this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
504 points (97.5% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35805 readers
1753 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm just a regular person making about $70K a year in a big city, and I've recently felt incredibly powerless dealing with private companies. For instance, my landlord’s auto-pay system had a glitch that excluded my pet rent and water bill. I ended up with over $1,000 in late fees. Despite hours on the phone, it turns out their system doesn’t really do auto-pay and requires a fixed amount instead of covering the full rent. It feels like a scam, and my options are to pay the fees or potentially spend a fortune on legal action.

Another frustrating experience was trying to cancel my pest control service. I had to endure a 40-minute call followed by 35 minutes of arguing, just to finally cancel. There’s no online cancellation option, and the process felt like a timeshare sales pitch.

Why do ordinary people seem so unprotected against these shady practices, and how can we change this? How does one person even start to address these issues?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] theparadox@lemmy.world 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Why do ordinary people seem so unprotected against these shady practices

Assuming you are in the USA, it's fundamentally because our politics is fueled by private money. The "haves" spend lots of money to make rules that protect and enrich themselves at the expense of the "have nots". The rich get richer, and the rest of us get a larger share of the burden.

The rich then spend more of their money convincing everyone else that some minority group of their fellow "have nots" are to blame and let us fight amongst ourselves. They starve us but leave us with just enough left to lose so that the price of doing something about it is too high (quitting, losing health insurance, getting arrested at a protest, etc) for most of us to bear.

how can we change this?

Get money out of politics. Get the public to stop blaming their fellow have nots and demand change from the haves.

How does one person even start to address these issues?

Have empathy for and help your neighbors if you can, especially when they take the risks required to push for actual change. Talk to people. Organize. Support/start unions or a mutual aid organization. Go to local government meetings and make your voice heard. Run for local office.

Its easy for a small group of wealthy organizations to tilt specific elections or politics in their favor. It's much harder them to do that in 1,000+ small communities across the nation.

[–] 4grams@awful.systems 1 points 2 months ago

well said. money in politics has some pretty awful downstream effects. who'd have ever thunk it...

load more comments (1 replies)