Animals have such a wonderful thing as a conditioned reflex - a mechanism for remembering positive or negative (mostly) conditions in certain situations. Birds remember not to fly into fields where there is a scarecrow, a cat understands where its tray is, a dog knows perfectly well who feeds it and who walks with it... You can give endless examples, but there is one exception in the world of living beings. Yes, that's right - people.
In fact, our consciousness is both a great blessing and a great source of various problems. After all, no matter what conditioned reflex a person develops, we can always overcome it if we really want something. And often we play havoc with ourselves, stepping on the same rake over and over again.
We convince ourselves that this time we will definitely win at the casino, that we are used to unloved and not very well-paid jobs, that the charismatic and spectacular politician will keep all of their numerous and generous campaign promises... We believe again and again, we are wrong again and again - but very rarely do we draw the right conclusions from our own mistakes.
Recently, a true viral thread appeared in the AskReddit community, the topic starter of which asked people just one question: "What's 100% a scam but we accepted it in our society?" As of today, there are already exactly 35K upvotes and more than 34.1K of a wide variety of comments, from really serious and vital ones to jokes as well, but still fully answering the original question.
Bored Panda has compiled for you this selection of the most popular, sometimes unexpected, sometimes instructive and anyway incredibly interesting viewpoints from the original thread, so please feel free to scroll to the very end of it, upvote the ideas you support most and of course add your own - and who knows, maybe this list could become really helpful for someone.
More info: Reddit
#22
Middlemen/Brokers eating up the profit and inflating the prices in pretty much every business.
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56points
#23
On a lighter note, Santa Claus 🎅🏻 🎅🏻
Unlike other scams, I am 100% OK with this continuing.
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56points
#24
Arbitration clauses in almost every service provider contract. Tricking you into giving up your access to the court system. Nobody talks about it, but they should.
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53points
#26
As an academic scientist pick one of these two: We use tax payer money to fund biomedical research, which we then write up into a research study and pay the Journal so that they can publish the said study only for the journals to turn around and put them behind a paywall.
We also use taxpayer money to fund years of biomedical research, which occasionally results in a groundbreaking drug/treatment, which then gets licensed out (usually) by a pharma company, which then marks up the price and turns around and charges the taxpayer an absurd amount of money to use the said drug.
Edit: Additional salt to the wound: Do you guys know Moderna (which made the mRNA covid vaccine) and the NIH (the federal institute that performed initial pre clinical research on the mRNA vaccine and also literally funded the research) are in a patent dispute over the vaccine?
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49points
#27
I don't think it's a scam, but the prices like "4.99$", when it's clearly 5$, but they know most of the people will tend to think subconsciously it's 4$
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49points
#29
Worked at CapitalOne Investing for a while. Came to understand that the 401(k) system is merely the base layer of a congressionally-sanctioned Ponzi scheme to prop up our stock market. If 401(k) contributions were to dry up tomorrow, the entire house of cards collapses.
There is now legislation that proposes increasing the contribution limits and even making 401(k) participation MANDATORY for some employers. A healthy financial system wouldn’t need such measures.
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37points
#30
luxury skincare. go to a dermatologist. pay less. get real results.
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36points
