ZodiacSF1969 @ ZodiacSF1969 @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

Did we buy much oil from Iraq?

Lmao yes Coca-Cola is such a scam. Wtf are you talking about?

There's a Tom Scott video on this, the truth behind it seems murky.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The side effects have been well known for a long time. I can see pharma companies downplaying them, but in modern times the risks are well understood. Do you have an example?

It wasn't BS, it was required at a time when AIDS was a near-certain death sentence.

Why? AIDS was a devestating epidemic. The blood banks were slow to act at all, and as a result many haemophiliacs acquired the disease and died. Gay men were the largest risk group for spreading and contracting it, so it makes sense to screen them out.

I agree. As I said in another comment, the book And The Band Played On is a great history of the AIDS epidemic in the USA and really hammers home just how devestating it was to gay men. It's a fact that gay men are the major risk group in the West for HIV transmission. Heterosexual sex is much less likely to spread it compared to anal sex. There was a lot of mismanagement of it, but screening was a good idea, when it was finally introduced.

It's a bit more complicated than that. In the early years of the HIV epidemic they at first didn't even want to screen donors. The blood banks and the FDA were slow to introduce screening for a few reasons, one being that gay men were such good donors that a large proportion of the blood supply would have been removed. Eventually the risk became too great and do screening was introduced, just like we exclude those who were in Britain when TSEs were a risk. Note that these restrictions also never applied to lesbians, because they are not a high risk group.

40 years ago contracting HIV was still a serious, life threatening event. It's also true that in the USA homosexual men represented one of the largest risk groups, unlike in Africa where other factors made spread between heterosexuals more common. It took hold in the gay male community due to the higher risk of anal sex, the popularity of bath houses, and the amount of sex men were having basically. Testing for HIV was also expensive. You could do it at the batch stage to reduce testing, but then you throw away a lot of blood. It's only recently that PreP is widely available and used, so that HIV is more manageable (though it is still a serious illness).

My source for most of this is And The Band Played On, which apart from being one of the saddest books I ever read, outlines well the inaction by politicians, medical funding bodies, and even within the gay community itself, in tackling the epidemic. That it was allowed to happen is a black mark on the Reagan presidency.

Not really since RiF stopped working... That's not surprising to hear though lol.

I wonder who the hell would even invest in reddit at this point, it's a mess.

So glad we don't have this shit in Australia lol

I think you are both right to be honest. It's not mutually exclusive.

What do they do after Pride Month that's so bad? Yeh it's just a corporate cash grab, and it's funny how the Middle Eastern branches of these companies don't change to a rainbow profile pic, but what do they do that's so wrong?

RedLetterMedia. I re-watch their 'best of the worst' movie reviews over and over.

It's either from the fires or the time that dust storm blanketed the east coast. That was crazy.