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Yeah it's real easy for a dentist to claim you have [issue] and how the gently caress would you know? Not exactly simple to stick a mirror in your mouth and identify cavities. My old family dentist tried to pull this poo poo on me and claimed I had four (!!!) cavities that were really bad and needed to be filled ASAP despite the fact that I was in zero pain. Thankfully both my parents and I were moving out of the area for various reasons, so I had an excuse to not schedule the filling and go get a second opinion from a dentist near my new place. Sure enough he found nothing and pointed out that I'd probably be in considerable pain while chewing if it had been the case. Thankfully the dentist is something you can mostly avoid as long as you're not a goon about dental hygiene, outside of uncontrollable poo poo like wisdom teeth. You can't really avoid mechanics unless you learn to wrench yourself or are incredibly lucky.
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Jan 31, 2019 23:07
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| # ¿ Oct 8, 2024 13:46 |
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 at "dentistry is more art than science." gently caress off with thinking that flies when your "art" costs thousands of dollars shitstain.
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Feb 1, 2019 05:15
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turns out government is the greatest scam of them all. makes you think.
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Feb 13, 2019 22:30
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Out of the blue I started getting 3-4 calls a day from the area code I lived in 10 years ago about very obvious credit scams. This despite my credit being very good and AFAIK not doing anything to wind up on a telemarketer list. It got so bad I downloaded a program from google play that lets me block entire area codes, because the fuckers would leave the exact same message in four separate calls every day, using a new phone number every time except for the area code.
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Feb 15, 2019 00:58
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Yeah I get about 2-3 of those pitches a year for natural gas resellers. It's super disingenuous too because half the time they're wearing PG&E badges despite having no affiliation with them. In my experience they also try really hard to make it sound like it's something that's already happening and just needs your approval, and hide that it's actually a transaction until the very last possible moment where you have to sign the contract that clearly states you're consenting to buying from a re-seller. I almost fell for it the first time it happened but alarm bells went off in my head when they said they needed me to call the number on the contract and then verbally confirm details on it with some rando. They got super lovely when they realized I was backing out too,.
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Feb 15, 2019 16:34
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Good routers don't need to be regularly rebooted. Cheap routers should probably be rebooted every so often. No router is "cleared of malware and spyware" from a regular reboot.
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Mar 10, 2019 10:05
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Either they were casing or it was a poorly thought out attempt to make some quick cash. Maybe they figured they could convince a couple morons to let them into the backyard to gently caress with cables for five minutes, before claiming their internet is now faster that'll be $250 please, cash only.
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Mar 29, 2019 19:46
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From least to most annoying: 1. Mormons: Still kinda pissed about the Prop 8 bullshit we had to endure for a bit here in California thanks to them but otherwise they're generally pretty chill. "No thank you, I'm quite happy in my current beliefs" and they go away 99% of the time. Used to tell them I was an Atheist but that just made them come back harder, so I've switched to vague language for convenience. 2. JW's: My roommate made the mistake of engaging with a pair once, and for the next month they'd show up every other loving day thinking they had an in when he was just trying to be nice. Outside that though they generally go away if asked, although sometimes they'll leave a pamphlet on my doorstep as they go even if I explicitly tell them not to. 3. Those loving people trying to sell me carpet cleaner, and insist on me letting them into my house so they can demo it on a patch of carpeting. Oh my god they will just not go away and will stand their insisting they be let in forever until I slam the door in their face. Had one couple who even after that stood their ringing the bell and knocking for another ten minutes before finally loving off.
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Apr 2, 2019 18:51
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peanut posted:My boss got a long email in English, spoofed to look like it was from the office email address. Hackers stole our passwords and recorded us jerking off to adult videos!!! No joke, we got the exact same emails at my work. Except they were in Japanese. Spoofed to look like they were coming from a Bay Area public transit agency. Maybe they mixed our emails up.  e: Here's what we got (with emails redacted): quote:Subject: ハッキングされています！ すぐにパスワードを変更してください！ Sydin fucked around with this message at 00:57 on May 16, 2019 |
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May 16, 2019 00:45
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Domus posted:What the heck do you do to protect the elderly from scam calls? There are apps that allow you to block all incoming calls that aren't from people on your contacts list, so if you have access to his phone you could always set that up and hope he doesn't notice.
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Jul 16, 2019 18:42
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One of the managers on the hiring committee I interviewed with flat out admitted to me that he searched for all my social media accounts (Facebook/Twitter/etc) but could only find my Linkedin, because that's honestly all I have
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Aug 24, 2019 07:34
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Tunicate posted:Friend of mine just got a fake publishers clearinghouse scam phonecall, promising the second place prize, 5 million dollars and a Mercedes Benz Should have asked what the first place prize was.
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Aug 28, 2019 22:40
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Captain Monkey posted:Casinos are fun, but it's just paid entertainment. If you keep that in mind, casinos change from 'scam and rip off!' to 'drink with your friends for a few hours playing a game'. It's an expensive diversion, but the odds for every single game are easily looked up, same with the lotto. I used to go to the casino and have fun, you just pull out x amount of money and consider it the cost of the evening. If you walk out with part of it, or more, then bonus. Otherwise, that was your entertainment for the night. Yeah this is 100% the mentality you have to have. My dad is really big into horse racing and we go as a family once a year for his birthday. Invariably he goes in with an attitude that he's going to win, ends up blowing more money than he planned to bet, and gets pissed off and depressed by the end of the night. Meanwhile my mom and I set aside x amount of dollars we plan to spend on the experience + food and drink, and budget our bets around that expecting to lose it all. If strike gold and come out winning more than you budgeted, that's great! If you just win a little bit, then hey you came in under budget! And if you lose every race, than whatever I spent $150 to hang out with my family for a day and drink, I've had way more expensive nights out that were less fun. Casinos are the same way. The trick too is to not re-invest your winnings into more gambling. If you come in with $200 and win on your first $10 bet, set it aside and play as if you only have $190 left.
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Sep 4, 2019 22:01
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I still get at least ten different "refinance your student loans!!!" letters a month from the same 2-3 companies. They've been sending them to me at this pace since graduation day over five years ago. I finished paying off my student loans this February. They're still sending me refinancing literature. I almost want to call them to tell them if only to save the trees, but on the other hand I don't want to waste one second of my life on them either.
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Sep 10, 2019 18:08
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Some woman changed her address to mine a few weeks ago and also signed up for some sort of USPS package tracking thing where she could see packages come to the house. Canceled this (USPS actually sent me card asking if it was me with instructions on how to cancel it) and have been marking all the mail arriving in her name with change of address stickers on them with "NOT AT THIS ADDRESS" and sending them back. Been watching my credit like a hawk have a camera watching my front porch, nothing out of the ordinary on either front. My mail is also delivered via a slot that empties into my locked garage, so it can't be flat out stolen (and I have a camera watching that too just in case). If it's an attempt at a scam, it appears to be a really poor attempt.
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Sep 17, 2019 21:32
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I assume you have but just in case: if you haven't already done so put a freeze on your credit with all of the big three credit providers ASAP. This will prevent anything new from being opened in your name while you sort through the mess and will hopefully cause the thieves to eventually move on.
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Sep 19, 2019 22:18
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Update on the lady who changed or had her address changed to mine a few months ago: after four visits to the post office to explain the situation and three clueless supervisors who said they'd "take care of it" followed by all the mail I dropped off to them showing back up in my mailbox the next day, the mail I'm getting for her seems to be winding down to 1-2 things a week. Highlight was about a week ago when I got at least six small package envelopes, all from China, which apparently contained hair clips according to their labels. I know some kind of scam is at least being attempted here, but I have no idea what it is. Again there's a slot on the side wall of my locked garage the mail person drops it into, and we have a camera watching our driveway regardless, so it's not like somebody just changed the mail to a location they could steal it from. I've also had nobody show up at my house to try to claim it and it's been months. I've been surrendering all the mail to the post office to be returned to sender. I just don't know. 
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Nov 1, 2019 17:25
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luxury handset posted:if you make gambling illegal then it just drives the market and the addicts underground, and it's one more vice to police This can't be emphasized enough. Humans want to gently caress, gamble, and alter their consciousness via drugs/alcohol/whatever. These are constants that permeate all cultures and time periods: it's just part of being human. This is why banning gambling, prostitution, or drugs/alcohol never works and just serves to create a thriving black market. You don't solve impoverished people wasting what little money they have gambling by banning gambling. You do it by fixing the flawed social and economic systems that create impoverished people in the first place.
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Nov 13, 2019 03:20
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Capitalism is a scam.
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Nov 13, 2019 19:09
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:Do you live in the one city in America where utilities aren't a monopoly? California has a thing where you can choose to buy natural gas from a third party seller. Usually the pitch is that you're buying it at a lower price than you would from your energy company, which is true, but if you do it then a) your energy company starts charging you a transmission price (since they're still the ones sending gas through your lines) and b) the third-party seller will usually charge a "procurement fee" or similar, and you'll end up paying more in totality than you would just sticking with your utility. I get 2-3 a year and they're always pretty aggressive salespeople. They also pretty much always wear PG&E badges even though they don't actually work for PG&E.
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Dec 2, 2019 17:44
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Dec 4, 2019 22:06
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SaaS is a nightmare for B2B as well unless you're a monolithic megacorp. My current job (a small local government agency) was using dropbox for a long time, when a couple years ago we went to renew and they hit us with "oh by the way your prices are going up by 40%." We kicked and screamed and they eventually backed down to "only" a 10% increase, but refused a long term contract that would lock in that rate. Sure enough next year rolls around and it's a 40% increase again, and this time they're not backing down! So we flipped the bird and switched to Sharepoint/Onedrive, since we're using O365 anyway at cushy government rates. Cue the announcement from Microsoft a few months later that they're completely overhauling their licensing structure, and this is good for you! And by "you", they mean huge megacorps of 100K+ licenses. Any lower than that and the stated price from Microsoft is final, no negotiation. Oh and they can raise it whenever they want, naturally. What do you do though? Our CIO essentially had to go in front of the governing board and say "The price of our O365 just doubled, we need the money or we're going to have no email, filesharing, or word processing ability when our current licenses run out." We're a very small, single-threaded agency so it's not like we have the resources to completely ditch O365 and spool up Gmail + Google Docs or something, and even if we did there's no guarantee Google won't pull the exact same poo poo on us as soon as we've bought in. They've all got us by the balls and they know it. I'm absolutely convinced Windows 11 or whatever they call it will be SaaS. Or at a minimum, will have an annual/semi-annual big version update that you have to pay for, and if you don't upgrade poo poo starts breaking real fast while you're bombarded with pop-ups about being out of date.
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Dec 27, 2019 22:01
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Sorry Kelly but you were a minute too late, and you know what they say the early bird gets the worm.
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Feb 20, 2020 01:01
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My favorite part about the whole Theranos fiasco is that after it all came to light and Holmes got charged she hired a big expensive team of super lawyers to defend her, but then a couple months later the legal team filed with the judge a statement to the effect of "Holmes hasn't paid us and we honestly have no reason to think that she's ever going to pay us, so please give us permission not to defend her any more" and the judge let them walk.
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Mar 3, 2020 19:22
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Reminds me of how back in the day Fry's Electronics paid their floor staff on commission, but swore up and down they actually didn't. It was obvious as day though because you couldn't walk two feet without an employee swooping in to ask you fifty time if you needed help with anything, and even if you insisted that no you did not they'd stalk you at a distance until they saw you pick something up off the shelf, at which point they'd run up to you and ask if you're buying it, and if so to please come to the closest sales desk with them so they can put a label on it. The label served no purpose to the customer: you could take anything up to the register without one and buy it just fine, it just put that associate's name on it so they got commission. It made shopping at Fry's absolutely insufferable. I told this story in an old GBS thread but ~15 years ago or so I went to Fry's to buy a specific video card, went up to first sales associate I could find in the parts section and asked if they had it. He said he'd check and went back into the warehouse, but another employee was in earshot and - know there were some on the shelf - ran over to grab me one, then started putting his label on it. First guy comes back with another card from the back, sees what the other guy has done, and gets into a huge screaming fight with him about stealing his customer. After a couple minutes of this I just picked the box up off the desk and started walking towards the register, at which point first guy hastily prints out his own label and chases me to the other side of the store to beg me to let him take the other guy's label off and put his on. So yeah sales commission is in fact a scam.
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Jul 14, 2020 22:15
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My roommate worked for doordash for a couple years and yeah they're insane. I guess there are some stores that won't/can't go through Doordash's usual payment system, so instead of you paying doordash, doordash forwarding that money sans fees on to the restaurant, and the dasher just picking up the order, the dasher has to use a credit card given to them by Doordash preloaded with money to pay for it at pickup. Well multiple times they forgot to reload the card and my roommate wouldn't be able to pay for the food, and each time support would tell him "oh well then use your own card and we'll reimburse you." It eventually happened enough times (and a few instances where they "forgot" to reimburse him and he had to hound them for it) that he put his foot down and the support person told him that if he didn't pay with his own card and complete the order they'd deactivate his app (ie: fire him).
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Oct 23, 2020 22:08
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I asked the head manager at a place I used to frequent often before COVID what Doordash takes from them, and he told me that it's apparently something you bargain with them. Doordash originally came at them demanding a 25% cut but they were able to negotiate it down to 18%. Note that this is a well liked and frequented business that has three locations in town and is in the process of opening a fourth up north. So my guess is that if you're a small mom and pop then gently caress you either you eat 25% or they walk, if you're reasonably successful you can hover around ~20%, and I'd imagine national chains are even lower then that.
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Oct 23, 2020 22:24
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There's a huge amount of tactics used by gig workers to game the system and get more orders, and AFAIK most of the companies don't care as long as the food/groceries/people/etc get to where they're supposed to go and they get their money with minimal complaints. There was a story from a couple months ago where people doing Whole Foods deliveries were buying additional burner phones linked to their main phone and hanging them in trees near the store, so that they could pick up multiple orders at once and do them all in bulk for something actually approaching pay you could eat with. If you didn't do this then you'd be lucky to get an order an hour, at which point you're at the mercy of the order size and the person tipping (some of which all these gig companies still steal even after there was a big public outcry over it and they promised they'd stop) to even break even doing the job. This is also a factor of there just being a huge glut of out of work or underemployed people right now who are trying to supplement their income, and even with shelter in place there just aren't enough orders to go around.
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Oct 29, 2020 18:23
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Collateral Damage posted:The proliferation of gig jobs is a way for companies to game worker protections, so I'm perfectly fine with workers gaming the gig job systems.  Sorry if it came off like I was giving them poo poo, if anything it's loving sad that they have to jump through so many hoops just for the system to pay them something approaching a workable wage.BiggerBoat posted:Maybe a dumb question but why do they have to hang the burner phones in trees? So that it looks like they are close to the pickup location and idle. You hang a bunch of phones in trees, go do an order, come back and pick up all the phones and hope you have multiple orders, do all of those in bulk, rinse repeat.
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Oct 30, 2020 19:28
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BiggerBoat posted:What now? I actually got two $15 checks from my insurance last week because I somehow overpaid, even though the only thing I paid out of pocket were co-pays.
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Nov 10, 2020 18:39
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My last car purchase was surreal because it was from a small used auto dealer and the owner was either the chillest car salesman on the planet or on zanax, maybe both. Asked to test drive a couple and he'd just give me the keys without asking to hold any kind of collateral or even copy my ID, finally narrowed down on one I wanted and asked about the price, he goes "yeah that's the full price, I've already added all the fees and stuff in. I'd also really rather not haggle if that's alright with you." Asked how I'd be paying and when I said cash he gives me a thumbs up. When I went back the next day to actually do the purchase I was in and out in under 30 minutes. I was so weirded out by the whole experience that I had a mild panic that I'd been sold a lemon and rushed it to my mechanic the next day for a once over, but he tells me nah it's in great condition. So uh, yeah, if you're ever in the Bay Area check out Green Light Auto I guess.
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Dec 1, 2020 21:33
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Thanatosian posted:You're thinking of children as people instead of chattel property. We actually have signed it, we just refuse to be a party to it. Which is incredibly on brand for the USA and allows us to go "hey look see we totally support this human rights treaty!" but then we get called on the awful poo poo we do like sentencing children as adults we can throw up our hands and go "well hey hold on now, we never actually agreed to be bound by the text of the treaty, we just support it!" 
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Dec 23, 2020 03:22
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e. ^ lol beaten I did my last two years of HS at a sort of hybrid campus with the local community college, and on every single billboard were flyers to work for Vector. $15 an hour! They'll hire anybody! Great way to start building a resume! None of the flyers actually said what the job was, just that it paid well and they'd give work to people without job experience. It actually wasn't too big a draw on our campus because we were five minutes away from a major theme park that voraciously hired teenagers to staff the place, but I'm sure in places lacking in easy first time job opportunities it's an incredible honey trap. You can skim the wikipedia article I linked but in brief, they're an MLM marketing wing of a cutlery company, and the "job" is to push their poo poo. I did have a friend who tried it highlights I heard from her include: 1. Their "Regional HQ" was a tiny office rented out of building in the local Industrial Park, and had functionally zero signage or visible presence. 2. They did hire you no questions asked, but they then made you travel to and sit through hours and hours of training that you were naturally not reimbursed for. 3. You had to buy your own demo kit, which was fairly pricy (apparently this has changed per the article). 4. While you could get $15/hour, you could also choose to be fully commission-based instead, and this was heavily pushed on applicants. If you adamantly refused to accept switching to commission, they'd quickly turn around and fire you. 5. You had a fairly rigorous sales quota, and what passed for management pretty aggressively advocated for selling to friends and family to meet it. If you failed to meet quota for a couple weeks you would be fired. Unsurprisingly, this lead to my friend selling knives to her parents and a couple extended family members, then quickly failing to meet quota and being shown the door. The money she mad on commission didn't even cover the cost of the demo kit they made her buy (technically it was a "security deposit" but her manager decided she had ruined the set somehow while demoing and so they refused to refund her) and left her a depressed wreck for quite a while.  And yeah for the brief time period she was doing it all she could talk about in conversation was how good Cutco knives are and asking all of us if we could set up time with our parents for her to give pitches to them. The sad part is if anything, it's a more merciful MLM because they just quickly milk you for some easy cash and then cut and run, as opposed to stringing you along indefinitely like Amway.
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Jan 5, 2021 19:50
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BiggerBoat posted:Well, they're not entirely wrong in many respects. Its just that signing up for loving Amway or any MLM is not the loving solution. Exactly, and that's what makes MLM's so insidious. There is absolutely a growing group of people who are trapped in a situation where they work multiple jobs for menial pay just to keep food on the table and a roof over their head, usually with a family to support. Between multiple jobs and no savings they're left with no time, energy, or money to invest in education or training that could help elevate them out of that situation, and at a point it must feel like an inescapable, suffocating trap. Particularly if there are kids involved, stopping you from even entertaining the notion of just walking away from it all and living out of your car or something while you try to pivot to a better life. In such a situation successful people swooping in and telling you that yes, you are in fact getting a bum deal, and they have the solution that can break this horrible, endless cycle and give you and your family a better life must be very difficult to turn down. As others have mentioned MLM's also pretty much always immediately bring you into seminars and meetings with other people who are like you, which gives a feeling of inclusiveness and purpose. It is all the terrible psychological tactics used by religious cults, just replace "cleansing the soul" or "moving on to paradise" or whatever with "not being one minor financial crunch away from homelessness."
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Jan 5, 2021 23:50
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Apple is also one of the major companies up there with John Deere lobbying to prevent stronger right to repair legislation.
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Feb 9, 2021 00:36
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BiggerBoat posted:What's the reasoning behind this? Because Apple fosters an almost cult-like consumer culture where your choice to embrace Apple products is a lifestyle. It's part of your identity and provides a sense of self-worth. This is why you have tons of people who can barely afford to pay rent still lining up every year to trade up for the new iPhone or Apple Watch. This is also why Apple does not want you to be able to repair old devices, but rather make you take them into the Apple store where an employee can push a newer, shinier phone while you're surrounded by newer, shinier phones you can play around with while you wait. Apple was already found guilty of pushing updates that intentionally degraded the quality and battery life of older models of iPhones in an attempt to force people to upgrade out of frustration. Their business model and sky-high valuation are entirely reliant on a yearly buying cycle and people realizing they could just hang on to the same iPhone for even just two or three years would massively eat into their profits.
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Feb 9, 2021 21:44
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Space Gopher posted:7/10. Pharmaskittle posted:Anyway, none of this is strictly limited to Apple, they're just the biggest name that people want to talk about. I'm sure Samsung doesn't love it when you repair your own phone either, they just calculated that it wasn't worth it to do much to prevent it. Yeah plenty of companies try to lock consumers into similar cycles, check out what John Deere does to farmers.
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Feb 10, 2021 04:46
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Popoff is still at it too, he just laid low for a couple years after the earpiece fallout before coming back with a different miracle healing scam and is once again rich as gently caress entirely off the back of fraud.
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Mar 12, 2021 03:24
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Yeah my roommate used to have an unmodded, manual Honda Civic and he'd get like 3-4 of those a month. Two different times I was leaving for work and somebody came up to me on the driveway to ask if the Civic was my car and if it was for sale.
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Apr 13, 2021 01:34
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I'm legit going to use this in my next "examples of phishing" mailer I have to send around the company, thank you.
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Apr 15, 2021 04:00
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