discounts. its all pre-calculated in the price
Inflation. The money you have is worth less every year by design. It’s a secret tax on all of us.
Tbf we should always aim for slight inflation. You want to incentivize people to use their money on things so it circulates, and it being slightly depreciating is the best way to do that.
If it was the best option long term to just stuff money into a mattress and sit on it for a decade then that has it’s own problems
The best inflation is zero. The second best is slight inflation. The third best is slight deflation. Because they can’t control it that well they aim for slight inflation so it doesn’t go negative.
“best way to do that” for who? corporate profits, or humanity?
Printer cartridges
Are people still out there buying new ink cartridges every time they need to print something? I was sick of that s*** in 2019 and returned my printer to Costco and I’m never buying another printer again.
I just bought a laser printer. Toner never goes bad and it prints faster and better than ink
You just bought it? Well I’ve got news for you. It’s going to start nagging you about ink cartridges in a couple months. Yes even laser printers do this. I thought just like you when I bought a laser printer that I had escaped the ink cartridge nightmare. Nope.
“Your laser printer, which doesn’t use ink, will nag you about buying ink” is a wild sentence.
You must use Windows and bought an HP laser jet, cause I don’t have that problem. Linux + that Brother laser printer everyone has = tech that isn’t garbage.
What should just be a little plastic box containing ink has a tiny computer inside to prove to the printer it’s not counterfeit. All so that the manufacture can have their give-the-razor-for-free-sell-the-blades business model, enforced by the anti-circumvention part of copyright law.
Just a polite reminder that if you only need to print a few papers, it’s probably cheaper/easier/free to use the printer at local library! Mine does it for like 15 cents a paper, or for free if you have your own paper! Much less hassle than buying a good printer, sorting the ink situation and then fighting with that machine…
Big box store plant offerings. Clones of the same mother plants at best, highly unregulated invasives at worst.
Big-box stores are a scam, period. Their whole business model is driving smaller local shops out of business and becoming the only game in town, and then completely screwing that town over when they leave.
Taxes
Insurance
As a concept or in practice?
Yes
Does that mean you don’t buy insurance or are you paying someone to intentionally scam you?
It is strange that you don’t have an option to choose a insurance company who are not scammers. I mean, that no one thought of starting an insurance company which promotes self on actually helping their customers.
There are companies outside US who are not scamming people and still are profitable.
Outside of the US here: nearly every insurance company in Belgium (that are coincidently also the banks) are 100% scamming people and literally make their entire business model off of ripping people off as much as possible.
Using any and every excuse to deny people the insurance they paid for when they have legitimate claims is literally how they are “profitable.”
And even on the off chance they actually pay for whatever you need, you need to go through an ungodly amount of bureaucracy and most certainly pay a deductible as if you are not already paying enough for the insurance!
We have quite a lot of public stats on the insurance companies in Denmark. You can see how many formal complaints a company have received, I.e. customers who have made a complaint a decision made by the insurance company, how many of these complaints have been in favor of the insurance company or the customer, which types of insurances each company gets most complaints about, etc. So there is a lot of data that allows you to make a informed decision about which insurance company you want to choose.
Insurance is nothing but a legal protection racket. The only difference is when you lapse on your protection money, the insurers don’t go and blow your kneecaps out, although United Health has effectively killed people who lapsed on payments before or denied them potentially life-saving drugs.
Capitalism
Religion.
Religion is tricky. Most people search for meaning in life, and religions are an answer to that need.
But linking religion to nations is the root of evil. Not being Catholic in Italy will cause you a lot of headaches, for example, yet you should be able to choose any religion you like and follow it freely.
So I would say the real issue is the interplay between religion and power, and discrimination on religious grounds.
Religions claim to answer that need. But they’re bullshit. It’s all just made-up, and the made-up bullshit somehow means minorities don’t get civil rights.
Tax
Two party politics
Being told to go therapy, instead of being told to burn down the oligarchy.
Capitalism
Impressed ot took this long. Every other comment is just describing capitalism working as designed, fucking over the poor to ensure a working class. Maybe do something about the torment nexus if you dont want to live under it?
Extended Warranties.
Everything about cars from manufacturing, sales, insurance, repair, registration and taxes. We could just have Public transportation.
The car is a tool to move yourself and your family/friends from place A to place B. But James Bond, Batman, rap videos made a status symbol of it. They created a modern mythology around it.
The transformation of the automobile from a means of transport into a luminous totem of status is a near-perfect case study of what Pierre Bourdieu theorised as the conversion and misrecognition of capital.
Bourdieu argued that capital presents itself in three fundamental guises: economic capital (money, assets), cultural capital (knowledge, taste, credentials), and social capital (networks, group membership). These are not static silos; they are constantly converted into one another to legitimise and reproduce social hierarchies. The car, in its purest state, is merely objectified economic capital, a purchased good with a clear use-value: to move from A to B. But the moment it enters the cultural field, it is inscribed with meaning, and it becomes a vehicle for symbolic capital, which Bourdieu defined as the form the other capitals take when they are perceived and recognised as legitimate.
https://archive.org/stream/bourdieu-the-forms-of-capital-1/Bourdieu The Forms of Capital-1_djvu.txt
The real estate market. The value of labour and materials necessary to build a house is about 30 to 40 thousand euros. Everything else is speculation.
Location matters though. It wouldn’t make sense for a house to cost as much as it does to make. Though obviously prices have become completely detached from reality.
It’s not only speculation, it’s also because some locations are a lot more wanted by many people to live there: right next to a big park, walkable neighbourhood, city amenities nearby but few city problems, no highway audible when sleeping with open window et cetera et cetera. More people want to live in prime locations than prime location housing is available.
The big scam are the insane prices for run down shoebox-apartments in shitty locations.
Where the fuck do you live? In switzerland your average new house costs around 300-400k
Value is how much socially necessary labor it actually took to build and maintain that house: materials, construction work, infrastructure, etc. It’s the real human effort crystallized in the building.
Price is what they slap on it in the market, which can be wildly disconnected from its actual value. In housing, price gets inflated by speculation, land monopolies, credit bubbles, location hype, and landlord parasites treating homes as investment vehicles to extract rent.
So you might have a crumbling flat that cost relatively little labor to build 40 years ago, but because it’s in a “desirable area” with a housing shortage artificially maintained by capital, its price skyrockets. That is a socially enforced ransom, not the value.
https://open.oregonstate.education/sociologicaltheory/chapter/value-price-and-profit/
How did you arrive at the 30 to 40 thousand euro figure
From a friend of mine who built a house in Southern Italy some years ago.
You can also find numbers on the Internet, see basic construction cost in Bulgaria here: https://arch-pfoertner.com/en/blog/bulgaria-vs-spain-building-costs
I’m assuming labour cost is still pretty low in Southern Italy, because in North/Western Europe you can have a kitchen and a bathroom renovated for that money, but no way build an entire house.
I am just talking about the cost to build the actual house plus the profit the contractor slaps on top. The price of your house will not be below 1 million in most places because of the reasons you stated
