Why does everything have to be such a fucking scam?
this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2026
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Scams improve GDP
I'm not an economist, but this is probably technically true
GDP measures the value of all goods and services produced in a country. A legal scam can hide as a service and get counted.
This is why cars are good for GDP but mass transit isn’t, because a lot more cost goes into a car than a bus on a per rider basis.
The same goes for health insurance. Simply paying a doctor for services is far less GDP than paying an insurance company who then pays the doctor after taking a cut.
Once you realize what GDP measures a lot of what countries do makes sense.
if i burn down your house, the gdp grows, because lot of people now have work rebuilding it.
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A 300MM Ferrari and a 300MM new hospital generate the same GDP.
I remember this discussed in my economics class 20y ago.... Whether housewives work should be in GDP. One would hope economists move forward from there.
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Because the FTC has been regulatory-captured.
Because: "fuck you!" that's why!
aka: uncontrolled late stage capitalism
It's capitalism
again
Because capitalism
For real: Because it's been too long since people rose up and killed a bunch of corrupt shitheads.
Airlines ABSOLUTELY change their prices if you repeatedly check routes to a city. I have watched them change by over $100 over a few hours a day when contemplating a trip using their flight searches.
I now do all the flight route and time checking with a browser private window, no location being served, and VPN with an exit far from where I am, then use a phone on a cellular network to do any booking or vice versa in order to prevent tracking or some sort of identifying hash they might grab.
It's such a cheapass scam to basically gouge a customer based on interest.
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JetBlue is hardly the first airline to fall into the limelight for potentially changing its prices based on a user’s browser history.
The Federal Trade Commission has studied surveillance pricing methods since 2024, and found retailers often used people’s personal information to set individualized pricing information. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said he “directed staff to start examining” if new disclosure rules are needed by companies during a Senate Commerce Committee earlier this month.
or, OR... We could ban the fuckery
The best I can do is give tariff refunds to companies and fuck over the lower class.
Earn $10B doing illegal stuff, settle with the FTC for a $10 million dollar fine and don't have to admit wrongdoing and/or a deferred prosecution agreement with no teeth or oversight.
Fine is seen as a cost of doing business
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According to a California audit last month which analyzed open network traffic across more than 7,600 popular websites scanned from California, over half (55%) of sites set advertising cookies even after users explicitly rejected them. More than three-quarters (78%) of consent banners failed to enforce the user’s choice at all, while Google ignored 86% of opt-out requests.
Not surprised. Always book tickets in private browsing, preferably with a VPN. Expect to get upcharged otherwise.
In countries that are not the US, they just don't stand for that shit and make it illegal.
You're not wrong, but we don't all have the capability to move to another country, for both legal and financial reasons.
We're not saying Americans should move somewhere else; we're saying Americans (collectively) need to fix their broken ass country, looking at others for inspiration.
Easier said than done OFC.
I am going to vote unlike millions of Americans who don’t
They say you can't be arrested for anything you do in a voting booth. There's a dude who smokes a joint every election as a protest and to prove a point. I plan to just sit down and cry when I get my turn in the booth.
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It's easier to move
Ideally that would be the case but there's non-US countries that also have this shit unfortunately.
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Good on that JetBlue employee for showing a level of empathy. They were probably fired for it, but at least they went out with a bang.
I am going to run for Congress in 2028, and my entire platform is going to be built around making it legal to Luigi corrupt people and burn down corrupt businesses.
This shit is not going to stop until we get bloody.
I think Amazon does this shit too and uber
Oh Uber absolutely does this! I drive for them occasionally, and sometimes I'll see price hike a little and not for very long. Then I tried to use it one time drunk at a bar ~2 miles away. Checking back and forth for about an hour or went from ~$70 to ~$30. And shocker, the driver said he was only getting a few bucks on the surge premium.
one time i saw uber was $60 bc i was in downtown so i walked into a residential area and it dropped to $30. the driver came from downtown to pick me up.
I once bought a couple copies of a book as an inside joke for a couple friends.
It was not at all a popular book, I can pretty much guarantee that you've never heard of it or it's writer, and odds are you'd probably hate it if you did ever read it.
I think when I bought them they were going for about $5 a pop.
And immediately after I ordered them the price shot up to like $15
I can only assume that the algorithm assumed that something happened that made that book popular all of a sudden, instead of just one asshole buying a couple copies to give to his asshole friends as a joke.
Took a few months before the price dropped down again.
Was the book Ulrich Haarbürste's Novel of Roy Orbison in Clingfilm?
My answer to this is always "I opened an incognito window, effectively the same thing"
That didn't matter for me recently. On a site, flights in cart, looked at rental car for <5 minutes and the outbound flights jumped ~$60/ticket in that time "due to demand" when the flight was 80%empty...
Got on my phone, on data (so new browser, new IP) still prices are higher. Hopped on my old phone over VPN to change region, checked out a different leave date, checked a couple, went back to my original date and flights were $40 cheaper (so still $20 more than before) but they gotta know based on Geo IP and time of inquiries it's probably all the same person, smh.
What a scam!!
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I haven’t had this happen to me with European airlines I think. Is there maybe some law forcing them to keep steady prices? From what I’ve seen (though I don’t fly that often) prices don’t really fluctuate and just rise with more demand, with some last minute tickets going for pennies.
If you check on a flight regularly it will show you a different price. That increase you are seeing is your own interest raising it.
Never accept cookies, use blockers
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