Work.
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
“best way to do that” for who? corporate profits, or humanity?
Paying for education that “the market” wants us to have so they can have a larger pool of skilled workers, leading to lower salaries
Tax
Working harder instead of prioritizing.
Liberalism
Passive income. If value is being created and you’re being presented some of it without doing any work it necessarily means that someone else isn’t receiving the full value of the work they’re doing.
In most cases I agree with you, but what about a musician who makes passive income off of people streaming their music, or people who buy my fonts?
subset of capitalism
Absolutely
Or you’re squeezing all the value and more out of the asset and users, while increasing externalities
Sounds cool til you realize the assets being squeezed are mostly just other people
No no no. I gave them CULTURE! A wonderful work culture.
And security! Sure, not the security I decided I need for myself, and it’s only really present as long as they’re profitable to me, but security nonetheless.
After all, I had the idea and stuck my neck out to secure the financing, which is far more important than the actual daily labor that keeps things running.
We’re like a family, see.
Using non-free (proprietary) software and believing we are free to do anything we want with the software. But we can do only what the app (the devs) let us to do. We can’t see or edit the code of program to run as we wish.
Capitalism
AI subscriptions
AIsubscriptions
Insurance.
Insurance- paying for something you might never need but required to be available JUST IN CASE. eyeroll
Then you’re denied it regardless.
correction, you do an ungodly amount of paperwork prior to getting denied.
And if you die you lose everything you paid for and your family gets none. Sounds great!
The Dutch East India Company is still alive and well.
The stock market
Only if you don’t have insider info.
Ending a price in .99 so you think it is a whole dollar less.
Ive always thought it was due tax related reasons. In México, most shops have it set up so the price + IVA (our consumer tax) gives you a rounded number.
But it works! Supposedly. Don’t poke holes in the JC penney story.
That’s because it’s so normalized we don’t even realize it’s a scam anymore.
college textbooks. have to have the latest edition for class, but almost nothing is different from the two-years-old one.
This is why I try, if possible, to find them online for free. That’s been my first step whenever needed. Last time I needed a book and lab access code, it cost a little over $150USD!
I once had a professor who gave assignments with the last several editions page numbers because he thought it was bullshit too.
in roughly half of my classes; my professors were the authors of the of the books that they were selling so they made photocopies of them to distribute to the student for free.
it was one of two benefits to attending the largest university in the country (at the time).
For my classes, anything that was graded was not done from the textbook it was either online questions or from a worksheet. Any work given from the textbook was just for our practice and not graded. They’d usually just call out sections of questions based on that day’s lesson.
Tipping (for the US and so), Tax and Rents
I like tipping (in the US). I feel like servers would be a lot less friendly if they weren’t so directly incentivized to be nice. Plus I’ve been treated somewhat gruffly by servers in countries that do not have tips. Maybe that is just dislike of U.S. citizens.
Ah yes, the culture of punishing people pre-emptively with the threat of not being able to afford to live, in order to force them to be nice to your smug ass
| Maybe that is just dislike of U.S. citizens.
Quit possibly. I live in a country without a strong tipping culture and people are (generally) nice.
Progressive tax (based on income as well as the value of the item) isn’t a scam. Flat fee is a scam (eg: a hypothetical 0.02 cents to support veterans). Percentage based taxes like sales tax aren’t much better. Cliff based tax like luxury taxes are better but not as good as progressive taxes
