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Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

Every time that I or a friend has ended up in an even mildly not-everyday financial situation there was IMMEDIATELY a scam waiting there.

Trading in a car? Last-minute they discount the trade-in value due to damage and hope you won't realize that's already counted in the KBB value.

Car's making a weird noise? The mechanic wants to replace your struts for 1800$ even though the sound is just from the brakes being worn down.

Inherited money in a trust? The trust manager calls you to "discuss your plans" and get you to let them manage the money without your ever seeing it.

Miss paying taxes in a state because you thought you didn't owe them anything because you didn't actually live there? I'm still getting fake letters that try to scare me into calling them even though the bill was cleared up. years ago.

That's just off the top of my head. I swear sometimes it seems like this whole country is build on scams. It's fucking depressing.

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You go in for a medical procedure. There are multiple entities that send you a bill, directly to you and also to your insurance. Normal practice seems like it is to wait and see what the insurance will cover, and after a reasonable amount of time (and getting a statement of benefits from the insurance), you pay the difference. Meanwhile you've been reported to the credit bureaus, so basically anyone can see that you had a recent medical procedure with potentially to-be-settled balances.

A couple years later you start getting calls from collection agents saying you owe money, often times only double-digit values. They hound you till you give in an pay it (after all, how can you verify something that was several years old?). All because when you went to the hospital billing clerk, they can't tell you how much you owe the third-party pharmacy, or the radiologist, or the independent anesthesiologist that bills you at some random time anywhere from 1 month to 3 years later.

You probably know this already, but for the general audience: you don't actually owe a debt to a collector if they can't prove to you that you owe it, and they're typically very bad at that. (See https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/the-waste-stream-of-c...)

It feels like everything here is predatory by some law of thermodynamics. Anything that moves must be powered by the exploitation of someone, and no change may happen without the simultaneous ratcheting up of some mechanism of extraction.

Profit has an inexorable tendency to decline, and thus the squeeze.

The hidden extra cost of sales tax and tip when you go to pay in America feels very much like a scam. I don't understand why the cost is not just exactly as advertised like everywhere else.

Because the entire nation has been brainwashed into believing that it's your responsibility as a customer to make sure someone else's employees are well compensated. It's literally the biggest scam going on currently in US, and you will get people(including here on HN) passionately defending it.

What's missing are transparency laws. Every business should give a breakdown on where cost for a service went. If that breakdown does not cover compensation to the employees then it should be illegal.

I was even more surprised to find out that delivery services don't pay tip to drivers on top of the agreed upon rate for their service. Instead the rate they're are paid is adjusted as per the tip provided so that the total amount of money they make remains the same per delivery.

It can only be considered a scam for the tourists, because everyone in America knows that prices in the menu are 30% less than the real prices, and mentally adjusts for it.

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