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.
The lawsuit accuses Sinclair of receiving about $1.5 billion as a result of alleged misconduct, including fraudulent transfers of assets, unlawful distributions and payments, breaches of contracts, unjust enrichment and breaches of fiduciary duties.
“Diamond Sports Group is seeking to vindicate its rights and protect the value of the Diamond bankruptcy estate, including by recovering value from Sinclair Broadcast Group that was improperly transferred from Diamond prior to its filing for bankruptcy in March 2023,” a spokesperson for Diamond said in a statement.
Yup. Great article about that and many other failures of capitalism here if anyone wants something to share with a fence sitter in their life.
Google stock is literally worthless and does not represent an actual stake in the company for example
Wait what?
Google’s shares are divided into two types, Class A and Class C. Class A shares, traded as GOOGL, confer one vote per share as a typical stock would. Class C shares, traded as GOOG, confers no voting privileges. This dual shares system was done to raise more money selling less useful Class C shares (intended for mutual funds and the like) while keeping control of the company in the hands of those held on to Class A shares (i.e. longtime executives).
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Ah, thanks for the info. That’s actually what I suspect is happening with the new fractional shares thing, but the brokerage is the one retaining control.
It’s worse than that, because a company bylaw also gives every GOOG stock a set value of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a cent and a binding part of their issuance is the clause that they can demand to buy them back for that price at any time. Google can drop like pocket lint and instantly buy all GOOG stock back.
They have 2 (3?) types of shares, and the one most people buy ($GOOG) is a class C share which comes with no voting rights and doesn’t give you a share of the company profits.
While class A shares ($GOOGL) come with voting rights, class B shares which are held by Google’s founders and insiders get 10x voting power and so they still hold the majority vote. Class A also does not pay dividends.
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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.
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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
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.
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.
Private anything is a scam because it doesn’t exist to resolve an issue or fulfill a need and instead pursues profit over any logic.
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?
Chiropractors.
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.
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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.
Professors requiring their own, expensive textbook for their course.
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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.
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.
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Cars in general are a scam
In many places car manufacturers are not legally allowed to sell their cars directly to customers
I want to hear the excuse they made for this
Back when many of these laws were created, car manufacturers were way worse than franchise dealerships for the consumer.
Everything I’ve read said it had very little to do with concern for the consumer. As I understand it, car dealerships lobbied for these laws because, according to them, the manufacturers were being anti-competative and squeezing car dealers out of business. So the laws were passed to protect “small” dealers from big car manufacturers, not to protect the consumers.
But now they use that ubiquity to get higher prices through shady tactics. It needs changed again, this time in favor of the consumer.
I forgot, nothing is ever done for the consumer.
Because monopoly is the way to solve things :)
A lot of these laws were created very recently. It was a response to Tesla’s business model. That was the main argument used this time as well, and it’s not wrong.
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Disagree. The States will find a way to tax the sale based on destination. The states can move to a different registration/property tax model to recapture the sales tax. See also online shopping sales tax changes.
It’s entirely about lobbying by autodealer trade groups.
to protect JOBS probably
Car dealership owners are a pretty big lobby, at least 20% of them are making 1.5m/y and tend to be very involved in local politics.
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There are ways to do that that don’t include a middleman that tries to legally swindle customers
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The price for glasses. It’s like this because of a stupid duopoly
Private health insurance.
Banks.
Insurance (am American)
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.
Those ink tank printers are their own kind of scam though, they clog if you dont use them frequently enough, and they use a non-replaceable dump pad when cleaning and purging that effectively bricks the printers when it is considred full, which is usually just a timer, not an actual sensor.
Dude stop selling us Epson ink, you are spamming your ad 3 times.
Ugh, I keep getting an error when posting a reply so I just repeat the send.
Thank you for the warning.
Also stop selling Epson ink, laser is superior!
Agreed! I miss my Samsung CLP. That was a real battle horse!
Yet, the talk was about printer ink and it is really hard to beat the price for that much ink, for those machines.
Fun fact: I don’t even own one of those machines. I have a Canon. Still cheaper than HP cartridges but those assholes tie the entire machine operation to the cartridges.
Old HP LaserJets like 1000 series (XP/2000 era drivers) are absolute behemoths. Still have and use one since 10-15 years.
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Then stop selling it???
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.
