Ask Lemmy

Have laws that get applied differently based on gender, race, and religious beliefs. Wild that it's a real thing.

Not caring about digital privacy.

Buy a thing, it stops working, throw the thing away, buy a new thing.

Seems like nobody fixes shit anymore. And yes, I know, companies make things as unfixable as possible. But I'm a weirdo who would rather pay a lot to fix a thing than throw it into the ocean and buy a new thing.

Externalized costs.

How polluting industries don't have to pay the cost of their pollution, for example.

Capitalism.

Now there are all kinds of things people think of when you say capitalism, the free market, democracy (for some reason), etc.

But I mean the idea that the guy that owns the means of production should get the value produced by labor.

If you boil it down to that, it’s kinda crazy. You want to start a company digging holes, but you don’t have enough money to buy a backhoe.

Fred has plenty of money and can afford a backhoe. He buys it and makes you a deal, you can use his backhoe and he will own the company, you go out and dig holes and he will pay you a couple bucks an hour.

Obviously he has to charge the people that want the holes dug more than he’s paying you to make it worth his while, and he has to recoup the money he spent on the backhoe in the first place.

Fred will never pay you enough to live and save up to buy your own backhoe. After a while he’s made back all the money it cost him to purchase the backhoe.

So now the situation is this. A customer wants a hole dug, you come and dig the hole, and Fred, who has done nothing and already recouped all the money he spent to purchase the backhoe, gets most of the money. And that arrangement just goes on forever. When Fred dies, Fred Jr will inherit that backhoe, Fred Jr will have never spent a dime for that capital, in fact Fred Jr will have had a very comfortable life paid for by the sweat of your labor digging holes.

Fred Jr will get most of the value of your labor for his whole life for doing nothing at all, just because he happened to be Fred’s son.

This is the way we decide who gets the rewards of all the work humanity collectively does (under capitalist systems) and it’s resulted in a hundred or so people so insanely wealthy we can’t even conceptualize how much money they have and everyone else scraping by.

And very serious people (often paid by those billionaires) will be on the news (or replying to this very comment) telling you how this is just the only system that makes sense. But listen closely when they do, they will always say it’s good because of free markets, or competition, or democracy or something that is NOT capitalism. Capitalism rarely defends itself by talking about why it’s good for the rich guy that owns the capital to get all the value, it always misdirects you to something else, a free market or freedom just generally. The freedom to pick between 10 different ultra wealthy companies that own everything and work to make them even more wealthy for your entire life.

Embalming our dead loved ones and burying them in a sealed box.

Seeing my grandmother's stinking of preservative with visible stitching holding her mouth shut did not bring me peace or closure.

Compost my dead body, I promise you I will not miss it.

religion.

Throwing cigarette butts on the ground.

In America it's gambling and gambling culture. It makes everything trashier and brings out the worst in people.

Pledge of allegiance in

Talking to computers. With recent LLM craze it really rubs me the wrong way when people try to reason with an autocomplete as if it is another human being. I also am weirded by others talking to voice assistants like Alexa and using text to speech. Could never force myself to do it, and consider it a form of lunacy, to be honest.

Paying for our basic needs to stay alive and countries.

Don't wanna starve? Gotta pay. Wanna stay hydrated? Gotta pay. Wanna stay out of the cold and sleep soundly? Gotta pay. I mean, it's not like food doesn't just grow on trees. It's not like water falls from the sky. It's not like a basic home wasn't being sold be sears in bulk.

And another thing. Countries, properties, states, provinces, etc. People draw an imaginary line that we can't see and everything in that line is there's that no one can touch or use. "No! This piece of dirt is mine! I will charge you if you take one speck of my dirt!"

Absolutely insane.

Secretly? I'm pretty outspoken about most things: DST, education, the environment

So in terms of things I rarely talk about, it's friggen nuts that we all just accept that candies labelled 'banana', 'raspberry', 'mint', and so on taste so little like their real-life namesakes.

It is a toss up between tipping as wages and consumerist obligated gift giving.

Both are ways of pretending we spend less because of how we see spending combined with shaming those that don't want to participate in such a shitty system. Pay people living wages and I would be happy to tipping on top, until then I will continue to avoid going anywhere that has staff paid primarily through tips. I also refuse to participate in gift giving based on a day of the year because spending money without a real reason is not a sign of love or friendship, it is quilting people I to bejng good little consumers. Fuck Christmas especially.

I will absolutely give people things and buy people things, frequently have friends and family try to pay for meals and whatnot first and bot in that stupid try two times or whatever bullshit. I will also tip well when I can't avoid going to a business with tip based employees. But both are based on what I chose to do at the time and not because it is the regularly scheduled thing to do.

Announcing you are raw dogging it since you want a baby.

Similarly, asking a pregnant woman about the genitals of her baby.

Having children when you can't even take care of yourself. Worse, doubling down and having lots of children in order to "play the odds" and hope at least some survive.

Obviously, I'm not talking about rape victims here, they didn't choose that.

I'm talking about parents who have no means of support, and intentionally have kids anyway. Then society mostly applauds.

I've seen this shit firsthand many times. And humans the world over do it. They breed like mindless animals, then act so sad and surprised when their children suffer.

Definitely insane, yet normalized.

Ironing clothes. Maybe this only applies to drier-safe clothes. The drier irons them more than enough. Then it always get balanced between crumbled from wearing and kinda ironed by body heat and such. Regardless if it's ironed first or not. At least for most of the clothes i wear, even without drier ironing, the body heat thing works fine relatively quickly.

I ran an experiment trying both ways for years to prove it's a useless waste time. No one was able to tell if i ironed my clothes or not. Because the end results is the same. It's worst than vanity in my opinion because you're supposed to be showing something better or more neat or whatever aesthetics you feel. Not if the same results regardless!

Alcohol I guess.

Tasty poison.

Religion, capitalism, deny reals for feels, war, polluting the atmosphere, having children, eating flesh of other animals, circumcision, the universe.

centralized social media

Ads

Driving in cities

Closed-source software

Edit: I missed a word in the title. I don't think these things "secretly;" I express them very vocally at every opportunity.

Raping cows at an industrial scale so we can drink their breast milk