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For better or for worse sometimes somebody needs to borrow money. Loaning money has a certain amount of risk so it's kind of necessary to make some interest just to cover the risk alone. Financial institutions of course have a knack for attracting greedy assholes so they inevitably end up getting regulated. A big problem right now is that they're getting increasingly deregulated in ways that allow them to do bad things they should not be doing. Abolishing banks entirely is a terrible idea.
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Nov 1, 2019 15:22
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 00:40 |
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Scratchies can potentially be a scam if the odds are horrid enough. Often the odds do suck and are available but are in fine print in a place you aren't likely to notice them. Then again you can literally put pictures of lung cancer on packages of tobacco and still get people going "gently caress it, I'm smoking anyway."
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Nov 13, 2019 11:51
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Dr. Platypus posted:My father talked about how people would try to push fast change scams on him when he worked at a newstand as a kid, I feel like they'd work best when there's no actual cash register. I saw someone try to pull it at a store once, and the manager shut down the till to do a count and the guy bolted. That's what we always got told to do in the places I worked if we saw that poo poo. Stuff all of the money in the till, grab management, and do a count. Under normal circumstances the till might be a few cents, a dollar at most, off so the scam is up at that point. If there's no till and it's just a locked cash box then set the money aside some place specific so if you give change back and the person is like "no, I gave you a $20" you can show them the $10 they actually gave you and tell them to get hosed. If they start doing the "hey can you make change...no this different kind of change" then ask them to wait, run the transaction, and then be willing to make change but one transaction at a time. If they're trying to confuse you then ask them to hold on and you'll gladly do what they need or help them with what they want when you're done with this one.
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Nov 23, 2019 07:05
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Tubgoat posted:Yet they won't go after the writer of the cheque? I think I see the problem here. Maybe. I think those are typically state laws though writing enough bad checks for enough money can possibly get one slapped for fraud. I'm not a lawyer by any means and I think it varies by jurisdiction and check amount. Even so automatically throwing people in jail for writing a bad check is a terrible idea given that sometimes people just legitimately gently caress up and accidentally overdraft their accounts. Granted in the case of international finance shenanigans that's going to depend on a lot of factors. In theory somebody running a Nigerian prince scam from somewhere that isn't America has broken American laws but you may or may not be able to get them extradited or charged wherever they're operating from. The country may not give a poo poo or might let international scammers run amok as it brings money in. There might also be lawless areas or a civil war going on so lovely behavior goes under the radar. Or maybe the country can't afford to deal with it for some reason or another. The world is a big place and the answers vary. You can look up the laws for that wherever you live I imagine. If nothing else somebody that has a long history of writing bad checks will eventually no longer be allowed to write checks. I've known one person in particular who wrote so many bad checks in her life (mind, this wasn't scam-related or writing checks against other peoples' money; she was just terrible with money and constantly wrote checks while saying "don't cash this until next week") that no bank would allow her to open a checking account. I mean that; absolutely nobody would let her open a checking account ever again.
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Nov 26, 2019 15:40
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roffels posted:I once tried to tell someone that it sounded like they were getting scammed by a MLM, and their response was "They warned me about people like you." Yeah, at this point I just don't bother with people that get suckered into MLMs. They're basically cults that suck people in where they get lost. I'll make a token attempt but once they start posting about nothing but their MLM on social media they're just too far gone. They'll figure it out eventually but the MLMs always have a list of canned responses. "They warned me about people like you" is one of them. Calling it a "business" and saying things like "it's fine if you don't support my new business" is another. Like...no. It isn't your business. You are not operating a business. You are getting scammed and are trying to vacuum other people in. gently caress off with your guilt tripping and "but don't you want me to be successful?!?" Yes I do want you to be successful and want the best for you, fellow human, which is why I'm telling you to nope the gently caress out. Like 1% of people ever made money on MLM and you could make more money spending that time scavenging cans to sell them as scrap.
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Nov 27, 2019 14:47
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CommonShore posted:I know someone who has a staggering amount of high-level business qualifications and who posts like this. I think in this case that they know it's MLM but they are convinced they're going to "win." Yeah, MLMs have been spreading propaganda focusing on the tiny number of people who do in fact make crap tons of money. There are even children's books about it. It's on the level of "well hey if you work very extremely hard and want it bad enough you'll get to diamond and make millions!" No, you won't. Do the drat math. I forget which one it was but I crunched the numbers and one particular MLM had it set up to where you had to have like a billion people under you in the pyramid to get to the top level unless you were a founder. The payout was absurdly huge if you managed to get there but it's one of those "well I mean it's technically possible but from a practical standpoint..." sorts of things. Numbers don't lie and if you look at the numbers they're specifically geared to gently caress you over unless you get in at the very beginning. Which you won't do. Meanwhile why should I buy poo poo from you when I can buy it for less direct from the company? Even then it's hideously overpriced and I can buy something better from any random retail place for way less. I'm just like "no gently caress off with that bullshit and never bother me with it again" at this point. It's like hey you're going to alienate everybody that cares about you and just get sucked deeper and deeper into a cult that will only cost you time and money. Do you really want that? I mean gently caress if all you care about is making more money then come hang out with me and I'll teach you how to write code.
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Nov 27, 2019 15:54
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Yeah I'm legit glad for you that you saw the bullshit and got out that fast.
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Nov 27, 2019 16:33
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Cults, MLMs, terrorist cells, and hate groups tend to target the same demographics, actually. Now, not everybody in those demographics will potentially fall for all of them but they use the same tactics and hunting grounds. Usually what they go for are the disaffected, the disappointed, and the lonely. Like you said; the need to belong to something is a big thing. People need tribes. The tribe is basically an evolutionary superpower and is why we won the biological arms race. Forming tribes is inherent in what people are. We can't get away from it; it's how we survive. This is why loneliness stresses people right the hell out and ultimately kills them. It's also why the threat of social rejection is such a strong threat against people. It isn't that people are threatening to throw you out of the group; they're threatening to throw you out of your tribe which is extremely dangerous in the wild surroundings people evolved in. People actually pick up little tribal identities like quirks in how they move, talk, dress, and what have you. We can't not. So they target people whose lives kind of suck, who don't have a lot of friends (or any, really), or who are disappointed with how their lives are turning out. This is why MLM meetings resemble cults. They use the same recruiting tactics and know precisely what they're doing. They're finding people without a tribe and they're offering them one. That's a siren song that's difficult to deny. They also target people who are struggling and clinging to anything that might let them get out of the situation. Somebody strolling along and saying "hey we'll help you start your own business and get you rich" is extremely tempting. Of course they go after people who don't have a head for numbers or who don't have the math skills to see how impossible the odds actually are. This is also why they do that whole "oh but you are a hard worker that will totally claw your way up to that half of a percent that actually makes money." Well, no. Those slots are already filled by the time you've even ever heard about the MLM. MLM bullshit should be 100% illegal.
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Nov 30, 2019 18:53
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This is what you see when you die.
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Dec 5, 2019 16:23
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Tubgoat posted:For how long??? Forever.
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Dec 5, 2019 16:47
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It's made pretty explicit that Springtime for Hitler is 100% "hey what do you suppose the worst possible thing we can come up with is?"
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Jan 2, 2020 23:15
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AngryRobotsInc posted:It's Facebook but for specific neighborhoods. And you get to people watch absolute morons. There are continually old people on the one for my majority black neighborhood going essentially "I SAW A BLACK PERSON WALKING DOWN THE STREET DO YOU THINK THEY WERE CASING THE NEIGHBORHOOD?" That sort of thing is simultaneously the best and the worst thing. Police blotters can also be fabulous for that. Most people are OK but there's always that one poo poo head in every neighborhood. The craziest one I read was about a lady who kept calling about a young black guy that walked past her house every morning at exactly the same time. Nobody else in the neighborhood gave a single poo poo as the guy wasn't hurting anything and, you know, roads are public and all. Eventually the police did stop to question the guy. He basically just said "this is the quickest way for me to walk to work." That was it. That was the entire story. The guy walked to work and that was the route he used. One person decided to be a poo poo head about it.
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Jan 18, 2020 17:29
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Votes should be taken away from everybody except for me.
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Feb 8, 2020 08:18
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 00:40 |
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Inceltown posted:Wouldn't Theranos count as a more disastrous failure? Yes because unlike literally everything Theranos did the Xbox 360 actually worked most of the time. The Xbox was an actual, functional product that did as advertised it just had a pretty wicked flaw. Theranos, on the other hand, never had anything that actually worked other than Elizabeth Holmes' ability to commit massive amounts of fraud.
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Mar 3, 2020 04:26
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