy. There's even a state-exam for homeopath. Though for that you only have to demonstrate you won't kill your patients, not that you can actually help.

Credit scores

Capitalism and religion, easily the top two scams.

Your ISP is suddenly asking for more money. What are you gonna do? Disconnect from the internet?

The ISP have probably made careful calculations of how much they can increase the price before people start looking for alternative ISPs. So if we could collectively lower our thresholds to look for alternatives, we could probably achieve lower prices.
- Here's what happens. Say you have three businesses providing roughly the same service in your area. They know you are going with one of them.
  If they compete too much on price is a race to the bottom. There's a point at which one or more companies are losing money to compete. The ones with deeper pockets starve everyone else out then start raising prices.
  Now, let's assume these three are the ones that made it.
  They are not allowed to collude on price. That's illegal, they would be acting like a monopoly. Can't have that so they passed a law.
  What's allowed? Publishing your pricing online. What's crazy is the other companies can see this so it's kind of light all three can still meet and compare pricing.
  Because of this, you'll be paying about the same no matter where you go. You might be able to find a reseller that provides the connection but no real service. That's fine, but most people aren't using that.
  You might find services bundled with other services like a mobile phone plan, tv packages, etc. That's even worse since they call use "price confusion" to make it look like price diversity but no one is letting anyone else eat their lunch.
  All of this should be yelling at you full volume that this business is a de facto monopoly so therefore should be regulated heavily or run as a government utility.
- That only works in a competitive market. A lot of places, even in the developed world, have just a single provider in some of the areas people live in outside of major cities. And even in major cities there’s often not enough competition to find reasonably cheap internet, all the prices are within stone throw of each other. Essential utilities being privatized is a scam, especially when infra is funded by the public dollar.
- And different towns can be charged wildly different amounts for the same service
I've somehow been stealing internet from my ISP for like 2 years.
So I moved in to my new apartment. Go down to the local ISP monopoly's physical store and pick up a modem so I can just plug it in and not wait for a tech or anything. They tell me since it's been over 5 years since my address was connected they have to send a tech out anyway. Fine. But they let me pay my first month's service and give me the modem.
Well I get home and plug it in. It works perfectly. Call the ISP and tell them to cancel the tech appointment, they say no problem. An hour later my account to login to the ISP's website is made inactive. In the next few days I get a full refund for what I paid.
So I figure I'll call them once my internet stops working and resubscribe. But it has never stopped working. I keep getting mailings from them with deals to sign up for internet. They even knocked on my door once to try to sell me it.
- This is a dangerous game you're playing (despite the Robinhood like dynamic -- trust me I hate ISPs too, though I will say AT&T fiber has been quite reasonable). You can be sued for all the lost payments plus interest, and likely will be when/if they find out.
  It's the same thing as getting an unexpected raise on your paystub, if it's in error and a reasonable person would believe it's in error, they're within their legal right to take the money back.
That depends only on the competition.
20 years ago I payed €65 for 4Mbps. Now I m paying €25 for 200Mbps + a landline with unlimited local calls + an android box (that I use for PLEX and retro gaming) that provides 50+ channels through an app.That was the last renewal.
I also switched my cell provider. I used to pay €42 for unlimited calls, SMS and Data. Now I pay €25 for the whole package.
You could switch to any of their dozen or so competitors.
- Hugely location dependent.

Printer Ink and paying companies like Google and Spotify, who still collect your data as a paid customer.

Paying Spotify and still getting adverts.
At that point I decided that Spotify wasn't for me anymore.
- You get ads?

Cars=freedom

Capitalism

The notion that capitalism is the end-all be-all of how society functions/works.

- I didn't mean it like that. My comment was about how a lot of billionaires, governments and politicians seem to believe that capitalism is the only system that can ever exist in a civilized society, and how there can be no alternative (some prominent influential figures that held this belief or something similar were/are Larry Kudlow, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Ronald Reagan).
  There's also the fact about how in the 20th and 21st century there was a significant effort to undermine any alternative ideologies in the western liberal democratic world. The various anti-red campaigns by the US, Thatcherism that destroyed the significance of unions in order to completely remove any possibility of a revolution (and turn workers into free-market commodities), there was also this very recent event in 2021 where during Rosa Luxemburg peaceful memorial event in Germany, police suddenly came up to disrupt it, presenting false motives.
  There might be something better, a society or a system that serves the many instead of the few, but such non-capitalist system would go against the interests of the rich and the ruling elite, so there's an active heavy pushback against it. Even when it comes to politics, the political left is definitely outnumbered at least in my country rather than political parties that lean to the center or the right, which are the parties that keep the status quo or even strengthen the elites further.
  I'm approaching this from a leftist point of view, and my arguments are probably not perfect, but at least that's how I see it. Capitalism is definitely better for people than Monarchy/Aristocracy, but it could definitely be much better for the people.
- Like democracy, it's the best bad answer.

Shampoo: Washing away the natural oils in our hair, causing the body to produce them in higher volume, causing our hair to get greasy, creating a need for shampoo.

Recycling: Only about 10% of plastic is actually recycled, the rest is sold to countries without environmental laws, and they are dumped irresponsibly. Composting is simple, effective, and would reduce landfill use by about 30%, not to mention creating a useful end product. Yet it is rarely promoted.

Mattresses and box springs: They are worse on our spines and end up causing neck and back issues. Sleeping on a firmer surface, even a thin mattress or pad on the ground, alleviates these issues.

Lawns: Turning a useful piece of land on which we can grow food into a barren wasteland and making it into a chore that requires expensive equipment and encourages chemical use.

Sales tax on food: Some countries and US states have them. It's a tax on existence. Also, taxes on gym memberships and personal protective equipment. The government simultaneously claims it wants healthy, safe citizens, and charges them when they try to be healthy and safe.

Airlines charging for seat selection. I remember the days when that was just a right you got for "free" by purchasing the ticket 🤷

Diamond Scarcity

The way mobile providers charge. The likes of Vodafone, any random Telecom, T-Mobile and so forth. It's a huge scam, bordering theft sometimes. Want samples? Here we go:

"Your credit expires in x days. Better recharge now to not lose it!" (Banks should start doing this /s)

"Your credit has expired. Better give us more money within our generous deadline, or else we are forced to delete your number. We love you."

"Your data has expired. We now charge you a horrendous amount every minute, because we are too greedy to warn you in time. For technical reasons we also cannot stop you from using data after your allowance has been used. Fortunately you still have credit, huh?"

"Your data expires today. We don't insult your intelligence by telling you when. Surely you remember when you bought the package, right? It's not hard to count 24 hours. We also do not send any SMS anymore to save the environment."

"Your data has expired. You need data to buy a new bundle. Our app charges data for our convenience."

"Social media data only works for WhatsApp, but not for Signal. But who uses Signal anyways?"

"Use our customer friendly support chat. Conveniently it uses data. 'Hello, I am your smart bot speaking. How can I help you? I might understand you if you type one of the three questions I have been programmed to answer. Do you want to know more about our products?'"

Edit: added point 2, minor corrections for clarity

Is this some kind of prepaid nightmare? I'm across the pond, and what you're describing sounds vaguely familiar. But it was almost half a lifetime ago that I turned 18 and switched to unlimited postpaid.
- They all copy the "best" ideas from their international arms and their competitors
  It's a tight run race to the bottom
I've never prepaid my phone by credit. Anytime I prepaid a phone it was an unlimited monthly deal. Eventually I switched to post pay and it's about the same. Either way it's fairly cheap for me.

competition. You like Brand A? and dislike Brand B? both are owned by C

Printers

In-game shops

DLCs: Games are expected to have DLCs nowadays, so game devs purposefully hold back some ideas for potential DLCs, often crippling the main game as a result.

Subscription services: For pretty much anything, but especially those automated monthly payments, which you won't bother cancelling, even if you feel like you're not using the service to its fullest.

Lemmy just made a suggestion

Block chain - there's still no legitimate practical use for it

capitalism

Asking this question every single week.

Herbalife, fucking herbalife.

This weekend, I went into what looked like an indie smoothie shop and dropped an ungodly amount of money on a delicious sounding shake... only to watch the lady drop a scoops of powder and ONE freeze-dried strawberry into a cup with ice. Tasted like ass.

Yet they do have regulars to that shit, and nobody is taking them out of business. I want my fucking $11 back. So anyone reading this doing a class action against Herbalife, I want in...

But I doubt it, since it's a scam that's so normalized we don't realize it's a scam anymore.

The gop

- I also just really hate the idea of applying financial logic to something like this. Like, are we just gonna go and label the entire human race as a Ponzi scheme? Grandpa's not able to pull his weight lately so fuck him? That's a rhetorical question, obviously. The reality is that old people are going to cost what they cost and everyone else just has to suck it up because the alternative is way uglier.

Video games having microtransactions and "chests" or otherwise with random rewards.

Chiropractic.

I'd wager fewer than 25% of Americans know that it's quackery invented in the 1890s.

In the past few years I've seen "turns out printer ink is a scam" videos trending at least three times on YouTube, so I'm assuming printer ink.

I'll try to list things that aren't in the typical internet echo chamber. Bring on the controversy. These are just my opinions.

50% of the shelf space at the grocery store is just different forms of corn syrup, sometimes with some trans fat mixed in, generationally twisting our idea of what food is in a race to the cheapest, most addictive product.

The only way it's profitable for someone to knock on your door to sell ANYTHING is if they are obscenely inflating the price (think 100-600% markup)

Most supplements, especially expensive ones with TV ads

Dr Scholl's and the goodfeet store

Genuine leather is just about the opposite of what you'd think

Bamboo fabric which is pretty much just a different way to say rayon but is pitched as a revolutionary and environmentally friendly cloth

Most bladeless fans just hide fan blades in the base

Many cleaning products don't do better than diluted soap and water (even for sanitizing) especially the ones with TV ads

Financial planners who are actually financial product salespeople

Most single-purpose kitchen gadgets, especially as-seen-on-TV

The realtors racket: I just paid $30k for an internet posting and mediocre advice

Many personal hygiene products are just repackaging the same two or three active ingredients by the same one or two megacorporations

Essential oils (even ignoring mystical claims) big names charge an order of magnitude higher than they should

The internet.

And no I don't mean every single part of it. But somewhere along the line there became an expectation that the internet be free. That continued for sites that rapidly grew well beyond the point where it was reasonable for them to be maintained for free, but instead of a natural progression where we pay for things we use, we simply became the product of the internet at large in the form of data about every aspect of our lives.

We now live and exist in a world where very little of what we do is private in any way, our preferences and relationships and tendencies are digitized and correlated and used against us largely without our active, conscious knowledge. And it's all so Gmail, Facebook, and YouTube can be free. Or rather..."free".

It has always felt like the biggest scam ever to me, that everything I do and think online should be bought and sold without me really ever having much of a chance to have a say in that.

This contrasts interestingly with the current top comment, Subscriptions.
- I think people's feelings about subscriptions are warped. There's been a very popular take here on Lemmy lately towards piracy and not paying people for their work, and it's annoying to say the least (especially contrasting it with how they deserve to be paid for what they do).
  Things that don't actively have operating costs, e.g. a text editor, I think it makes sense to be traditional purchases. However, things that do require ongoing expenses, be it live service games, lemmy servers, news organizations, etc, these things need money to function, and funding them with our data is not making the world a better place.
  Considering advertisers expect to make money off their ads, and seem to have the data to back that up, I'm going to assume (on average) free services sure aren't saving folks money either.
Yup, I increasingly pay for things to not be a part of that system anymore, Proton, Kagi, B2 Cloud storage, Standard Notes, Ars Technica, The Atlantic, NYTimes, The Akron Beacon Journal, Feedly, Last.fm, Todoist, Telegram, Privacy while donating to things like KDE, Dark Reader, Lemmy, the EFF, Sunshine, the RuneScape wiki (and that's just Internet related stuff).
I'm grateful that things were free as a kid, because I had no money to pay for them, and I think that is something these services should account for. However, now that I'm an adult, I think there's an obligation to make sure the things I use and want to exist receive funding (and don't need to turn to selling my data).

Giving money to politicians.

I agree with this so much. Political parties should just be given one tv ad and one pamphlet. Only allowed to talk about their own policies and nothing else. Exclusively government funded. Any extra donations and you're no longer representing the people's interests so you're murdered or something idk.

Car dealerships.

Organized religion.

Nothing comes even remotely close.

Religion.

"Disposable" electronics

My dad used to buy disposable vapes. I decided to take them apart just to find rechargeable li-ion batteries. By the way, in many of them there were quite thin wires and some of the insulation was visibly burned, looks quite dangerous.
Similarly there are some single use power banks. DiodeGoneWild made a video about those and also how to recharge them.
Just a stupid waste of batteries.
- I like to tinker with things. I wanted to see if I could hit a weed cart powered by my phone so I bought a bunch of cheap 510 batteries with temp select from DH gate. They were all the same brand, same seller, same packaging. Inside was a different story though. All the batteries were from different manufactures with capacities different from what was listed.

Health insurance. Actually that probably doesn't really count since most of us know it's a scam.

Most security on consumer hardware

Let's take android for example. There are legitimate security implementations like SELinux, full disk encryption but something like samsung's knox is useless outside of enterprise use and kills OS level modifications

Health insurance.

Would be far easier to name things that are not a scam and assume the rest is just a scam in waiting.

Libraries, Pets, Sunrises/sets, Nigerian princes needing loans, Mr. Rogers

Everything else is probably looking to take money from you in some fashion.

College. The learning is fine, the cost is freaking out of hand. I never went and have no regrets. My daughter is going now and I feel like I'm supporting a scam.

Copyright

Everything comes with a subscription

Social media

Penny auction apps like dealdash, they always have bots that will outbid you so you can never actually win one of their auctions. If you do win an auction, you're not actually guaranteed to ever the see the product you won.

Adobe

Speculative economic instruments. There's a reason why specific items, such as onions in the US, have been banned from being essentially bet on.

Real estate agents

Yeah, well, I have to disagree with you on this one.
A few years after I met my wife, we had to sell her apartment so we could move to another city together for jobs. We tried to be cheap and sell the place ourselves to save money. We teamed up with a lawyer that specialised on selling real estates privately. We had a few viewings, but people were hesitant to bidding. We got a lot of questions about why we didn't use an agent.
After a few weeks, we contacted a real estate agent, and sold the place after just one viewing for a better price even after paying the agent fee.
I think it is important to leave the job to professionals when selling thing with high risk and high value.
- Yeah, I also like that the agent does all the paperwork and arranges things with the bank for everyone involved.
You mean them in general or the percental cost they take?

Paying high subscription fees for Autodesk products

Fashion

The mortgage.

How is mortgage a scam? It's a loan, why is it worse from other money loans?

Companies being the sole arbiters of OTA "Upgrades" and DRM "purchases".

Printers and printer ink

Get yourself a Brother printer and this annoyance will be cast away forever
- I agree. Brother printer is the best purchase I made in a long time. They're reliable and printing with laser is so cheap
- I have a brother dcn-7065 from about 2012 maybe. Still going strong. No issues.
Laser printers are an option

Mass Surveillance.

Companies and governments alike have successfully convinced most people that they have "nothing to fear".

Religion. The all-time champion, no contest, just as George Carlin said:

https://youtu.be/2tp0UNcjzl8

gacha game, paying premium money, an insane amount event just to see virtual character

Battle passes and most microtransactions in games. Day one patches, and GaaS games, always online games and expiring media licenses. VAC bans on Steam.

Patents

Resort fees, especially in Las Vegas.

Toilet paper

Car rental - I'm 95% sure I don't need any of those extra insurances but due to pressure and fear tactics (you do want to be covered if x happens, right?), it's hard to know in the moment.

I rent a car very often through work, and I always get those extra insurances, because:
My company pays for it
More than once the car rental companies have found some nano-scale damage to the car that I couldn't have caused (must've been there when I picked it up), and they try to pin it on me, something my job wouldn't cover. And unsurprisingly, those claims only happen when I don't have that extra insurances.
- The very first time I rented a vehicle, I got done for a scratch that I didn't make. It was a scratch from underneath the front bumper. When I got the car they never checked that area but it was the first place they looked when I returned it.
  Since this incident, I go over the car with them with a very keen eye. I get them to mark down every little mark. Including underneath the bumpers. I even get them to write it down if the car was wet since that can mask scratches.
- Always take full video on pick up. Close details over everything.
Last time I rented a car I declined their insurance and they were able to just use my daily car's policy.
- The last time I rented a car they tried to double charge me and tacked in an extra 200 in cleaning fees for good measure. I reversed the charge on the credit card as fraud, which the credit card company investigated and accepted as fraud, and reversed the charge. Now Hertz is threatening to take us to court over it. We disputed it and have essentially been ignoring them since.
  The time before that, a "different company" tried to accuse me of stealing the car because they had the wrong car listed as the one we had rented.
  If you are in NE Ohio, don't bother with a rental, they are likely to try to scam you.
- Nice! For context for car rental: whenever I rent, it's a foreign country so my personal car insurance won't cover anything.
The insurance waiver is a gold mine for them. A good friend of mine works for a national car rental company in my country. He was telling me that they attempt to hard sell the waiver because they make a lot of profit on it.
My thoughts on it are, I'm a careful driver, I haven't had an accident yet. The waiver can be just as expensive as the car depending on what you rent and the period of the rental. I'm happy to 'take the risk' because in the long run I'll be less out of pocket even if I do have to pay the excess once in a while.
- Thanks for the explanation!
  I know that I'm a careful driver but what about all the other people on the road?
My insurance company will allow you to add a rental on to your existing policy for a couple of dollars a week.

most cheap things that fall apart after a short time

Video game trailers

Ha! This is a good one!
Anymore I just find them so frustrating. Like I want your trailer to show me what the game is... How does it play... Not show me a random cutscene of someone smashing something in half and sliding down a hillside while some narrator is telling me that "you don't stand a chance hero."

In the US - - taxes.

Things used to be a lot simpler & cheaper in the US, but then we passed the War Revenue Act in 1917 which drastically increased the budget & helped to pay for the war. They probably saw all that money rolling in & got greedy. What was initially designed as a war-time fund raising effort is now just standard taxation, it has gotten worse, and the people being born & working & dying nowadays don't know anything different.

The government wastes so much money. Whose money? They don't have any money! They're wasting our money, that they extract from us via taxation.

We are financially raped into the ground, not allowed to enjoy the fruits of our own labor.

Car insurance Health insurance Dental insurance

All insurance really

Also renewing license plates/licenses

Basically if you need to make a yearly or monthly payment to keep using something it's a scam in my eyes.

Credit cards and everything to do with the debt trap.

Airline ticket prices.

ads

Paying for cellular data, in advance, regardless of whether or not you use it with no possibility of refunding any you didn't use.

I didn't know any companies still did that. I pay $25/month for unlimited and it's only gone down over the years. I started paying $45/month about 15 years ago. I know of some companies that are cheaper, but I haven't had any issues, so I haven't bothered to switch.

@mastermind Software as a service

The Mormons.

Phone companies charging you for caller ID. It must cost them nothing.

Getting paid every 2weeks (what the old times told me)

I'm going to shock you:
In Germany and Austria being paid per month is the norm. All the laws are defined for that. So pretty much everyone who works gets paid just once a month, that's it (Well, in Austria you get 14 salaries, so you get an extra salary every 6 months). It makes zero difference if you get your money one time a month or half your money two times a month, it's the same amount in the end.
Getting paid more often would just complicate things, as it can depend on how much overtime you did in a month. Or how often you went into the office (you get lessened taxes based on how far the office is away and how often you have to drive there and if there is suitable public transport to get there).
Really? Is that a thing? Where I live getting paid per month is the norm. Some people get paid per 4 weeks instead of per month. But I don't know of any trade where payment per week or twee weeks is the norm. Stuff like rent, mortgage, water, gas and electric etc. is all done per month. So it makes sense to match the income cycle to the bill cycle.
Puts living paycheck to paycheck in perspective. I can image not getting ends to meet on a monthly basis. But if you can't afford the next week, you have basically nothing.
I know there is a lot of overhead with payroll where I live, so if companies would have to do it more often, that would be pretty expensive. There are a lot of rules and regulations, so it takes a lot of work to do it right.
- Weekly payment was quite common in the past, the norm 100 years ago. But it is not anymore.
How in the world is that a scam? I've been paid once a month to every day in my career and I far prefer the once a month situation but every 2 weeks is fine with me. Every day is just tedious. Once a week has the same problem but different scale. Once a month means I can actually plan out my bills easily.

Individualism.

I thought individualism and collectivism were more like cultural traits than a specific thing you could call a scam.
- No only that, but it's entirely possible to be an individual who can participate successfully in a collective. They're not mutually exclusive or contradictory things. You can have goals and aspirations that focus exclusively on you without negatively affecting your contributions and interactions within a group. Life is nuanced, things aren't as black and white as people often seem to think.

Intelectual property and patents. (Copying ideas and modifing them was always a part on how societies advances.)

Non disclosure agreements. (Allows company to monopolize on your knowledge and force you out of the industry altogether)

Lottery (a way to extract money from the poorest/dumbest members of the society)

Do you mean non compete clauses? Cause, yes.
- Yes, non compete clause. Thanks for the correction :)

401k

Just curious why you think it's a scam? It's a type of account that has tax benefits.
- 401k plans are a scam not because of what they are, but what they replaced.
  Companies used to offer pensions. These were retirement benefits that were handled by the company, and the company bore the risk of underperforming markets.
  For a number of reasons, pensions were much better for workers. Now, only some unionized workers get them.
- In my country, 401(k) is rare. My wife's company is one of the few that offers it, and it's way better than the government pension my dad is getting as a retiree, which is like less than $200 a month.

Shampoo

Probably not originally a scam but something about Tax, maybe it's just me but taxes are suppose for the betterment of society. Everyone suppose to pay their fair share of tax yet it's strange that we can't even see how are taxes were used to improve society. There is no breakdown like a receipt on how our tax was used. While we file taxes we have to be meticulus or we get ourselves in trouble.

People who vote for conservatives

Marketing and advertising. They show a huge, juicy, scrumptous nice quality burger. You go to buy it and it's a cold, limp, tiny, frail nothing burger.

There used to be a law about false advertising. But it doesn't seem to be enforced anymore. Marketing and advertising can lie straight to your face. Its not right and shouldnt be tolerated.

And Americans are so complacent about it, they say things like, "It's , what'd you expect?" Instead of demanding what was advertised. It's soul crushing. It's like we've given up.

Enclosure

    
"The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose."

Stores and restaurants increasing their base prices to promote discounts from data harvesting apps.

SaniFair is a scam that every German is aware of yet it's normalized.

Workplace benefits.

Really? What's the benefit? You're taking money out of my paycheck to restrict my choices?

And aren't you a business anyway--you know, an organization whose purpose is to MAKE MONEY, not coddle people.

American Colleges.

Massage school. They say they’re teaching you a trade and will help with job placement but there is a glut of graduates and not enough jobs for them. Yet the school keeps signing up new students because that’s how they make money.

Religion Healthcare Insurance Tipping

Honest questions. Why do you seem unable to change anything of this? If you leave in a democratic country, why the majority of people won't change the second amendment, the college tuition scam, swap to a free healthcare system, and vote people that won't start another war in the name of democracy?

EDIT: I reckon it's complicated, but you must have some opinions about the final motive(s) for this. Who/what is keeping things like this?

Working from home, but not being payed rent for the space.

Daily life

Printing money.

Income tax

High tax on humans, low tax on companies and property
- That's the scam we live in now. We need high tax on corporations. Low Income tax on individuals under 250k. High income tax on everyone else.
I used to think the same thing but it's not really a scam. It's a way to allow low income people to pay less to the government in taxes because they have less to give.
When you move things over to sales tax, high income folks don't end up paying as much as they could because they don't spend the money as aggressively, and low income folks can't afford the bare minimum so you have to either further subsidize them (so you took their money to give back to them?) or deal with the ensuing homeless problem/never ending poverty cycle.
- I mean if you want to be all sensible about it, sure.
  It’s just a tool. The real scam is that the 1% pay such a low share of their actual income (including capital gains)

Profit.

In the ideal situation, resources are transformed into goods with zero waste and with fair compensation for every person involved in that process. Any expense outside of costs and pay for the people involved is either inevitable inefficiency due to our imperfect technology or the laws of physics, or it is some sort of scam, and thus profit itself is a scam.

Insurance. A promise they try really hard to break.

Tax

Religion

Mortgages needing to be renewed every 5 years so that banks can jack the the interest rate. Cap residential mortgages at 25 years max and 2% interest for the duration.

Many people lock in interest rates for the life of the loan. Most often 30 years for mortgage loans. You don’t have to renew a mortgage’s interest rate unless you get an adjustable rate one.
This is the main reason why mortgage applications are down significantly right now. People with super low interest rates don’t want to move because they’d have to get a new loan to do so, and interest rates are much higher now. If they stay and they have a fixed-rate loan, nothing changes.
- The user you are responding to has an account on a .ca domain. In Canada (as well as UK) it is more common for the rate to only be locked in for 5 years.
- Because it doesn’t matter the company. A bank creates money if you apply for credit. It just have to have a fraction - say 3% - real money to store at a central bank account. Then they literally type the numbers on your account. Money created!
  So, for a bank, it doesn’t matter if you apply for 5.10.20 years. They get the interests anyway. May be there is some weird financial acrobatic behind the 5 years target. However, here in Germany it’s pretty common to get a 20 years credit.

Fiat currencies like USD and Euro.

Government

Microsoft Windows. There are better operating systems that don't make you watch ads, that don't lock up your filesystem, that don't force you into upgrades before they're tested.

Service as a subscription, for me. It used to be you bought a product and then you owned it. Now if you want practically anything from streaming media to freaking car washes, you have to "subscribe".

Most forms of insurance in the US

That we are not paid for our browsing data, app data, etc.

Antivirus software

College

Brake service

Loan interest.

Specifically, compounding interest. I have no problem paying something extra back if I need to borrow a sum of money, but it should be a flat, fixed fee calculated as a percentage of the amount borrowed, up front.
Compounding interest is bullshit.
- If it's a flat fee then it'd likely be higher. If it's compounding interest, it will automatically include any late fees if you pay on time.

capitalism

Democracy. /s