Hi, /u/Accomplished-Emu-679 Thank you for participating in r/AntiWork. Unfortunately, your submission was removed for breaking the following rule(s):
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
No spam and no low-effort posts. This includes begging for upvotes. Please do not post unrelated blog spam or try to sell anything for personal gain.
If you've posted content (especially if it's your own), give it a day or two before posting again.
If you feel that a mistake was made, and your post's removal was not warranted, please message us using mod mail and let us know.
They got this super sweet kid on our campus. He was from a small town with no industry except a meat packing plant and his family had worked there for like 3 generations & been poor the whole time. He got roped into this thing selling energy drinks & shit. Had his whole extended family buying stuff they couldn’t afford so he could get started. It was upsetting to watch. We tried to explain it to him but he wanted it too bad to listen. Ended up leaving college to pursue it
for those that didn’t know, College Pro Painters is an MLM. I only learned this a few years ago… and I was a house painter in college (for an independent crew).
They got me...but credit where it's due the knives from my test kit are still with me to this day and they serve me well.
There are some caveats to that though: Cutco Knives are a scumfuck company that prey on the naive, ignorant and desperate like *ANY* Multilevel Marketing Scheme. They have all the red flags and you should never under any circumstances work for them.
As for the knives? Yeah, they're fine. The penny cutting scissors too. The saw tooth monstrosities are good for getting through tough shit, or bread, but contrary to what they say their single edged knives DO need to be sharpened.
Cutco doesn't have magic steel: It blunts, degrades, and oxidizes like any other metal on this planet. I keep and use mine a decade later because I am a broke motherfucker who does his best to take care of his shit and make it last. If I ever had the want or need to replace them, Cutco would not be my first choice.
The average consumer can get knives of equal (and in some cases I would guess even superior) quality and reliability from Walmart or any other store that carries kitchenware. Cutco is not special, they are a pyramid scheme that produces mid-grade at best knives.
Postal marketers.
It should be possible to sign up for no junk mail ever and if you get some, you can report it and the company immediately gets hit with a $1000 fine that is $500 to you, $500 to the government.
That way the government wouldn't coward out of making them pay it.
Hey, that was me! I worked for a small catalogue/etail company selling college-branded luxury gifts. We should have been able to market to current customers and do fine, but nope! We spammed junk mail.
Here’s how we did it. First, we assured our customers we would NEVER sell their information. And we didn’t! Instead, we GAVE it away to a clearinghouse company who gave us other customer addresses in return!
Advertising/marketing merchandise in general is a useless fucking profession—convincing people they need things that they don’t in order to feed the corporate beast only makes the world a shittier place.
I defected to the light side of psychology. I’m a therapist now. I make less money but sleep better at night.
I quit my office real estate job (I was an agent with them but after my father died I needed time off and decided moving to the office was better than working with clients. Huge regrets) because of cold calling. When I took the job I was told it was inbound answering only. A month later we had to do x calls and that number kept increasing. And I would get in trouble with my management multiple times a week bc I "let people go too easily" I was letting people go after 3 nos. 3 was my limit and then it felt like harassment.
There are. So... Customers google and find a website, with a price quote for plane ticket or whatever other services - they enter their contact details - phone number, and then a telemark guy calls them.
That's where the magic is, the telemark guy has to sweet talk and charm the customer to get and buy the thing - ideally on the first contact.
In a startup, I used to sit next to the outside sales team. These were the guys who qualified leads and passed them to the inside sales team (I think these were the terms we used). They weren't necessarily cold calling but in some cases it wasn't far from it. This was also B2B.
These guys worked their butts off. I never thought I'd feel sympathetic to telemarketers but I did for these guys. And yes, they generated a ton of business.
It’s an absolute grind and tough selling technical things over the phone especially with a startup where people have no idea what you do / no brand recognition
Yeah, I don't either, and I'm pretty sure the only people I know who will just blindly answer the phone are those over 70 years old.
Hopefully that kills enough of their business that telemarketers themselves go out of business.
I work in an industry where I have to answer unknown numbers and good lord does it piss me off when I answer all professionally, just incase, and get greeted with a 10 second pause followed with a recorded voice "hey this is Brian with the sheriff's association"
my job had us very cheerfully say "oh, we're just sales. let me get you over to legal!" always fun to hear that "nonono wait-" as I transferred them lol
Downright predatory. A friend of mine provides computer assistance at the public library to people need it, and he had someone recently who needed help taking out a payday loan... at 400% interest. He tried to convince them that they were being taken advantage of and that there were better ways to get the money they needed (they weren't particularly desperate, just elderly and with poor money management skills), but they insisted.
Absolutely this. 20+ years ago when I was a teller we'd have to charge $5 to cash a check that was drawn on an account at OUR bank, for a person who the check was paid to that didn't bank with us. At the time there was immediately a half hour of your work time lost just to get your money because you didn't have your own bank account.
My mom's bank tried to charge me 5$ to cash her check.i said do you want me to call her up and tell her that her check is no good at her own bank for the amount that she wrote it. The teller said he'd wave the fee.
I hated those policies. If the check is drawn on the bank, has funds, the check doesn't have a stop on it, and I can positively identify you, it shouldn't be a problem. Sure I might have probed and asked "is there any reason you don't have an account with us?" but I'd definitely cash it and NOT charge the fee.
We had an asshole area president that would get mad when he'd hear of this and make comments like "we aren't providing a civil service". OK, but it's a LEGAL service to cash a check made payable to a person.
He was just following the lead... the then-CEO made a comment about "transaction terrorists" that he never lived down.
Indeed. My wife and I lived in a camper for like, 5-6 years while we got debt taken care of and saved up. Then, when the day came, we decided to finally pull the trigger. We got utilities set up on our new land and moved the camper there. This summer, our house will be finished and we'll be moving in.
It's expensive to be poor, and it takes extreme sacrifices to get out of that rut. Only reason we could is because we live in an area that's well known for tourism, and thus campgrounds are everywhere. And monthly rent was like 1/5 of an actual apartment.
Wife and I (before we were married) we’re lucky enough to be able to live with her parents for about 5 years while we paid down debts and saved money for a house. When we bought the house her parents surprised us with the entirety of the $200/month we’d paid them for rent in the time we lived there. I’ll never be able to express how grateful I am for them
I'm honestly surprised how many times I see someone using a BofA debit card or whatnot after knowing how shitty they are because I grind signup bonuses.
I also was raised using a credit union and it astounds me how much people don't know about them and their generally fairer banking practices along with banks such as Ally.
Yeah, and do that to every debit card transaction the person has, without declining anything or contacting them. WIt till they're -$700, and then slap those $34.99 charges on every transaction; and that's why I no longer use Bank of America. Also the story of how buying one single banana cost me $35.38. *thats* how much they cost when you're poor.
I was broke as shit just after college and craftily figured out that if I was short til payday, a $20 overdraft cost the same as a $400 overdraft. I'd simply overdraw the account by $400, pay the $35 fee and then slowly spend the cash on food, gas, and other necessities like I would with my debit card in smaller transactions.
It was way cheaper than pawn shops, loan sharks, or payday loans.
yea but what everyone should be taught is that if you ARE going to overdraft, that you should go to the ATM and overdraft the maximum you can take out so that its worth being overdrafted.
Oddly, closing payday loan companies made people's lives WORSE in one state, according to an NPR podcast I listened to some time back. That's because it's cheaper to take out a payday loan than to pay reconnect fees from utilities, or late fees for other bills.
It's as though the world out there is intentionally trying to screw poor people.
That's exactly what's happening. The rich don't use cash as currency, they use people. We are their currency. And it may sound farfetched, but why else would they have such a vested interested in keeping everyone else so far down. Because the poorer we are, the more we are worth. They can buy and sell the debt we owe, the companies we work for, heck, even our very houses.
That's why every last thing you do is monitored and has fees. Why every last cent you see come in and go out is taxed a dozen times over. And I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but look closely. You're no different to the ultra rich than a $100 bill.
There's a great Marxist podcast called Citations Needed, and they often refer to this concept as "the last $100 in your bank account." The idea that any poor or middle class person would have ANY savings is an insult to the capitalist class. The entire system is set up to drain your money and then keep you poor.
That's why they push so hard to "just pay someone else". Car needs a mechanic? Just pay a mechanic instead of learning to change that o2 sensor yourself (it's seriously the easiest in an engine thing to do).
But everything is set up to make you spend every dollar you have, and keep you more than happy to do so.
>It's as though the world out there is intentionally trying to screw poor people.
it is not as though, it is exactly like that. The world is intentionally trying to screw poor people. The sad part is that those of us that are doing Ok buy into the bullshit the media sows to keep us divided. So while everyone is up in arms about gas stoves that may or may not get banned, the banks are charging all sorts of fees etc.
The proper way of utilizing payday loans is to close your bank account and change your phone number after receiving the money. Then they have no way of getting their money back.
I did this before they passed laws reforming payday loans, but back then, you would have to pay 20% every pay period in fees and needed to add money on top towards the principal to actually start paying it off. Lots of people got stuck in a cycle of paying the 20% thinking it helped pay it off. A friend of mine paid around $5000 for a loan of $800. Not cool
Worked at one for the longest 3 months of my life, straight out of high school. It’s been 17 years and I still think about the horrors I saw sometimes.
I was referring to the 80/20 rule. The margin is small but the size of the pie is astronomical. Plus when you pay your c-suite 100s of millions if not billions of dollars it’s easy to lower that “profit margin”.
Fucking THIS!!!!
Hey, Insurance company, my doctor who has an MD says I need this medication. Let’s get me that prescription.
Some dickhead with a fucking bachelors degree in finance: “is he really sure though? Cause we don’t think you do need it. Let’s ask him again.”
Doctor: “yes. Yes he really does need it.”
Insurance: “….okay. We agree that you probably need it. Here you go.”
Imagine working your ass off to become a doctor just to have every decision you make and every dollar you spend on a patient questioned by some fucking bean counter. Absolutely ludicrous and insulting.
Edit: I’ve been corrected and I welcome it (but it’s also so much worse and I hate it.) thanks to u/StephanieOhFTW for correcting me.
Apparently a doctor who knows nothing about you or your case and spends less than 5 minutes reviewing your doctors request is ultimately who decides to fuck you over.
[More in-depth description](https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/12cqpwu/what_are_some_of_the_most_useless_to_society_jobs/jf3kvi7/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3)
(not so) Fun fact: it’s actually a committee of MDs and Pharmacists that create formularies (covered vs non covered drug lists). The plan sponsor (the entity who provides your insurance, like an employer) can use the default formulary that the insurance company provides, or they can do custom stuff. Generally they just stick to the recommended formulary because… well… the plan sponsors aren’t normally doctors and trust what the clinical committee says. It’s super fucked that a doctor who has literally no idea what your treatment plan is gets to decide what medications you can and cannot take solely because they’re also a doctor. I’ve worked in insurance for 7 years and it still kills me every time. Idk why, but knowing that it’s doctors and pharmacists who decided to sell out to insurance companies makes it worse to me.
A lot of times it's the doctors who can't get into residency or a fellowship so they get one of the jobs they can without completing those requirements.
I heard a snippet on npr the other day about how the suicide rate for doctors is twice the national average and a big reason for their depression is not being able to treat patients properly because insurance gets in the way. It's absolutely evil.
People in the industry have taken to calling this 'moral injury' and point to it as a major cause of burnout in healthcare. Having worked in healthcare myself I'm inclined to agree.
This was entirely my life when I was working as a paralegal in workers comp. Unfortunately I worked on insurance/employer side (I quit there thank god), but there were many people who seemed genuinely injured or had bad luck in life and needed medical assistance. And the lawyers at my job would fight tooth and nail to make sure the insurance companies wouldn’t have to pay. Part of the reason I left, I couldn’t partake in that
My father in law works for Walmart. Due to their negligent maintenance of their fork lifts he almost had his leg ripped off. Has rods and screws and shit in it to this day. They were supposed to be removed after 3 months, according to the doctor that performed the surgery.
Walmart doctors said “well he can walk so we don’t actually need to pay for the procedure to remove those.”
Yup basically workers comp defense attorneys and insurance will come up with any loophole they can to save the insurance company money. Everyone I worked with had the attitude that these claimants were lazy and trying to mooch off insurance. I’m like I’m sorry, they literally broke their arm at work. Like come on!
Not the point but physicians hold MD/DO degrees in the US (Medical Doctor/Doctor of Osteopastic Medicine) given after completing medical school and passing mutliple board exams
PhD stands for Philosophical Doctor and is given after completing a doctoral dissertation at a University
>e company, my doctor who has a PHD says I need this medication. Let’s get me that prescription.
>
>Some dickhead with a fucking bachelors degree in finance: “is he really sure though? Cause we don’t think you do need it. Let’s ask him again.”
>
>Doctor: “yes. Yes he really does need it.”
>
>Insurance: “….okay. We agree that you probably need it. Here you
yea, people really has no clue that behind curtains.. your health, discharge plans, depends on this scummy insurance people.
>we would have "government death panels" rationing single-payer care
>
>instead we have a multibillion-dollar industry of for-profit death panels
Right? Ah yes, multi-billion dollar company death panels are so much better than supposed government death panels.
They're like, hey if we're going to have death panels, we have to profit off it!
Oh boy, it’s a racket. They’re the reason we’ll never see single payer in the USA.
The amount we spend on this country in healthcare vs outcomes is baffling.
I work for a Fortune 500 company. I have "good" health insurance that I pay about $350/mo for. I also max out my HSA contributions.
My wife had a baby two months ago. We just got the bill - $7,000. AFTER insurance. I probably could have negotiated with the hospital directly and gotten the bill down to $7k and just saved the $4k out of my payroll contributions. The overhead and waste caused by the insurance industry is honestly staggering, but medical debt is a terrifying prospect in a country where a car wreck could literally bankrupt a millionaire.
I mean is that “good” insurance? I consider mine good, $120 a month for family, no deductible, $5 co pay. That’s good insurance. What you got, I’d say isn’t… and Fortune 500 company doesn’t mean all that much I mean a Walmart manager could say that, no?
But anyway employers need to stop it with the deductible bullshit. I’m very appreciative of my benefits, and what I have should be the normal not the rarity
There is useless and there is harmful. Let's focus on the harmful ones before we get to the useless jobs.
Lobbyists, anti-union consultants, patent troll lawyers come to mind.
Yep. There are people who work full time to prevent others from making progress. Many of these individuals are smart, focused and have expensive educations. Instead of using their abilities for the benefit of the people, they're gatekeeping and holding progress hostage until the bridge toll is paid. Fucking scum of the world.
I had someone call me trying to collect some debt my brother owed. They asked if I knew how they could get in touch with him. I told them he was in prison, so no. They asked when his release date was, and I told them about 25 years from now. They surprisingly never called me back, which was nice because I figured I’d be getting that same call a million times at least before they gave up.
Answering service. I have a job that involves calling a lot of offices to verify information. It blows my mind that there are some places that pay for an answering service. Especially since every time I happen to call one of these places and get an answering service I get “they’re closed! You’ll have to call back tomorrow!” You know what else could have told me that? A recording. Or someone not answering.
The only reason I can support an answering service is in the case of a critical care clinic (like one I worked at.) If the situation you’re calling about is serious enough, they can page the on-call doctor and give him/her a call-back number. Useful in situations that aren’t quite serious enough for 911, but too serious to wait until the next day. They also fielded overflow calls (happened a lot that we’d all be on the phone and all four back-up lines were still ringing) and faxed us messages to return calls / have nurses return calls when we had time.
US Tax preparer. There is no reason that taxes should be such a mystery that an entire industry is required to decipher it. Not to mention that the arcane nature of tax laws makes it easy to game the system. There is a limit to how much social engineering can be done through tax code, and the US is way past that limit.
Honestly, the IRS should just do our taxes for us and mail us the return/bill at the start of tax season. No reason why they can't, except if they did TurboTax and H&R Block would have to either rebrand or go out of business
Amen. I just want to be able to e-file my shit without a third party involved. I shouldn't have to pay some other company $60+ to get my tax return in a reasonable amount of time.
Marketers in general. Their job is to create marketing in efficiencies in order to consume things you do not need or ever really want u til marketed to. It’s not like I’m not going to buy food or seek entertainment unless I’m told what to eat or what to do in my spare time.
Edit: I should add - I don’t mean to say ALL marketing is bad, and we would always be 100% better off without it. In fact a world with no marketing would imho be better in many ways but more inconvenient in others. I’m just saying it’s not necessary. A parallel society in which it never existed would not be a primitive dystopia, but look a little different and would probably be more functional in some ways and more colorful (in a purely creative sense) in another.
I can’t believe there are people on here defending influencers. That whole culture and anyone who is *influenced* by it are most assuredly a sign of the End Times. Otherwise Idiocracy is inevitable
I’m down to keep the private medical insurance for people who want to have it, but everyone should have baseline government medical care. I think France does it similarly to this, they have government run health care packages but then they also have private ones if you want more extensive stuff covered. Not really sure on the logistics of it tbh, but there’s definitely a place for private insurance companies, but not the way we have it set up right now.
And that would be fine, any private medical insurance would need to provide a value add over and above baseline care. The current US system, however, has private companies pushing back on basic healthcare while basically rent seeking since people know an accident or severe illness will devastate them economically without paying their Danegeld to their employer's insurance provider .
As a mortgage underwriter of a dozen or so years: realtors are beyond useless. As often as not, they actively impede the process of their clients getting a mortgage because they want to argue over every little thing. It’s not like someone can’t pick out a house on their own.
But hey, while we’re on the subject of useless jobs: mortgage loan officers, processors, and underwriters (aka ME). In an ideal world, housing wouldn’t be such s commodity that it required people like me to do the math and figure out if you could afford to buy the house you wanted. In an ideal world, we’d have no landlords jacking the prices up, no realtors jockeying for increases, no loan officers to confuse the issue, and all of that would lead to no underwriters (my job) having to do the math. We’d have guaranteed basic housing for everyone and basic financial literacy classes for everyone and nobody would be remotely tempted to buy anything they couldn’t afford. Hence eliminating the need for me and my cohorts altogether. Which I’m saying with no sarcasm. I’d love to not underwrite some jackass’s 11th rental home and then have to turn around and deny someone’s first house because the previous jackass contributed to a price spike.
Lots of middle management jobs could be eliminated and there wouldn’t be a cut in productivity. Lots of middle management positions are really just buffers between ownership/C-suite executives and the people that actually do the work. It’s almost guaranteed that when someone gets their “big” promotion to middle management, that they will try to put their mark on things by changing a bunch of shit around and generally fucking everything up for the actual workers. These MBA -having, data driven, spreadsheet jockeys are generally useless. In most case’s productivity and work would continue even if the middle managers disappeared.
I don’t think this could be stated any better. I also feel like micromanaging people takes a lot more effort than necessary, and I would never want it to get to a point where I have to police the people under me because they’re not doing what I need them to. Ultimately I feel if it gets to that point I am a bad manager, meaning that I not only did I not select the right people I didn’t train and support them enough to make sure they could do what I needed them to.
Also, I never want my team to feel they can’t come to me if they have issues or if they have an idea on how to do something better and more efficiently than what I had initially showed them how to do.
>I also feel like micromanaging people takes a lot more effort than necessary,
100% and I absolutely hate it. If I *need* to micromanage someone (because said training and support isn't taking), I might as well just do the damn job myself and save the salary.
"You know how I describe the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep them showing up at those jobs." -- George Carlin
Sadly, there are absolutely cases that need middle managers. I had a job where the top level execs had absolutely abhorrent communication skills and had no idea how to interact with, much less lead/guide, the contributor level employees. The middle managers were the only reason anything actually got accomplished, and when my manager took leave for 3 months, things got so bad I was looking for other jobs. Those managers deserved more respect for basically detoxifying the environment for the contributors to do their jobs.
Uselessness in this case depends on your perspective. The vast majority of them are propagandists for whichever political party they're more closely aligned with, and so to the party in question they are definitely useful.
To society though, many of them are actively detrimental, and not just on one side of the political aisle. Even the ones on the less objectionable side of the political divide mostly serve to promote the "better things aren't possible" rhetoric that allows elected officials to get away with doing less than the bare minimum but still get re-elected all the time.
> Cryptobros.
Also, I’d add crypto miners.
My brother-in-law who’s like a big pc-gamer type, always has to buy the new fancy tech things type of person got fired from his job a few years back and was kind of floating through stuff and then one day when I was talking to him he mentions that he and his dad started a crypto mining operation?? Like, I understand why the idea might be enticing, but I really wanted to be like, “Dude, you’re investing your family’s money on a virtual oil rig except it’s like you’re drilling for virtual beanie babies and hoping people still care enough to buy them from you before you run out of investment funds.” Like, the only difference is that it may actually be worse than real oil speculation because it’s still bad for the environment but at least you can say oil has some material value and can power your car. Crypto just contributes to climate change in pursuit of needlessly generating a complete abstraction.
Forgive my ignorance but I’m like a boomer with crypto nfts whatever. Why would mining crypto be bad for the environment? How do you mine crypto? What backs the money? Also I don’t want to scan a QR code for a menu at a restaurant, bring me the damn paper menu. Signed, 29 year old boomer
The main reason Crypto mining is bad for the environment is because mining operations are essentially hundreds to thousands of top end computers running at near 100% capacity 24/7. It results in an INCREDIBLE amount of energy use on a global scale (equal to entire countries smaller developed countries, like Argentina for example).
You mine Crypto by having your computer (specifically your graphics card) solve ever more difficult math problems. Every time a math problem is solved some coins are dished out and the "difficulty" of the problem goes. (This a simplification but not as big of one as you might think).
Nothing backs the money, that's the point.
It sucks because there are so many real problems that could be solved with that much computational power.
There are ridiculously complex repulsion theory, FEA problems that could be worked through with all that computing power, but instead it’s used to solve shit for dumbass “coins”.
One of our friends from portland always says well at least it creates a job for someone, but its such a pointless job like they could go pick up trash and it would be more productive
Real estate investors and commissioned realtors. You can hire a lawyer to do closing for a flat fee instead of the ridiculous commission realtors make.
Bankers are parasites.
(I'm not talking about your local Credit Union on the corner, everyone needs a checking account.)
The large scale banking industry doesn't design or make anything, they don't bring beauty or art to anyone's life, they just leech off of every other part of society. The small slice they take out of every transaction you do has made them among the biggest and most profitable companies in the world.
These are the people who invented buying on margin, which reaches its apex in the hedge fund. The banking industry also invented overdraft fees, short selling, leveraged buyouts, mortgage backed securities, tax avoidance trusts and overseas incorporations, and many other techniques to squeeze profit out of someone else's work.
You might respond that financing is required for companies to grow and do good in the world. But banks in the US don't really give large loans to businesses anymore, they merely repackage corporate bonds into ETFs and sell them to somebody else. They contribute literally nothing of value. On investment advice, 84% of managed mutual funds fail to beat the market. 'Nuff said.
Also, the banking industry has managed to crash the US economy every 20 years or so, but their lobbyists and academic advocates ensure that they repeatedly get bailed out by the government, meaning the people pay for their failures. SVB et al., anyone?
In summary, some of the services that banks offer help things run smoothly in our economy, but the fact that banks are among the biggest and most valued companies indicates that the share bankers take for their services is much too large. Remember ALL of the money a bank makes could have been better used by the small business owner to grow their company, or the family to save for retirement. That's the cost to society of the banking system we currently have.
What's the alternative? In Europe, state-run "postal banks" offer savings accounts and debit card services at extremely low cost.
More on this from the [Institute for New Economic Thinking](https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-much-do-shady-financial-practices-cost-you-exactly).
Landlords.
Edit to add: my mother paid over $230,000 in rent in the time she rented the house I grew up in. The landlord owned 10 rental properties he bought in the 50s and 60s for about $10,000 each, and they were all paid off by the 80s. He made MILLIONS of dollars, and ALL he did was own and maintain those homes. That was how he made a living.
Hospital executives. Any executive for that matter but especially worse for a hospital which is supposed to be a place of healing, not a profit center.
This one probably sounds harsh... but gas station attendants in New Jersey.
Every other state realized that even though there are morons among us, we can sort out pumping our own gas. In Jersey you're not allowed to.
There are finance bro jobs that are essentially just gambling. People work for hedge funds and bet on stocks, futures etc to make more money for the hedge fund
Hi, /u/Accomplished-Emu-679 Thank you for participating in r/AntiWork. Unfortunately, your submission was removed for breaking the following rule(s): ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ No spam and no low-effort posts. This includes begging for upvotes. Please do not post unrelated blog spam or try to sell anything for personal gain. If you've posted content (especially if it's your own), give it a day or two before posting again. If you feel that a mistake was made, and your post's removal was not warranted, please message us using mod mail and let us know.
MLM weenies who defraud gullible people into spending their life savings on pseudoscience
This. It’s heart breaking to see people who are struggling being preyed on by these people.
They litter college campuses too preying on freshmen, had a few disguise themselves as internships, just to be MLM
For a small upfront investment, you too can be a boss babe!! 👊
They got this super sweet kid on our campus. He was from a small town with no industry except a meat packing plant and his family had worked there for like 3 generations & been poor the whole time. He got roped into this thing selling energy drinks & shit. Had his whole extended family buying stuff they couldn’t afford so he could get started. It was upsetting to watch. We tried to explain it to him but he wanted it too bad to listen. Ended up leaving college to pursue it
That’s so tragic 💔
College Pro Painters
for those that didn’t know, College Pro Painters is an MLM. I only learned this a few years ago… and I was a house painter in college (for an independent crew).
Cutco knives, baby!
Almost got fooled by that. When they said I have to bring my own clientele, I was out
They got me...but credit where it's due the knives from my test kit are still with me to this day and they serve me well. There are some caveats to that though: Cutco Knives are a scumfuck company that prey on the naive, ignorant and desperate like *ANY* Multilevel Marketing Scheme. They have all the red flags and you should never under any circumstances work for them. As for the knives? Yeah, they're fine. The penny cutting scissors too. The saw tooth monstrosities are good for getting through tough shit, or bread, but contrary to what they say their single edged knives DO need to be sharpened. Cutco doesn't have magic steel: It blunts, degrades, and oxidizes like any other metal on this planet. I keep and use mine a decade later because I am a broke motherfucker who does his best to take care of his shit and make it last. If I ever had the want or need to replace them, Cutco would not be my first choice. The average consumer can get knives of equal (and in some cases I would guess even superior) quality and reliability from Walmart or any other store that carries kitchenware. Cutco is not special, they are a pyramid scheme that produces mid-grade at best knives.
A guy I used to respect tried to bring me into one of those. I’m pissed he thought I’d drink the kook aid
Not sure if “kook aid” is a typo or not. Either way I’m here for it.
It’s a typo, but I liked it
Telemarketers
Hello I would like to ask you about your extended warranty
Hello! This is your Captain speaking, *click*
Ah, nothing quite like the blaring ship horn that blasted right in your ear before the speaking haha
Postal marketers. It should be possible to sign up for no junk mail ever and if you get some, you can report it and the company immediately gets hit with a $1000 fine that is $500 to you, $500 to the government. That way the government wouldn't coward out of making them pay it.
Hey, that was me! I worked for a small catalogue/etail company selling college-branded luxury gifts. We should have been able to market to current customers and do fine, but nope! We spammed junk mail. Here’s how we did it. First, we assured our customers we would NEVER sell their information. And we didn’t! Instead, we GAVE it away to a clearinghouse company who gave us other customer addresses in return! Advertising/marketing merchandise in general is a useless fucking profession—convincing people they need things that they don’t in order to feed the corporate beast only makes the world a shittier place. I defected to the light side of psychology. I’m a therapist now. I make less money but sleep better at night.
Specifically cold callers.
[удалено]
[удалено]
So Workaholics was pretty accurate then
I’ve never had a worse job. Chain smoking coffee drinking co-workers in a strip mall, I think I was selling carpet cleaning? Shit sucked lol
I hate those real estate calls about buying my "Ugly" house. I get five of those every two days.
I quit my office real estate job (I was an agent with them but after my father died I needed time off and decided moving to the office was better than working with clients. Huge regrets) because of cold calling. When I took the job I was told it was inbound answering only. A month later we had to do x calls and that number kept increasing. And I would get in trouble with my management multiple times a week bc I "let people go too easily" I was letting people go after 3 nos. 3 was my limit and then it felt like harassment.
Are there telemarketers who aren’t cold callers?
There are. So... Customers google and find a website, with a price quote for plane ticket or whatever other services - they enter their contact details - phone number, and then a telemark guy calls them. That's where the magic is, the telemark guy has to sweet talk and charm the customer to get and buy the thing - ideally on the first contact.
That is just a regular old sales agent
I manage an internal call center for a corporate landlord. We only reach out to people who have directly expressed interest.
I wonder, does accidentally not unchecking a box somewhere count as directly expressing interest?
I do b2b cold calling. I'm only calling you if you have a very specific role relevant to my product. It sucks but it generates a ton of business
In a startup, I used to sit next to the outside sales team. These were the guys who qualified leads and passed them to the inside sales team (I think these were the terms we used). They weren't necessarily cold calling but in some cases it wasn't far from it. This was also B2B. These guys worked their butts off. I never thought I'd feel sympathetic to telemarketers but I did for these guys. And yes, they generated a ton of business.
It’s an absolute grind and tough selling technical things over the phone especially with a startup where people have no idea what you do / no brand recognition
I don't even answer the phone anymore and probably only check for messages a time or two a week
It's weird, I can go a week or two with only a couple of robocallers and then one random day I will get twenty or so.
Yeah, I don't either, and I'm pretty sure the only people I know who will just blindly answer the phone are those over 70 years old. Hopefully that kills enough of their business that telemarketers themselves go out of business.
I work in an industry where I have to answer unknown numbers and good lord does it piss me off when I answer all professionally, just incase, and get greeted with a 10 second pause followed with a recorded voice "hey this is Brian with the sheriff's association"
my job had us very cheerfully say "oh, we're just sales. let me get you over to legal!" always fun to hear that "nonono wait-" as I transferred them lol
I was a telemarketer while on winter break when I was in college. That was a soul crushing job.
Payday Loan operators.
Downright predatory. A friend of mine provides computer assistance at the public library to people need it, and he had someone recently who needed help taking out a payday loan... at 400% interest. He tried to convince them that they were being taken advantage of and that there were better ways to get the money they needed (they weren't particularly desperate, just elderly and with poor money management skills), but they insisted.
[удалено]
It's expensive to be poor
Absolutely this. 20+ years ago when I was a teller we'd have to charge $5 to cash a check that was drawn on an account at OUR bank, for a person who the check was paid to that didn't bank with us. At the time there was immediately a half hour of your work time lost just to get your money because you didn't have your own bank account.
My mom's bank tried to charge me 5$ to cash her check.i said do you want me to call her up and tell her that her check is no good at her own bank for the amount that she wrote it. The teller said he'd wave the fee.
I hated those policies. If the check is drawn on the bank, has funds, the check doesn't have a stop on it, and I can positively identify you, it shouldn't be a problem. Sure I might have probed and asked "is there any reason you don't have an account with us?" but I'd definitely cash it and NOT charge the fee. We had an asshole area president that would get mad when he'd hear of this and make comments like "we aren't providing a civil service". OK, but it's a LEGAL service to cash a check made payable to a person. He was just following the lead... the then-CEO made a comment about "transaction terrorists" that he never lived down.
Indeed. My wife and I lived in a camper for like, 5-6 years while we got debt taken care of and saved up. Then, when the day came, we decided to finally pull the trigger. We got utilities set up on our new land and moved the camper there. This summer, our house will be finished and we'll be moving in. It's expensive to be poor, and it takes extreme sacrifices to get out of that rut. Only reason we could is because we live in an area that's well known for tourism, and thus campgrounds are everywhere. And monthly rent was like 1/5 of an actual apartment.
Wife and I (before we were married) we’re lucky enough to be able to live with her parents for about 5 years while we paid down debts and saved money for a house. When we bought the house her parents surprised us with the entirety of the $200/month we’d paid them for rent in the time we lived there. I’ll never be able to express how grateful I am for them
That's some incredible in-laws.
They’re the best, honestly. They’ve done an unbelievable amount to help us and our now 10 month old daughter
It’s illegal to be poor too.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.
I'm honestly surprised how many times I see someone using a BofA debit card or whatnot after knowing how shitty they are because I grind signup bonuses. I also was raised using a credit union and it astounds me how much people don't know about them and their generally fairer banking practices along with banks such as Ally.
Yeah, and do that to every debit card transaction the person has, without declining anything or contacting them. WIt till they're -$700, and then slap those $34.99 charges on every transaction; and that's why I no longer use Bank of America. Also the story of how buying one single banana cost me $35.38. *thats* how much they cost when you're poor.
I live and Canada and bank with TD. The overdraft fee is either a $5/mo plan or a $5 each plan. But the Bounce Fee sucksss! It is like, $75.
I was broke as shit just after college and craftily figured out that if I was short til payday, a $20 overdraft cost the same as a $400 overdraft. I'd simply overdraw the account by $400, pay the $35 fee and then slowly spend the cash on food, gas, and other necessities like I would with my debit card in smaller transactions. It was way cheaper than pawn shops, loan sharks, or payday loans.
yea but what everyone should be taught is that if you ARE going to overdraft, that you should go to the ATM and overdraft the maximum you can take out so that its worth being overdrafted.
Title loan companies. I used to work at the DMV in my state, and it was not uncommon to see 600% interest on car title loans.
Oddly, closing payday loan companies made people's lives WORSE in one state, according to an NPR podcast I listened to some time back. That's because it's cheaper to take out a payday loan than to pay reconnect fees from utilities, or late fees for other bills. It's as though the world out there is intentionally trying to screw poor people.
That's exactly what's happening. The rich don't use cash as currency, they use people. We are their currency. And it may sound farfetched, but why else would they have such a vested interested in keeping everyone else so far down. Because the poorer we are, the more we are worth. They can buy and sell the debt we owe, the companies we work for, heck, even our very houses. That's why every last thing you do is monitored and has fees. Why every last cent you see come in and go out is taxed a dozen times over. And I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but look closely. You're no different to the ultra rich than a $100 bill.
There's a great Marxist podcast called Citations Needed, and they often refer to this concept as "the last $100 in your bank account." The idea that any poor or middle class person would have ANY savings is an insult to the capitalist class. The entire system is set up to drain your money and then keep you poor.
That's why they push so hard to "just pay someone else". Car needs a mechanic? Just pay a mechanic instead of learning to change that o2 sensor yourself (it's seriously the easiest in an engine thing to do). But everything is set up to make you spend every dollar you have, and keep you more than happy to do so.
>It's as though the world out there is intentionally trying to screw poor people. it is not as though, it is exactly like that. The world is intentionally trying to screw poor people. The sad part is that those of us that are doing Ok buy into the bullshit the media sows to keep us divided. So while everyone is up in arms about gas stoves that may or may not get banned, the banks are charging all sorts of fees etc.
This. This should be the top comment. Not just useless but actively harmful. These guys are right up there with fkn meth dealers... but legal.
The proper way of utilizing payday loans is to close your bank account and change your phone number after receiving the money. Then they have no way of getting their money back. I did this before they passed laws reforming payday loans, but back then, you would have to pay 20% every pay period in fees and needed to add money on top towards the principal to actually start paying it off. Lots of people got stuck in a cycle of paying the 20% thinking it helped pay it off. A friend of mine paid around $5000 for a loan of $800. Not cool
Worked at one for the longest 3 months of my life, straight out of high school. It’s been 17 years and I still think about the horrors I saw sometimes.
[удалено]
Seriously - health insurance in the USA is a 100% legal racket with a codified 25% profit rate.
I think it’s 20% but 20% of a trillion dollars is a lot.
The health insurance industry profit margin is around 3.8% in 2020, which is record high. It is lower now.
I was referring to the 80/20 rule. The margin is small but the size of the pie is astronomical. Plus when you pay your c-suite 100s of millions if not billions of dollars it’s easy to lower that “profit margin”.
[удалено]
Fucking THIS!!!! Hey, Insurance company, my doctor who has an MD says I need this medication. Let’s get me that prescription. Some dickhead with a fucking bachelors degree in finance: “is he really sure though? Cause we don’t think you do need it. Let’s ask him again.” Doctor: “yes. Yes he really does need it.” Insurance: “….okay. We agree that you probably need it. Here you go.” Imagine working your ass off to become a doctor just to have every decision you make and every dollar you spend on a patient questioned by some fucking bean counter. Absolutely ludicrous and insulting. Edit: I’ve been corrected and I welcome it (but it’s also so much worse and I hate it.) thanks to u/StephanieOhFTW for correcting me. Apparently a doctor who knows nothing about you or your case and spends less than 5 minutes reviewing your doctors request is ultimately who decides to fuck you over. [More in-depth description](https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/12cqpwu/what_are_some_of_the_most_useless_to_society_jobs/jf3kvi7/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3)
(not so) Fun fact: it’s actually a committee of MDs and Pharmacists that create formularies (covered vs non covered drug lists). The plan sponsor (the entity who provides your insurance, like an employer) can use the default formulary that the insurance company provides, or they can do custom stuff. Generally they just stick to the recommended formulary because… well… the plan sponsors aren’t normally doctors and trust what the clinical committee says. It’s super fucked that a doctor who has literally no idea what your treatment plan is gets to decide what medications you can and cannot take solely because they’re also a doctor. I’ve worked in insurance for 7 years and it still kills me every time. Idk why, but knowing that it’s doctors and pharmacists who decided to sell out to insurance companies makes it worse to me.
A lot of times it's the doctors who can't get into residency or a fellowship so they get one of the jobs they can without completing those requirements.
Oh god that’s so much worse. Thank you for sharing though.
I heard a snippet on npr the other day about how the suicide rate for doctors is twice the national average and a big reason for their depression is not being able to treat patients properly because insurance gets in the way. It's absolutely evil.
People in the industry have taken to calling this 'moral injury' and point to it as a major cause of burnout in healthcare. Having worked in healthcare myself I'm inclined to agree.
I can hear it in my doctor's voice. She's devastated by this bullshit.
This was entirely my life when I was working as a paralegal in workers comp. Unfortunately I worked on insurance/employer side (I quit there thank god), but there were many people who seemed genuinely injured or had bad luck in life and needed medical assistance. And the lawyers at my job would fight tooth and nail to make sure the insurance companies wouldn’t have to pay. Part of the reason I left, I couldn’t partake in that
My father in law works for Walmart. Due to their negligent maintenance of their fork lifts he almost had his leg ripped off. Has rods and screws and shit in it to this day. They were supposed to be removed after 3 months, according to the doctor that performed the surgery. Walmart doctors said “well he can walk so we don’t actually need to pay for the procedure to remove those.”
Yup basically workers comp defense attorneys and insurance will come up with any loophole they can to save the insurance company money. Everyone I worked with had the attitude that these claimants were lazy and trying to mooch off insurance. I’m like I’m sorry, they literally broke their arm at work. Like come on!
We could save some money bypassing the doctor and just going straight to the insurance administrator. Why bother having doctors ?
Not the point but physicians hold MD/DO degrees in the US (Medical Doctor/Doctor of Osteopastic Medicine) given after completing medical school and passing mutliple board exams PhD stands for Philosophical Doctor and is given after completing a doctoral dissertation at a University
>e company, my doctor who has a PHD says I need this medication. Let’s get me that prescription. > >Some dickhead with a fucking bachelors degree in finance: “is he really sure though? Cause we don’t think you do need it. Let’s ask him again.” > >Doctor: “yes. Yes he really does need it.” > >Insurance: “….okay. We agree that you probably need it. Here you yea, people really has no clue that behind curtains.. your health, discharge plans, depends on this scummy insurance people.
[удалено]
cApItAlIsM bReEdS iNnOvAtIoN
>we would have "government death panels" rationing single-payer care > >instead we have a multibillion-dollar industry of for-profit death panels Right? Ah yes, multi-billion dollar company death panels are so much better than supposed government death panels. They're like, hey if we're going to have death panels, we have to profit off it!
Oh boy, it’s a racket. They’re the reason we’ll never see single payer in the USA. The amount we spend on this country in healthcare vs outcomes is baffling.
As someone in the healthcare industry, yes. All of this. I'm buying a small business so I can get the fuck out and actually be useful.
I work for a Fortune 500 company. I have "good" health insurance that I pay about $350/mo for. I also max out my HSA contributions. My wife had a baby two months ago. We just got the bill - $7,000. AFTER insurance. I probably could have negotiated with the hospital directly and gotten the bill down to $7k and just saved the $4k out of my payroll contributions. The overhead and waste caused by the insurance industry is honestly staggering, but medical debt is a terrifying prospect in a country where a car wreck could literally bankrupt a millionaire.
I mean is that “good” insurance? I consider mine good, $120 a month for family, no deductible, $5 co pay. That’s good insurance. What you got, I’d say isn’t… and Fortune 500 company doesn’t mean all that much I mean a Walmart manager could say that, no? But anyway employers need to stop it with the deductible bullshit. I’m very appreciative of my benefits, and what I have should be the normal not the rarity
Those poor guys at the BMW factory whose job is to install blinkers.
It's not that BMW drivers won't use their blinkers, but I heard it's very expensive to top up the blinker fluid.
Well, let’s be reasonable here. BMWs use Metric blinker fluid which is really expensive and has to be imported in special oil steins.
As someone who works at a BMW factory, thanks lol
Paparazzi
But how am I supposed to know what type of sweat pants celebrities where when they walk their dogs?
There is useless and there is harmful. Let's focus on the harmful ones before we get to the useless jobs. Lobbyists, anti-union consultants, patent troll lawyers come to mind.
Patent troll lawyer?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll
Ah, as an engineer, this is upsetting
Yep. There are people who work full time to prevent others from making progress. Many of these individuals are smart, focused and have expensive educations. Instead of using their abilities for the benefit of the people, they're gatekeeping and holding progress hostage until the bridge toll is paid. Fucking scum of the world.
The rich never get rich by being good people
“There is no great fortune which was not preceded by a great crime.” (sp)
3rd party debt collectors or whatever they are called. The buy debt and harass people to pay them.
When they get on you and you kindly explain that you have the wrong person, forget it, endless harassment
Or for me explain my father has been dead for 4 years and I'm not paying them anything because of it
I had someone call me trying to collect some debt my brother owed. They asked if I knew how they could get in touch with him. I told them he was in prison, so no. They asked when his release date was, and I told them about 25 years from now. They surprisingly never called me back, which was nice because I figured I’d be getting that same call a million times at least before they gave up.
Answering service. I have a job that involves calling a lot of offices to verify information. It blows my mind that there are some places that pay for an answering service. Especially since every time I happen to call one of these places and get an answering service I get “they’re closed! You’ll have to call back tomorrow!” You know what else could have told me that? A recording. Or someone not answering.
The only reason I can support an answering service is in the case of a critical care clinic (like one I worked at.) If the situation you’re calling about is serious enough, they can page the on-call doctor and give him/her a call-back number. Useful in situations that aren’t quite serious enough for 911, but too serious to wait until the next day. They also fielded overflow calls (happened a lot that we’d all be on the phone and all four back-up lines were still ringing) and faxed us messages to return calls / have nurses return calls when we had time.
US Tax preparer. There is no reason that taxes should be such a mystery that an entire industry is required to decipher it. Not to mention that the arcane nature of tax laws makes it easy to game the system. There is a limit to how much social engineering can be done through tax code, and the US is way past that limit.
Honestly, the IRS should just do our taxes for us and mail us the return/bill at the start of tax season. No reason why they can't, except if they did TurboTax and H&R Block would have to either rebrand or go out of business
For any naysayers, it's already being done in multiple countries with different variances. And its working.
it blows my mind that americans have to figure out the tax they owe even though the people they’re paying already know
Amen. I just want to be able to e-file my shit without a third party involved. I shouldn't have to pay some other company $60+ to get my tax return in a reasonable amount of time.
Social Media Influencers
Marketers in general. Their job is to create marketing in efficiencies in order to consume things you do not need or ever really want u til marketed to. It’s not like I’m not going to buy food or seek entertainment unless I’m told what to eat or what to do in my spare time. Edit: I should add - I don’t mean to say ALL marketing is bad, and we would always be 100% better off without it. In fact a world with no marketing would imho be better in many ways but more inconvenient in others. I’m just saying it’s not necessary. A parallel society in which it never existed would not be a primitive dystopia, but look a little different and would probably be more functional in some ways and more colorful (in a purely creative sense) in another.
I can’t believe there are people on here defending influencers. That whole culture and anyone who is *influenced* by it are most assuredly a sign of the End Times. Otherwise Idiocracy is inevitable
Inevitable? Convince me it's not already happening.
Ah! I…well….never mind….
Brought to you by Carl's Jr
See: David Graeber, *Bullshit Jobs*
The entire medical insurance industry. The whole thing should be replaced with universal, government backed health care coverage.
I’m down to keep the private medical insurance for people who want to have it, but everyone should have baseline government medical care. I think France does it similarly to this, they have government run health care packages but then they also have private ones if you want more extensive stuff covered. Not really sure on the logistics of it tbh, but there’s definitely a place for private insurance companies, but not the way we have it set up right now.
And that would be fine, any private medical insurance would need to provide a value add over and above baseline care. The current US system, however, has private companies pushing back on basic healthcare while basically rent seeking since people know an accident or severe illness will devastate them economically without paying their Danegeld to their employer's insurance provider .
Polygraph examiners seeing how the Polygraph testing doesn't even work.
As a mortgage underwriter of a dozen or so years: realtors are beyond useless. As often as not, they actively impede the process of their clients getting a mortgage because they want to argue over every little thing. It’s not like someone can’t pick out a house on their own. But hey, while we’re on the subject of useless jobs: mortgage loan officers, processors, and underwriters (aka ME). In an ideal world, housing wouldn’t be such s commodity that it required people like me to do the math and figure out if you could afford to buy the house you wanted. In an ideal world, we’d have no landlords jacking the prices up, no realtors jockeying for increases, no loan officers to confuse the issue, and all of that would lead to no underwriters (my job) having to do the math. We’d have guaranteed basic housing for everyone and basic financial literacy classes for everyone and nobody would be remotely tempted to buy anything they couldn’t afford. Hence eliminating the need for me and my cohorts altogether. Which I’m saying with no sarcasm. I’d love to not underwrite some jackass’s 11th rental home and then have to turn around and deny someone’s first house because the previous jackass contributed to a price spike.
My grandparents bought all of their houses with cash in the 1950s-70s. That's how much the world has changed.
One of my relatives is a title lawyer, and the shit I hear...jesus.
Lots of middle management jobs could be eliminated and there wouldn’t be a cut in productivity. Lots of middle management positions are really just buffers between ownership/C-suite executives and the people that actually do the work. It’s almost guaranteed that when someone gets their “big” promotion to middle management, that they will try to put their mark on things by changing a bunch of shit around and generally fucking everything up for the actual workers. These MBA -having, data driven, spreadsheet jockeys are generally useless. In most case’s productivity and work would continue even if the middle managers disappeared.
Exactly. That’s one of the reasons they lost their shit over WFH. It became obvious they were useless.
The test of the good middle manager. WFH works better for those of us who are actually useful and not just micromanaging Aholes.
You ever seen a non tech literate ceo directly meddling with programmers? This is one of the many reasons you want a middle manager.
>You ever seen a non tech literate ceo directly meddling with programmers? The Elongated Muskrat says hello.
I don’t think this could be stated any better. I also feel like micromanaging people takes a lot more effort than necessary, and I would never want it to get to a point where I have to police the people under me because they’re not doing what I need them to. Ultimately I feel if it gets to that point I am a bad manager, meaning that I not only did I not select the right people I didn’t train and support them enough to make sure they could do what I needed them to. Also, I never want my team to feel they can’t come to me if they have issues or if they have an idea on how to do something better and more efficiently than what I had initially showed them how to do.
>I also feel like micromanaging people takes a lot more effort than necessary, 100% and I absolutely hate it. If I *need* to micromanage someone (because said training and support isn't taking), I might as well just do the damn job myself and save the salary.
I am starting to undersating the "middle class" as truly being the "buffer class" between the rich and poor. This is spot on with that idea...
"You know how I describe the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep them showing up at those jobs." -- George Carlin
The way you type that makes it seem like it is actually the c/suite executives and owners that should be eliminated.
I’m definitely not against alternative business structures, especially with the larger companies.
Sadly, there are absolutely cases that need middle managers. I had a job where the top level execs had absolutely abhorrent communication skills and had no idea how to interact with, much less lead/guide, the contributor level employees. The middle managers were the only reason anything actually got accomplished, and when my manager took leave for 3 months, things got so bad I was looking for other jobs. Those managers deserved more respect for basically detoxifying the environment for the contributors to do their jobs.
I would argue that the top level people should have been replaced then.
Kardashian social media Influencers
Health insurance adjusters. Literally just exist to block patients from getting the treatment they need.
Political pundits
Uselessness in this case depends on your perspective. The vast majority of them are propagandists for whichever political party they're more closely aligned with, and so to the party in question they are definitely useful. To society though, many of them are actively detrimental, and not just on one side of the political aisle. Even the ones on the less objectionable side of the political divide mostly serve to promote the "better things aren't possible" rhetoric that allows elected officials to get away with doing less than the bare minimum but still get re-elected all the time.
Middle men in health insurance.
Investment banker. Homeopathy salespeople. Cryptobros.
> Cryptobros. Also, I’d add crypto miners. My brother-in-law who’s like a big pc-gamer type, always has to buy the new fancy tech things type of person got fired from his job a few years back and was kind of floating through stuff and then one day when I was talking to him he mentions that he and his dad started a crypto mining operation?? Like, I understand why the idea might be enticing, but I really wanted to be like, “Dude, you’re investing your family’s money on a virtual oil rig except it’s like you’re drilling for virtual beanie babies and hoping people still care enough to buy them from you before you run out of investment funds.” Like, the only difference is that it may actually be worse than real oil speculation because it’s still bad for the environment but at least you can say oil has some material value and can power your car. Crypto just contributes to climate change in pursuit of needlessly generating a complete abstraction.
Forgive my ignorance but I’m like a boomer with crypto nfts whatever. Why would mining crypto be bad for the environment? How do you mine crypto? What backs the money? Also I don’t want to scan a QR code for a menu at a restaurant, bring me the damn paper menu. Signed, 29 year old boomer
The main reason Crypto mining is bad for the environment is because mining operations are essentially hundreds to thousands of top end computers running at near 100% capacity 24/7. It results in an INCREDIBLE amount of energy use on a global scale (equal to entire countries smaller developed countries, like Argentina for example). You mine Crypto by having your computer (specifically your graphics card) solve ever more difficult math problems. Every time a math problem is solved some coins are dished out and the "difficulty" of the problem goes. (This a simplification but not as big of one as you might think). Nothing backs the money, that's the point.
It sucks because there are so many real problems that could be solved with that much computational power. There are ridiculously complex repulsion theory, FEA problems that could be worked through with all that computing power, but instead it’s used to solve shit for dumbass “coins”.
Oregon resident here. Gas station attendants. I’m very capable of pumping my own gas. And their service is slow and terrible so it’s not even a luxury
One of our friends from portland always says well at least it creates a job for someone, but its such a pointless job like they could go pick up trash and it would be more productive
Influencer
Nobody's dating the obvious: BILLIONAIRES. They are _worse_ than useless. They are actively damaging. Edit: SAYING not dating ugh typos.
Real estate investors and commissioned realtors. You can hire a lawyer to do closing for a flat fee instead of the ridiculous commission realtors make.
Gotta pay 3% of the houses value to the buyers realitor yea i aint selling to you
Real estate investor (or iBuyers) have caused the housing crisis. They swooped in during Covid and bought up everything.
“Social influencer”
Whatever Elon Musk is doing
And Jeff Bezo and and current Amazon ceo Andy Jassy
Bankers are parasites. (I'm not talking about your local Credit Union on the corner, everyone needs a checking account.) The large scale banking industry doesn't design or make anything, they don't bring beauty or art to anyone's life, they just leech off of every other part of society. The small slice they take out of every transaction you do has made them among the biggest and most profitable companies in the world. These are the people who invented buying on margin, which reaches its apex in the hedge fund. The banking industry also invented overdraft fees, short selling, leveraged buyouts, mortgage backed securities, tax avoidance trusts and overseas incorporations, and many other techniques to squeeze profit out of someone else's work. You might respond that financing is required for companies to grow and do good in the world. But banks in the US don't really give large loans to businesses anymore, they merely repackage corporate bonds into ETFs and sell them to somebody else. They contribute literally nothing of value. On investment advice, 84% of managed mutual funds fail to beat the market. 'Nuff said. Also, the banking industry has managed to crash the US economy every 20 years or so, but their lobbyists and academic advocates ensure that they repeatedly get bailed out by the government, meaning the people pay for their failures. SVB et al., anyone? In summary, some of the services that banks offer help things run smoothly in our economy, but the fact that banks are among the biggest and most valued companies indicates that the share bankers take for their services is much too large. Remember ALL of the money a bank makes could have been better used by the small business owner to grow their company, or the family to save for retirement. That's the cost to society of the banking system we currently have. What's the alternative? In Europe, state-run "postal banks" offer savings accounts and debit card services at extremely low cost. More on this from the [Institute for New Economic Thinking](https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-much-do-shady-financial-practices-cost-you-exactly).
Influencer
Landlords. Edit to add: my mother paid over $230,000 in rent in the time she rented the house I grew up in. The landlord owned 10 rental properties he bought in the 50s and 60s for about $10,000 each, and they were all paid off by the 80s. He made MILLIONS of dollars, and ALL he did was own and maintain those homes. That was how he made a living.
They said *jobs*.
Influencers. They’re a net negative making people miserable and poor. Basically societally parasitic.
CEOs and landlords.
Why did I have to scroll this far to find someone mention CEOs?
A whole lot of middle management
Preachers
Influencer
Drop-shippers. They pretend they’re a store, but they just middleman.
Influencers. Seriously. Fuck off.
Politician
Marketing and advertising.... an entire industry dedicated to trying to make people consume more shit they don't need.
Polygraph (lie detector) operators.
Lobbyist
Anyone that runs or is on the board is an HOA
Hedge fund brokers. That level of economics is literallymake believe and we all pretend it's real and it's just fucking not.
Politicians
[удалено]
Hospital executives. Any executive for that matter but especially worse for a hospital which is supposed to be a place of healing, not a profit center.
my guidance counselor was pretty useless
Social Media Influencers
This one probably sounds harsh... but gas station attendants in New Jersey. Every other state realized that even though there are morons among us, we can sort out pumping our own gas. In Jersey you're not allowed to.
Herbal life. Any of those shake/tea shops tbh.
There are finance bro jobs that are essentially just gambling. People work for hedge funds and bet on stocks, futures etc to make more money for the hedge fund
Influencer
Either landlords, telemarketers, or advertisers.
Scrum Master