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Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
101–110 of 114 posts
Re: Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
#102I’m guessing you are relatively young, because what you are seeing isn’t a significant change on society, but rather a change in yourself, or to be more specific a change in how others perceive you. In fact I’m willing to bet you’re ~27-28 years old, because what you are seeing is your profile getting moved from the 18-25 market segment to the 26-35 segment. The scams where always there, it’s just that people thought…
I might argue differently. I am regularly shown how to start day trading and starting my own ecommerce site that makes 30k a month with no effort needed on Youtube regularly. These guys aren't looking for intelligent people. Youtube profiled me as a pure dumbass, and it might have to do with all the Rogan videos I watch. Just watch a few minutes of this: https://www.digitalpodcastmillionaire.com/episode13 These are t…
> These guys aren't looking for intelligent people.
Never said they were.
They’re likely looking for men, specially young (but old enough to have some savings), middle class (so you have a high enough paying job), preferably single, and even better with low to no financial know how.
Re: Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
#103Scams are increasingly common. "Since when" is, say, sometime in the past 10 years.
It's partly due to technology completely removing barriers to entry and providing global and powerful amplification, coupled with sociocultural "bonkers insanity" (a technical term) where almost everything has become an advertise or a performance or etc, which has its own effect of lowering barriers and amplification.
The feedback loops there just accelerate it.
It's not new (watch any set of TV infomercials, or most of what happens on QVC or Home Shopping Network or whatever the equivalents to these things are today) but there really is more of it, and they're getting better at it, as above.
Technology + Humans. IMO.
Re: Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
#104Scams are increasingly common. "Since when" is, say, sometime in the past 10 years. It's partly due to technology completely removing barriers to entry and providing global and powerful amplification, coupled with sociocultural "bonkers insanity" (a technical term) where almost everything has become an advertise or a performance or etc, which has its own effect of lowering barriers and amplification. The feedback loo…
I mean, it isn't a "scam", but I for one would love to never again have someone invite me out to lunch like they want to hang out as friends, only to discover they're just trying to get me to buy something.
Extremely rare occurrence before the last 10 years of influencer hustle culture. Now, not so much.
Re: Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
#105TIL: not everyone on HN uses an ad blocker.
I don’t. Instead I use a /etc/hosts file. Much better imo, because I don’t have some external script that has access to the content and input of all my web pages.
Best to use both. uBlock Origin does more than block IPs.
For YouTube, I also highly recommend SponsorBlock.
Re: Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am an atheist ex-Catholic. The big atheist-leftist crowd in my college town are intensely more violent, toxic, and racist than local Catholics or Lutherans. Lack of religious belief is no guarantee of kindness or rationality, nor is the presence of faith a strong signal of evil.
I am Italian… raised catholic… my high school was owned and managed by the church… and I am an atheist as well! An I can tell you that in my country the problem are the believers not the atheists! The presence of faith implies you are willing to outsource your moral compass to what a bunch of primitive men belived to be right
When it comes to value systems that have stood the test of time and have well-understood failure modes vs. whatever hot new theory was cooked up on Twitter or Tumblr last week (the main vectors for recent moral changes in my country), I generally prefer the former.
Re: Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your painting the right as "no taxes" I think they'd paint as "quit wasting money". As an example, SF has the highest tax revenue per capita in the USA https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/slideshows/us-cities-with... So why is it so dysfunctional? My guess is the right would say because so much is wasted on the wrong things. Note: I'm not saying the right is correct. I'm only suggesting a different interpretation of t…
Everyone thinks that something they don't want to pay for is a "waste of money". When that something that you want to quit spending money on can be characterized as "other people who I don't identify with", you get the right. SF is a mess because of liberal mismanagement (I say that as someone who identifies as left). Spending money at massive scale without asking the people you're spending money on to fix something…
Not from a government perspective, but does anyone want to 'quit spending money' on anything anymore? I find that as a society we've become addicted to spending on stuff and we never cut back spending on anything anymore.
I don't know if the majority agrees but we've all become addicted to e-commerce spending. The number of shoes is not counted in number of total shoes owned but number of shoes bought per month. A stock metric vs a flow metric.
Everybody has a vague idea that they're addicted but nobody seems to want to acknowledge it or even track it.
It's almost as if cutting frivolous spending is no longer a virtue.
Sorry if that's a rant.
Re: Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
#108The world is a business, Mr Beale
Re: Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
#109Scams are increasingly common. "Since when" is, say, sometime in the past 10 years. It's partly due to technology completely removing barriers to entry and providing global and powerful amplification, coupled with sociocultural "bonkers insanity" (a technical term) where almost everything has become an advertise or a performance or etc, which has its own effect of lowering barriers and amplification. The feedback loo…
I mean, it isn't a "scam", but I for one would love to never again have someone invite me out to lunch like they want to hang out as friends, only to discover they're just trying to get me to buy something. Extremely rare occurrence before the last 10 years of influencer hustle culture. Now, not so much.
> Extremely rare occurrence before the last 10 years of influencer hustle culture. Now, not so much.
You must not have been arount > 10 years ago ... see Amway, tupperware, etc.
https://www.history.com/news/tupperware-parties-brownie-wise
Such an old story it is in the "history" section.
Re: Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am Italian… raised catholic… my high school was owned and managed by the church… and I am an atheist as well! An I can tell you that in my country the problem are the believers not the atheists! The presence of faith implies you are willing to outsource your moral compass to what a bunch of primitive men belived to be right
When it comes to value systems that have stood the test of time and have well-understood failure modes vs. whatever hot new theory was cooked up on Twitter or Tumblr last week (the main vectors for recent moral changes in my country), I generally prefer the former.
You mean the value system that got us the dark ages, people burned at the stakes for “heresy” (or hanged, or many other form of death), silenced people because what they were saying was against what is written in a non particularly good fantasy novel (aka the Bible), caused all kind of toxic behaviours in families and communities if someone was not following stupid rules in the aforementioned book. And the alternative is not embracing every stupid trend appearing on the internet… ethics is a topic philosophers have been engaging for more than 2 millennia!