Comment by dboreham
1 day ago
What underlies this is that the USA is a fundamentally scammy country. I mean no disrespect: I'm a US citizen and have lived here for 30 years and made plenty of money from the US economy. But nevertheless it's a scam culture. And sure enough when I read the article, it says "Facebook battling Japanese regulators". Of course there wouldn't be a regulator in the USA telling Facebook to not host scam ads.
Consider the TV industry in the USA: it makes huge amounts of money from political ads, which are for the most part scams. The same people who make money from those scam ads also control the news. So guess what? No pressure to not scam the population with false advertising.
Perhaps it helps to have not grown up in the US. If you've been here your entire life there's a frog boiling syndrome where none of the weirdness seems weird. This is why JD and co witter on about how terrible Europe is -- they need to keep up the delusion that scammers should get to scam and there's no hope to stop them. The recent moves to sanction European campaigners against big tech disinformation is really: the scammers got the root password to the country and are using it to fight back.
The scamming is pervasive in works of American fiction through the last century - Mark Twain’s works, The Jungle(more than just meat packing industry), Elmer Gantry and Steinbeck. Many of the described scams still take place on industrial scale.
No I've lived in the US my whole life and I agree with you. Ever since I bought my house I feel like I'm constantly bombarded by people trying to scam me out of my money. I'm sure it was always like that but it seems like getting a mortgage put me on some "financially stable guy" list that attracts the vultures. Medical, home repair, finance services. Without constant vigilance it's so easy to get grifted.
Seriously. I actually want a bunch of renovation work done to my house, and door-to-door salesmen come by all the time to try to sell me that type of service. After one horrible experience that started with such a salesman, never again. I assume everyone out there is a freaking scammer because too many are.
And even the companies and industries that used to be pretty benign have realized that all the growth is in scams, so they've added whole divisions of their business to try to get you onto recurring payments for stuff you probably don't want, which can all be signed up for with like 1 click, but cancelling needs a phone call during Eastern Time business hours and a 25 minute wait on hold.
I've basically shifted to negatively weighting any advertisements I see, the thinking being that if a company needs to advertise, they're more likely to be a scam; companies who are actually great at what they do can survive off word of mouth (or at the very least, don't have it in their margins to pay someone to advertise door to door.) Basically the same logic as the old "never go to a restaurant that has someone standing outside trying to drum up business because it's a tourist trap."
It's a major problem with US culture. The guy 'hustling' and making big bucks scamming people is seen as virtuous somehow. The guy working a 9-5 or owning a small scale honest business are seen as the suckers.
> Perhaps it helps to have not grown up in the US. If you've been here your entire life there's a frog boiling syndrome where none of the weirdness seems weird.
Eh - some other countries I've lived are way scammier. The difference in the US is the distinction between legal and illegal scams, and because of better enforcement, most of the "scams" in the US are legal. They can be more sophisticated because the bar is higher here.