I’m just a regular person making about $70K a year in a big city, and I’ve recently felt incredibly powerless dealing with private companies. For instance, my landlord’s auto-pay system had a glitch that excluded my pet rent and water bill. I ended up with over $1,000 in late fees. Despite hours on the phone, it turns out their system doesn’t really do auto-pay and requires a fixed amount instead of covering the full rent. It feels like a scam, and my options are to pay the fees or potentially spend a fortune on legal action.
Another frustrating experience was trying to cancel my pest control service. I had to endure a 40-minute call followed by 35 minutes of arguing, just to finally cancel. There’s no online cancellation option, and the process felt like a timeshare sales pitch.
Why do ordinary people seem so unprotected against these shady practices, and how can we change this? How does one person even start to address these issues?
No it’s not, that’s zero sum owner class propaganda designed to force us to waste energy competing with our peers instead of fighting the rich bastards
Humans have created a haven away from ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ where we DON’T have to compete with each other, and mutualism without profit is possible, it is literally the greatest achievement of our species, to short circuit natural selection.
In human culture, the weak and sick don’t have to be sacrificed for the good of the whole, and we can support a wide and diverse service and goods structure BECAUSE we have moved on from natural selection.
The problem is, predatory practices are often more rewarding short term than cooperative practices, and humans are geared for short term planning.
You get more food now for killing the farmer and taking his cattle, but you get more food for everyone forever if you let that farmer prosper.
Bandits kill the farmer, they are the ones telling you it is a dog eat dog world.
The farmer will tell you that the world is full of bounty if you put the effort in to cultivate it.
Yes a bandit uses less energy, and has more short term profit, but degrades the entire total outcome of the system by their greed.
This doesn’t change the fact that when no social safety net exists one must construct their own safety nets. That’s my point. We can talk all we want about how broken the systems are and how we would fix them if given the power to, but ultimately we have to live and survive. Use the good times to better prepare yourself to weather the bad, because good luck getting help from the government or corporations to do so
Which is why I support food shoplifting and radical community cooperation.
Also why it’s a tragedy that so much of this site is anti-religious, because churches were the original social safety net.
Religion has an organizing and empathizing trend, and I think it is a mistake to consider a secular society as better for the average human.