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.
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
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).
Again - I’m not arguing necessarily that any of them started out that way, in fact - I’m willing to bet that very few (looking at you, Mormons) actually were. Most religion (in my humble opinion) just stems from folks trying to make sense of an unfathomable universe using what tools are available to them at the time. But once you have the religion, and you have holy men/women who have the ability to excersize some form of power over their flock, you’ll inevitably find corrupt people flocking to those positions, as they do in every position of power. Then over time they’ll carve out more power for themselves and more authority, find ways of extracting influence and power from their positions until soon you’ve got “holy men” living in palaces with the authority of kings.
It’s just human nature for positions of power to eventually become corrupted to some degree, and positions of religious authority offer an unparalleled lever in which to move the masses, which only serves to make it more attractive to would-be tyrants
Just FYI, that is specifically why The Baha’is don’t have clergy. They do have an administrative body with local, national, and global levels of influence, but those are 9 member councils that are elected by the members of the faith, who must use the Baha’i rules of Consultation to reach unanimous decisions. Also if any of them ever appear to want the position, they are automatically ineligible to hold said position. It’s worked well for about 60 years so far.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being religious (provided you don’t force those views on others)
Hum. That’s like saying “there’s nothing wrong with being convinced that 2+2=5”. There’s something intrinsically mistaken about it, and I don’t think it’s defensible.
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.
So do secular charities.
https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/who-gives-most-to-charity/
Once again, the biggest givers are found to be concentrated in “Bible Belt” states in the South or where Mormons make up a large portion of the population. On the other hand, scant-giving households are heavily concentrated in relatively wealthy and secular New England.
I’m not even religious myself, just find it annoying that reddit atheist cool guys think that religious people are all greedy and selfish, when this opposite is actually true.
A church in the city I work for is being used as an extreme weather shelter for homeless/at risk people. I received a couple dozen phone calls from the parish when it was first announced who were pissed about homeless people using their church for shelter. Any time I tried to explain the irony of their complaint it just made them angrier.
I’m not saying this to paint a picture of all religious people, but from my experience the one’s I have come across tend to not care about anyone in their community not in their circle.
Considering giving to any church 501©(3) themselves are considered “charitable donations” when it comes to taxes, this rings a little hollow. If you consider a church as a charity itself, and those churches are soliciting donations every week in services, of course you’re going to see higher charitable giving from areas with a lot of churches/religious. That said, my gripe is not with religious based charities, it’s with churches. Salvation Army can continue to do what it does, religious affiliated childrens hospitals, etc. The amount of money that is spent on congregations is just a waste and it’s a shame.
~signed, an atheist (ex)reddit cool guy
Yeh I hate that reddit atheist attitude, it embarrasses the rest of us atheists/agnostics. Of course it got brought over here too.
Organized religion has done a lot of bad, but they have done some good too.
Religion is used as a scam by many people. It is also used in other ways by other people.
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.
BTW I was actually looking for specific instances of scams carefully plotted by known people, companies or even countries instead of broad answers like religion.
Lesson for next time, use the text part of your post to define what you are asking or are interested in hearing. Otherwise you get everyone giving glib answers that suck like the above.
BTW, I’m reading Smartest Guys In The Room, the book about Enron, you might be interested in looking up that company. They used very complex financial instruments to deceive shareholders and Wall Street and boost their stock price. Bunch of assholes, some of the shit they pulled was obscene.
Lesson for next time, use the text part of your post to define what you are asking or are interested in hearing.
Right, I should’ve seen it coming. But as long as the discussions are healthy, instead of mudslinging, I’m kind of okay with it.
I was gonna write about the fascist aspects of the country, but I wouldn’t say that it’s something completely unknown; many of my peers are okay with fascism just because there is no centerist alternative, as what we have already seen leftists are not going to be better given the same amount of power.
When it comes to religion, it should have been a personal thing rather than systematically integrating it with each aspect of our lives like how it was initially intended.
Sometime earlier in my life I took a decision of not going to my place of worship; this helped decouple my belief in something bigger that I don’t understand, and a cult made by man.
Obligatory George Carlin clip. https://youtu.be/iouZYYzQEjU
Oh my god, isn’t Christianity kinda a pyramid scheme?
I wanted to post this
The American healthcare system.
Scam for sure. Hard to say it’s been unnoticed for a long time though
idk - only 63% of Americans support single-payer healthcare, nearly half of Americans still haven’t caught on at least
“only”
That’s a clear majority. If we had a referendum about it we’d get it (but the US doesn’t have federal referendums.)
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.
Not all countries have for profit medicine though. I’m sure it’s a factor, but it’s not a universal thing.
There are other reasons why “natural” remedies get more scrutiny in the medical community, and the other comments have touched on a few of 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.
Tim Minchin
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.
Once I made a joke online about paying for homeopathy by dipping a dollar in a jar of water and giving them the jar, and like five people I know unfollowed me lol
Did you hear the one about the homeopathic who tried to commit suicide?
He took a 10X dilution of cyanide.
Lol yeh a surprising amount of people believe in it.
I once trained to work in pharmacies, we had companies present on their products and one of them was selling homeopathic products. One of the other students asked if it actually worked and the rep’s response was ‘if it didn’t do you think people would buy it?’ I didn’t say anything but I thought to myself yes, there absolutely are people who hand over money for dumb shit that doesn’t work lol.
Hey umm so … homeopathy. There is a case to be made --hear me out here please-- that it might have been effective once, but now we’ve got millions of “practitioners” doing things that clearly do not work.
The reasoning is obvious.
The concentration of practitioners within the population is clearly too damn high (insert meme here). To show how effective it can truly be, all we need to do is to dilute the ratio … by a lot.
Don’t you agree that this is worth looking into?
(/s in case anyone is in doubt)
A few weeks ago I got the flu and went to see my doctor. She wasn’t in so I got sent to a substitute who examined my ear with a weird beeping device. I asked her what it was and she just said that she practices “Chinese medicine”.
She told me her device indicated that I have huge problems with my thyroid and she said I should get some sort of crystal necklace that’s good for that and that I should apply some essential oils daily. Of course, she happened to sell those at a good price.
I went to have a blood test and my thyroid was fine, my values were right in the middle of the acceptable range.
I think chiropractors also fall under this
Scams, all of 'em. But the medbed that I can sell you is totally real. /s
I used to get acupuncture with a tend unit attached to the needles as a kid for my chronic pain. Holy fuck did I feel better afterwards. It was probably the tens unit. I have a small one at home and it is great for relaxing my tight muscles.
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.
Ponzi schemes actually already have a clear definition, and what you’re describing isn’t actually a Ponzi scheme
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.
Might as well be, the patron still gets screwed
Aka social security…
Where is social security pitched as an investment?
Edit. Now that I think about it, government retirement funds actually kind of fill those requirements. At least where I live.
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
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.
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.
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 just read a news article this week about a young Australian man on vacation in Indonesia who got in an accident. His family now face costs of around $350,000 because his insurance didn’t cover riding motorized scooters.
I think travel insurance is generally wise to have, and to be aware of what you are covered for. This is an example both of the potential costs and how if you don’t read your policy carefully they will fuck you over.
you’ll almost certainly spend more on premiums for travel insurance than you’ll ever claim (this is true of all insurance)
Yes I agree but it’s about how you value risk. Losing $100 on travel insurance is better than losing $1,000,000 on hospital bills. The risk is different obviously but I’m not worried about $100 for peace of mind. I have even gone to war zones were my insurance was invalid but I had it in safer places because it’s all about risk.
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’s just where your wrong and there is no point continuing this discussion. You don’t think people have to pay a fortune for medical cover when you have no insurance? Sure some countries might cover that and their might be mutual care agreements. But not having insurance in a place that won’t pay your hospital bills. That’s madness. Your argument works if you artificially make up costs sure.
I have personally know loads of people to get in accidents when travelling, I have myself. I have only heard one person being hospitalised and getting sent home but it happens and it isn’t cheap.
I think the main point is that the policies have so many exclusions in the fine print that you are unlikely to get them to pay even if something does happen. That seems pretty scammy to me. But I guess there is something to be said for the peace of mind you get when you buy it, eh? Even if it’s unfounded.
Yup - this is exactly it. I’m entirely certain that there are people out there who have had their financial lives saved from utter ruin via vacation insurance - but I’m also certain (because I’ve witnessed it myself) that far far more people who think they should be covered wind up in deep shit because their hospitalization came from an accident, or as the result of a crime, or some other edge case that happens to be excluded by the travel insurance policy (and make no mistake, these exclusions are carefully crafted to cover as many potential cases as humanly possible while still sounds decent on paper).
And you would be entirely correct - if insurance companies acted in good faith, the reality however, is that they don’t. Your comments are already littered with replies of people giving you examples that they’ve personally experienced of carefully constructed exclusions meaning that they can’t actually claim their policy.
I have no doubt that there are people out there for whom travel insurance has saved their ass, but I know from my own experience in the industry that the far more common experience for policy holders is to wind up with the insurance company finding a reason to not pay up, and now you’re left both with the cost of the emergency, as well as the cost of the policy.
Like I said, it’s your money, and I’m certainly not going to give a shit if you keep buying travel insurance policies, hell - people buying insurance policies pay my salary (though i don’t work in travel insurance any longer)
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.
Unfortunately, like all big business, they don’t care about anything but fleecing the little guy
Lotteries. They’re just tax for poor people.
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The people who do lottery tickets are poor people who need the money. The government funded programs should be coming from the rich people.
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rich people dont get taxed for shit, that’s the whole problem
I think most people buying a lottery ticket know that it’s a loss on average. I think people buy it for the experience and the dreams that it represents. From that perspective, I don’t think that it’s a scam for most people but rather just buying a slice of fantasy
You quite literally described the scam part though, selling false hope
Well no, because thousands of people have won it all over the world. Yes, it might be 14 million to one, but for a couple of quid I don’t care.
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!
That’s what they do with a lot more paintings that you would think. Not because they don’t want the plebs to look at them but because being exposed to the environment would cause irreparable damage to it. So they have experts make recreations and display those.
This isn’t really a conspiracy theory is it? I thought it was something they were open about that they often have replicas on display for security/preservation reasons
There was a fantastic interview on The Jordan Harbinger Show podcast with a professional forger. I’d recommend searching for it. I’ve been meaning to give it a second listen for a few years, but have too much other content.
The McDonald’s Monopoly promotions
I remember getting like 3 tickets for “part 1 out of 2 for a free car” a few months ago when they were doing the monopoly thing. I now realise that the employees probably just took all the part 2 ones for themselves.
They definitely didn’t because they count the sleeves that those prize pieces are on.
What really happens is they print 5 million part 1 pieces and like 10 part 2 pieces.
Toothpaste.
You only need to squeeze out an amount the size of a pea on to the bristles of your toothbrush.
The image of squeezing along the entire length of the brush bristles was concocted by an ad agency, a la Mad Men, to make consumers use their toothpaste faster, hence buy more product.
I’ve never used that much. I just assumed it was to look nice since a pea sized about would look silly in a picture. I think it I used that much my mouth would be so full of foam it would be uncomfortable
Aquafresh baby!
I swear it’s also why they made that newer garbage cap design that slowly leaks toothpaste and gums up unless you carefully clean the end and fully close it every time. I know y’all know what I am talking about!
The garbage flip cap instead of the good old screw on lid
Fools up your game. Tom’s toothpaste is so absolutely classy. My gums never felt this good. Better ask jeeves.good ass toothpaste.
printer ink, it costs them like 3 cents to make each cartridge and they sell it for so god damn much.
they also go out of their way to have chips in the cartridges and in the printers that make the printer not function if any ink is even running low, doesn’t matter if you want to print something in black and white you had better fucking buy more cyan ink
y’all need to stop buying printers from HP
Hardly “unnoticed” - it’s just a fundamental part of the business model.
I just assumed the manufacturing process required unicorn blood or something.
Credit scores are a scam to sell credit cards.
You take small loans each month via a credit card that you have to pay back. This increases an imaginary number that lets you take out bigger loans in the furure.
This is all tracked by private companies that you trust with your personal data. That, or you’ll not be able to take out a loan if you want to buy a house or start a business.
If you have a good credit score it means that you don’t overspend or forget to pay, which you can also achieve with a regular debit card by default. This doesn’t serve people, only the banks who expect that a number of people will overspend or not be able to pay their loans back.
Credit cards alone aren’t the problem. Forcing them on people with the credit score system is.
Coming from a civilized country where the credit score is calculated by looking at income, taxes and property, I cannot fathom how the US credit score calculation is supported by anyone.
o / \ Morals / ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾ Money / ‾‾‾‾‾‾A lot of people actually like it because it really doesn’t work the way OP said it did. They are partially correct, but you also get rewarded for perverse incentives. If you double pay your CC, it will actually slightly lower your credit score. If you have a lot of credit cards with no balance, that can also lower your score. The quickest way to buildup credit in the US is to get a card that has a 0% 18 Month introductory interest rate. Pay the minimum balance each month, and save the cash to pay it all off in 17 months. You will accumulate credit like crazy, holding a balance strangely increases your credit (until the balance gets too high or you start missing payments, then it will take a nosedive).
Interest, late fees, holding a balance, a lot of the bad stuff is actually weirdly good for your credit in the US. I mean it makes sense… they want to reward people who are stupid and pay interest, but actually have enough income to keep making payments forever.
When someone from the US remarks about their credit score, it always causes me to raise eyebrows. You can be poor and have a high credit score, it’s incredibly common.
You can “game the system” by picking credit cards that offer some kind of cash back incentive, and don’t carry balances month to month. For example the chase freedom card does 1% on all purchases and 5% on specific categories that change every quarter. I’ve had this card for like 9 years, I’ve never paid any interest because I pay it off monthly , and we make lots of “free” cash back. The key here is don’t go get a credit card and buy stuff you can’t afford, that should be hammered into youth from the beginning, just buy what you can afford, and if you’re disciplined enough you can put all of your purchases on the card and benefit from the card incentives for basically free.
I can’t agree with this more.
Transferring points earned to airlines can also net you some incredible deals on flights as well. I’ve booked several tens of thousands of dollars on business/first class travel over the years at a fraction of the cost. With the addition of free hotel upgrades and car rental upgrades, you can use credit cards to your advantage.
The caveat is that it takes some amount of expendable income to play.
Mormon church
Trim out the first half of that sentence and you’d have yourself a top comment.
Capitalism and the interest based investor economy.
“I own this machine and everything you create with it” is a fundamentally flawed way to run a society.
Old Egypt was full of pyramid schemes way back then
Tax-free charitable organizations
In a society with capitalism at its core, externalities exist. That’s a fact that everyone agrees with. Nonprofits help mitigate those gaps. Calling all nonprofits scams is misguided at best. I think OP is looking for something more specific. What nonprofits?
Yes, I’m looking for more specific cases.
I was trying to be tongue-in-cheek but specifically the Roman Catholic Church in a historic context.
There are a lot who have an extremely positive impact. It’s a small minority that causes a huge number of issues.
I personally help out with a non profit charity and we get a lot done with not a lot financially. The reduced taxes are a huge help.
There are a lot who have an extremely positive impact. It’s a small minority that causes a huge number of issues.
I would argue it’s the other way around frankly
To be fair, there are some good ones out there. I worked for a drug-rehab company in the 90s as the IT head that got mostly government funding for a 6 month-rehab-program for non-violent drug offenders (mostly stuff like heroine, cocaine, etc.). We also had an in-prison program but I don’t think that was as effective. Of course to get government contact money we would have to meet lots of strict guidelines too.
I definitely more wary of ones that don’t get any public funding and therefore have practically no guardrails and less forced transparency.
Bitcoin
To be fair, there are much worse projects too that were rugpulled. But I guess these didn’t go on long.
Nah not really
