Fall and Winter are typically the season for this, but I’ve noticed more people than usual have taken up interest in what amount to gyms. These very, very expensive gyms, which market themselves as almost exceptional in how they can help you regain yourself. All the while these “miracle body regimes” are advertised everywhere. Suspicious industry much?
Some neighbors of mine were headed there. I remember this because they were about to get into their vehicle, and I asked “the location is right around the corner, you don’t want to walk and maybe save transport money” and they responded “no, we’re old, we can’t do that” before they rode there and gained entry so they can run on the machine, and returned having used their whole wallet due to the journey/destination. Though not as memorable as the fact they came back with a brand of potato chips with the same name as the place they went to. Nothing like feeding into what you’re there to fix.
How about you though?
Any product which requires proprietary refills or filters.
My FIL once bought an expensive coffee machine that worked with beans. But you couldn’t just buy a bag of regular beans and refill the machine, no, you needed to buy a special kind of expensive cassette with their brand and their beans that fitted perfectly in the machine. My FIL just sowed off the top of the cassette that came with the purchase and refilled it with regular coffee beans for years.
Gah Brabantia can fuck right off with their designer bins that are only designer so they can specifically not use standard bin bags
Not so much scammy as scary, and no one else seems to have noticed.
They’re building storage units like mad around here. This suggests that thousands of people have been forced to downgrade their living arrangements/housing.
As someone who has been homeless, I hate that it is illegal to (a) sleep in one’s car and (b) sleep in one’s storage unit.
The lowest rungs of the economic ladder have been removed by government.
The whole symbiotic(parasitic) relationship between bank deregultion, estate agencies , “standard rental agreements” and planning process seems like a network of self reinforcing scam designed to push prices up instead off offer better value to consumers.
There seems to be no invisiblke hand of competetion doing aanything ti increate the amount of work, or bid down the prices. It is a dysfunctional market that seems to have been wantonly impaired by a nexus of self interest.
The battle for autonomous citizenship in a democracy was lost decades ago. Its true roots are the move to venture capital to avoid the WW3 that the previous military centric system would have created by around the 1980’s. The ideals of a warmonger state lend meaning to citizenship. Venture capital is feudalism. It is a system where autonomy and citizenship are in principal opposition to the interests of capital. A military must justify its cost with action. A feudal lord needs a mechanism of servitude but the name is irrelevant. Slave, and serf have been used in the past. No one will ever try to call you one of these loaded terms. They will alter the meaning of citizen until it is functionally equivalent. The feudal serving class are not owners of their tools, land, or means of survival. They have a theoretical right to legal recourse, but mechanisms bar them from doing so in practice.
I disagree that we had a transition from a military… democracy?.. to a venture-capital fuedalism.
Our militarization has only increased since the time you mentioned.
Wealth and capital have run America since they set up the colonies.
The military and the feudal-capitalist lords feed and build off of each other. They are part and parcel of the same oppression.
Autonomous citizenship in a democracy is an idea that America has flirted with but never fully delivered on.
This part was not my opinion, but is instead based on the history of silicon valley and how it evolved. It was started as a military research and development program to get R&D away from Washington’s meddling influence. Most of the key events surround William Shockley and people under his tutelage. Military couldn’t fund semiconductors scaling to meet its potential. Everything blew up from there. Look up the computer history museum and take a very deep dive into the early history of semiconductors. You will learn a lot about the reality of politics and the basis of venture capital.
Anything can be scammy if you connect enough dots.
Food literally grows itself in the ground. And yet we buy it from supermarkets. Absolute scam!
Car Insurance is a total scam. We should be able to make every traffic trip a potential crash derby.
Roller derby is a scam. I have connected the dots to the WWE. The connection is the goddamn leotards. Prove me wrong.
Why don’t you want lesbians and drag queens to have a safe space for violence?
Crumb free bread is the biggest scam of all.
Capital letters are the biggest scams of all. Especially the letter “E”. Who do you think secretly paid off Sesame Street? Goddamn Muppets distracting us from the truth.
Videogames that intentionally break their difficulty curve with the intention of seeming elite and prestigious. I’ve suspected for a long time that games like Darksouls and Kingdom Come deliberately try to manipulate their players into getting caught in sunk cost falacies, trying to get people to blame themselves for any failure of game balancing.
Over time they’ve fostered communties which are so toxic that they will lash out at anyone trying to criticize the game. This then frees the developer from all fault and casts any grievance as the players lack of understanding, skill, or hardware. Eventually, any mistake the devs make becomes seen as an artistic choice and will be defended tooth and nail by the players.
I’ve suspected for a long time that games like Darksouls
Funny enough the souls borne games are actually really great examples of actually balanced gameplay. While not perfect at all times they’re generally games where, if you’re having an issue, it’s actually you
Of course, Lost Izaleth and a few other places are famously just bad, but the community can actually admit to that so it’s not like they’re safe from criticism
Other games have absolutely hidden their bad game design behind the “were like dark souls” line though and yeah, we see through you The Surge and others
I never got the chance to play Bloodborne because of Sony but I’ve heard its the best one. I did play through their other games after Elden Ring came out, and i wouldn’t say the problem is always the player. Fromsoft does an absolutely abismal job telling new players where to go and how to play. Elden Ring especially just expects that you already have experience with the series and that you’re going to have the wiki open on your second monitor to follow a basic questline. Personally i just dont understand that philosophy.
Or, they just give you a playground and let you explore. Not everyone likes having their handheld all the time. From soft games give good players a chance to be good.
I did zen training involving koans. At an abstract level, koans are a practice of trying repeatedly in the face of thousands of failures, without getting impatient. It’s the mental equivalent of Lucy’s punch-through-the-sign training in Kill Bill.
Try try try ten thousand years nonstop. That’s the mindset it takes to make progress with koans, and in the process break some of the mind’s longest-held assumptions.
Ever since I spent some years doing that, I love extremely hard video games. I don’t mind trying dozens or hundreds of times before I pass a level.
I like group fitness classes, yoga, dance, etc so don’t mind paying something to have that space to do it; but yeah I stopped going to any that were too far away to walk in, say, half an hour. Driving to gym to work out freaked me out too, it feels crazy - a gym should be on your path home from work or really close to work or home, otherwise you are less likely to use it. But I say this as the privileged spouse of a man so rich in free weights that I can always lift heavy at home - if we didn’t have those I might be willing to drive and pay to use the equipment.
I think a lot of things are scammy, most investments and crypto are pyramid schemes, the US private healthcare system and I’m not sure Medicare fraud isn’t what the public system was built for.
