1w ago

What is something that only exists because people are stupid?

205 comments

- They would go bad instantly. I would assume these would be only suitable for banana bread. Reminds me of prechopped veggies that are way overpriced.
  
  Both these bananas and the pre-chopped veggies are nice for people with disabilities.
- At least they aren't packaged each with the plastic wrap.
- haiii turkish person :3 meraba
  
  merabalar :3

Trump
- Lemmy moment.
  He exists because his parents had sex. Having sex is stupid now?

Organized religion. Prosperity gospel. Televangelists. Tucker’s career.

Trump presidencies
- *loudly grieves in American * :`(

Trump and the American Nazi Party

Specific models of dumpsters found in national parks. Apparently making sure that the smartest bear can't get into a dumpster while making sure the dumbest person can is a grey zone.
- There have been national park visitors who have asked at what time the animals are let out of their cages and put back in them. Then again, that might be an education issue rather than a stupidity problem. Would it be ethical to experiment on these people by suggesting "we'll tell you if you can get that dumpster open"?
  Caveat: Having never seen those dumpsters, I have the nagging feeling that I could well be outsmarted by the bears.
  
  Caveat: Having never seen those dumpsters, I have the nagging feeling that I could well be outsmarted by the bears.
  There's another factor though: The bear will keep trying over and over if it smells something in there, for hours if it feels like it. Tourists, meanwhile, might not even try again if they can't get it open right away.
  
  That first can very well be a mixup between zoos, those parks where you can drive your car through and look at animals and national parks. I can fully see people getting it mixup a bit. So I would put that under education miss.
  And regarding the dumpsters I have been outsmarted by a child proff container so I will show respect to the dumpster.
  
  I remember a lady reviewed a solar eclipse party on Facebook 1star because they held it midweek instead of on the weekend and she couldn't go

Shops with perpetual "sales" and prices ending with 99.
- JC Penney went through a period where they did away with their perpetual "sale" and normalized their pricing. Their sales tanked as a result. Apparently a lot of people who shop there are idiots.
  
  The one time I went while they were just offering low prices was awesome. Just $8/shirt, no coupons or sales to turn a $20 shirt into a ln $8 one. Most people really like seeing a big number then having to pay a smaller one though.
  
  The former SVP of Apple Retail Ron Johnson, specifically. He actually thought the people who shopped at JC Penny were the same as the people who shopped at an Apple Store.
  
  I hate that "marketing" is just a science of bypassing peoples' rationality to sell them on short-term emotion, then reinforcing and encouraging stupidity to keep the loop going.

Lotteries. If people understood odds they'd never buy a ticket, or at least not in the numbers they do.
- Lotteries are a tax on hope, not stupidity.
  
  I've always heard they were a way to recoup tax funding from people below the tax-paying bracket, because they'd be the ones desperate enough to go for it.
  ...which is seemingly more and more at the way we love our income inequality...
- You have a better chance of literally being Brad Pitt than you do if winning the lottery.

Racism Sexism
- Smart people can be and often are racist and sexist too. They are better at justifying it too. Scientific racism is an existing pseudoscience.
  
  I hear your point, but they are not that smart if they think skin color determines the value of a human. Same for sex.
  
  Smart people don't do that, otherwise they wouldn't be smart

Tiktok
Religion
Lots of subscription based services, like heated seats in cars

Homeopathy and alternative medicine.
- Chiropractors can be heard chuckling nervously

I'm gonna get downvoted for this but... gaming consoles.
Gaming consoles made sense back in the day before home computing took off, and for a while they actually had superior hardware than computers when it came specifically to running games. But nowadays gaming consoles are just locked down user-hostile computers with a subscription service attached. The gaming equivalent of inkjet printers. It's an industry made irrelevant by advancements in technology, propped up by misleading marketing and artificial hype that sadly many people fall for.
- I have a PS5 because it will play the damned games. There's nothing in the PC realm for $400 I could buy that could come close to guaranteeing the same thing. Consoles don't exist because people are stupid, they exist because gaming and GPU companies are cartels just like almost every other sector of the economy.
- There is value in static hardware so you can perform specific optimizations and target framerate. The subscriptions are 100% bullshit though.
- New PC graphics cards alone cost as much as entire games consoles. The top end ones cost the same as multiple PS5s. That's why consoles exist.
  
  Consoles don't make money, the expensive games and subscriptions do.
- You are underestimating the importance of standards here. On a PC you will always only get a fraction of the hardware's power, because there's way more stuff running at the same time, not just the game, and because the developers can't know exactly what hardware configuration every single gamer has. On a console you can know exactly how much RAM you will have available, so you can design your content to use that amount of data and then stream it into memory that you reserve at the start. If you do that on a PC you may ask for more RAM than the PC has or you may leave RAM unused. Or you can try to optimize the game for different specs, which costs time and money, so you won't get the same results with the same budget.
  
  Back in the olden days when games were written in assembly and there was barely enough memory for a framebuffer it made sense to tediously optimize games to squeeze every bit of performance out of the limited hardware. Modern consoles are not like that. They have their own operating systems with schedulers, multitasking, and memory allocators, much like a desktop computer. Your claim that "way more stuff is running at the same time" is only true if the PC user deliberately decides to keep other programs running alongside their game (which can be a feature in and of itself -- think recording/streaming, discord, etc.) It is true that while developing for PC you have to take account that different people will have different hardware, but that problem is solved by having a graphics settings menu. Some games can even automatically select the best graphics options that will get the most out of your hardware. What you're describing is a non-problem.
- Steam deck makes sense
- You're not wrong. There definitely used to be a difference back when consoles would get way better support and PC ports were terrible.
  Sound On / Off
  -- The entire options menu of a PC port in like 2006.
  But nowadays I struggle to understand the point of getting one of those big chonky tower consoles like whatever the latest Xbox or PlayStation is. (PlayStation even selling entirely new consoles for a simple graphics/RAM upgrade, smh).
  At least the Switch's portability made sense.
- The old consoles also were just plug the game in and boot up.
  No Hassle.
  Now they sounds like Windows boxes.
  
  I LOVED how the original X-Box had an "desktop" in it. Unfortunately that's gone way too far anymore.
  Nowadays I find these interfaces so overly complicated and fiddly that it makes the UX of an N64 far superior.
  I pretty much went PC-only after the xbox 360 though, when ports finally started getting good. :)
- I downvoted you just because you're one of those people who is literally asking for it.
  
  My god, how can I possibly recover from this!? My lemmy reputation has been tainted forever!!!

Warning labels that say shit like "Contains: Milk" on a carton of milk.
- Egg carton that says "Contains Egss", like yeah, I sure hope so
- I hate to be "that guy" but in theee cases, it just makes more sense to have some extraneous labeling rather than have special clauses in the regulation dictating when it's obvious enough that the label can be omitted.
  Keeping the rules as simple as possible reduces the chances of loopholes and ambiguity, at the expense of sometimes resulting in things like a jar of peanut butter stating "contains peanuts" on the label.
  
  It makes no sense and it's a side effect of an over litigious society.
- Did you hear about the butter recall for that?
- Malk?
- 'Caution: Hot' on coffee.
- C'mon nowadays you can market anything as anything, and you're never quite sure what's in there! :p

Any brand of authoritarianism.

My high school mandatory epilepsy training for teachers and staff because the art teacher stepped over me while I was seizing on the floor during class. Other students had to carry me to the nurse because I couldn't walk right after the seizure. Teacher wouldn't even call the nurse to let her know what was up

Microsoft Windows
- As a heavy Windows user on a 12+ hour/day basis - I 110% agree with you.

Casinos & Gacha games

Probably a whole bunch of us. Stupidity may result in unwanted and/or unplanned pregnancies.

Cryptocurrency as an investment

Trump

Short-term warranties for electronics that aren’t expensive.
- These things are especially evil in Australia where consumer protections are stronger and usually exceed the stated warranty.
  I've had this conversation many times:
  "Can I interest you in an extended warranty with that?"
  "No thanks, it's no better than consumer protection"
  "Fair enough. Had to ask"
- When i worked for office Max, back when they still existed, they told us to always always always push the "extended warranty"...
  $4.00 on a $15.00 calculator... Even if you're making minimum wage, the time spent dicking around with the warranty crap, you could have bought a better calculator when the first broke.
  
  $4 is 27% of $15. Are you telling me that this calculator has a greater than 27% chance of failing within 1 year? If so, I'll shop elsewhere. If not, your warranty is a ripoff and I'll shop elsewhere.
- These laptop fans I bought a while back had a warranty of 60 days. At that stage I wonder why even bother. They worked just fine for years, though.

Advertising

Fox
- The FBI agent or the animal?

False dichotomies…

The price of Apple products

Health Insurance Companies
- They don’t really exist because people are stupid.
  More because of corruption and greed imo.
- You're gonna have to explain further before I can judge your comment.
  
  If people weren't stupid they would not put up with having the highest medical costs in the world while achieving the lowest quality of care in the first world. Health Insurance Companies exist because too many people haven't figured out that their purpose is to limit, or prevent, actual health care.
- For profit health insurance companies.
  Even with universal healthcare, someone has to do all the admin stuff, and putting it under government control directly just screams of inefficiencies.
  
  I always assume people who assert that the government is automatically less efficient, more expensive, and poorly run compared to private industry must never have been associated with a large corporation, or lack awareness.
  Medicare, as it exists today, delivers superior care at lower cost than any private insurer. This despite the fact that Medicare covers the elderly and disabled, groups that need more care than the population at large that the private guys cover. If you think about it, Medicare is a giant subsidy to the private market by removing needy populations from their rolls.
  The scheme to include private guys in medicare "medicare advantage", was supposed to bring down costs by bringing in the efficiency of the private market. Medicare Advantage today costs more than the Army and the Navy.
  
  Yes, but the alternative is far worse. I present America as Exhibit A.

"Do not eat"-stickers.
At HEB I saw "Water melon filet" for sale.

The Republican party.

Cigarettes
- Yes, but have you ever tried being addicted to nicotine? /s
  
  There's healthier ways

Republicans.

McDonald's

Facebook. (When Zuck was asked how he amassed so much personal information about people, he famously answered: "They 'trust me.' Dumb f*cks.") Growing up, we were told it was foolish to post personally identifying information to the Internet, then the generation that told us that flocked to facebook.
Credit scores. (Less the concept, namely the fact that they're used so extensively to judge people based on arbitrary rules. It's stupid that the companies behind them are still operating after major breaches involving more information than they should have had in the first place. The average person seems too dumb to care what happens with their personal information, sadly.)
Services like "Grammarly". Some folks noted below that there are some legitimate use cases as an accessibility tool, but the service itself seems to target the English-native people "Oh whatever you know what I meant" crowd, to help them sound smart in emails.
And all this other Ai stuff that seems to market itself on the premise that the user is a complete moron who needs to escape the consequences of their ineptitude.
Almost every Ai commercial features someone using Ai tools to quickly cover up the fact that they forgot their partner's birthday, or quickly cobble together some work memo because they were sleeping or something. (Okay that last one can be kinda based amirite lol.)
Edit: Explanations added because I'm fine being disagreed with but maybe I didn't communicate very well lol.
- Grammarly can be quite useful to people who are not dumb but have dyslexia.
  
  But grammarly gets it wrong.
  If it was perfect, then sure.
  
  This sounds interesting and I actually haven't heard of it being used for this before.
  What about dyslexia-friendly typefaces though? Would that be more practical?🤔
  I'll be honest a lot of my opinion of the service comes from being spammed ads featuring a targetted customer that's just too lazy to be hassled with the burden of learning decent communication, and has money to spend lol.

Gerrymandering?
- Gerrymandering is an actual brilliant way to ensure victory.
  
  Yep, but it exists because of the existence of these districts in the first place. Which weren't put there because the founders figured the populus was particularly bright.

The current american government?

Dealer add-ons at a car dealership.
- They can be good negotiating points, though. Often, they will reduce the price of the vehicle more than the cost of the add on because they make more profit on the add-on than the difference in price of the car. And often the add-ons are preinstalled, so they have to give them to you anyway. Not true for all brands or dealers, but works for some.
  With my last car there was a windshield coating, leather seat coating and bumpers on the door edges. After getting them nearly at the price I wanted, I told them I'd buy the seat coating if they'd lower the price another thousand below my previous price. The windshield coating and bumpers were also on the car when I finally got it. But I didn't get the warranty on them, of course.
  
  Something like this happened to me. I ended up buying an extended warranty that I didn’t really want, but it was because I insisted that I’m not going to pay MSRP for this vehicle. They knocked off a couple grand, and I spent as much on the warranty. At least I got something for the money.

Cybertruck.

The current climate crisis.

Warning labels...

A lot of Osha regulations.

Warning Labels on obvious things. Like "contains dairy" on a package of butter. At some point they need to stop and let Darwin take the wheel.
- I like the “This product may contain nuts” on a packet of nuts.
  
  It better contain nuts or I want my money back.
- Dairy is an allergen and has to be marked on packages by law in the states. There are also people who just avoid dairy, and non-dairy butter very much exists.
  
  Sounds like the problem is the vegans renaming margarine "butter" to avoid the negative connotations

automatic weapons

Science. If we weren't stupid we would already know everything and wouldn't have to study it.
edit: that was a joke, sorry if I didn't make it clear.
- You are confusing knowledge and intelligence
  
  The scientific method is specifically a tool designed to combat human intellectual shortcomings.
- Hard disagree. We have the scientific method to able to approach the unknown and slowly decipher it in a way that consistently gets us closer to the truth because we're at least smart-ish as a human race.

"I'm with stupid" shirts

Everything.

Maga

Imagine Dragons
- Why?
  
  I ask "why" every time I'm reminded Imagine Dragons exist, too.

Children?
- A good chunk of them anyways

Instructions on bottles of shampoo.
- I used to think the same but I recently decided to embrace my curly hair and the way you use certain shampoos/conditioners can be different. I've had to read the instructions each time I try a new brand to make sure I don't ruin my hair.
- I'd blame parents for that, tbf
  
  What did the parents do?

"Tactical" products and brain "vitamins"

CEOs

Car door jams/openers
Forgetful doesn't mean stupid!
Quick! Where are your keys?!
Did you have to look? lol

205 comments