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When the pandemic was at full force, i worked for some lady tgat did foot massages. At least that's what i gathered from what it said on her car. But she saw herself more as a doctor or even super doctor than someone who rubs feet.

I often heard her on the phone telling people/customers/future customers to not get vaccinated becase you get shingles from it, vaccines are the real illness, autism, whatever. Instead they should just massage it away. I don't even think she was straight up scamming people, she just lived on Facebook, or a bit of both. Her customers more often than not took her advice very seriously. I know that because they often gave me a weird look because i was wearing a mask and they would deliberately hug and talk really closely without masks when i was around.

I worked for one of her customers not too long ago, pure coincidence. She has long covid now, she can't walk up the stairs anymore without being out of breath. She told me she has long covid, while also explaining me that she doesn't believe in covid.

I kinda forgot where i was going, but some people just have to believe what they want to believe.

Supplements. Iodine, colloidal silver, sea moss, and methylene blue. Completely unregulated "cures" for everything from the common cold to erectile disfunction. And if it doesnt work clearly you took the wrong dose or are possessed by demons.

Selling a fuck ton of snake-oil as an alternative.

Going viral on social media. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok… YouTube, too. If you start getting a certain number of views per hour or views per day, they start paying you for it because of the ads that play during your videos.

Making insane bullshit that gets a lot of clicks and views is an extremely profitable industry, especially if you’re some idiot who is otherwise unemployable. This is why all of those crazy AI slop videos are suddenly very popular, because if you post ones that go viral, they get a lot of affiliate rewards from all of the views and add impressions. Basically, that translates into cash.

Reduced short term costs. Vaccines aren't free and operate on a fairly slim profit margin.

More customers in higher profit services. Emergency, surgical and palliative care have significantly higher profits especially since chargemasters are largely given a blank check on which to write the charges on.

"But surely this is bad for the insurance industry who will push against this." Nope! The biggest obstacle to them raising rates is that to avoid any legal pushback there needs to be something to point at for why their costs increase. Insurance rates will, and currently are, going to rise significantly faster than any payouts.

This isn't some "Alex jones conspiracy" it's the entirely predictable outcome of a privatized healthcare system and is only going to get worse. The Alex Jones types are taking advantage of the crisis by selling snake oil cures for it, but they aren't a primary driver of the problem.

Yes, although, even with my decades of experience and media literacy, if I were made the chairman of the FTC today, I know that it would, unquestionably, take a decade or more for the FTC to modernize. And by that, I mean, it would take at least that long for the FTC to come to really understand how modern social media works, and how it, under the constitution, really should (and should not) be regulated.

I fully support the FTC being a regulatory body that, to a constitutional degree, regulates communications on the Internet. But what does that mean? What are the limits of that? What is and is not constitutional? It’s gonna take at least a decade before we even have a conceptual framework for it, and then many decades after that of evolution, just as the medium, itself, evolves.

For me, right now, the priority is to get this process started. Currently, a lot of of the FTC is not only struggling with its own existence, but how they can maintain their own current operations under Trump’s chainsaw slashing of federal workforce.

OK, I think the most useful thing I can say right now is that, while you are not wrong in the archetypes that caused the problem that let us here, there are a lot more contemporaneous nuances to the problem, and which complicate any possible solutions than there used to be. Put simply, wow, very used to be your problem. That was once black and white, it is now not simply shades of gray, but it is the shades of grey on multiple dimensions.

So, it’s a similar problem, but one which affects many more people than anyone realized, previously, and then so many more complicated ways that we, even as an entire society, are struggling with trying to figure out exactly what they all mean, let alone how to deal with the problems that present themselves.

And while that is quite its own thing, what truly differentiates the progressive from the regressive is the willingness to both acknowledge that this is happening, along with the willingness to acknowledge that it must be dealt with in the terms of a public service and good, rather than a private corporate need right for exploitation.

Edit: even as we continue, discuss this, my point becomes clear: whenever intuitive degree this issue occurs, it is an extraordinarily nuanced and complicated situation which requires at least as nuanced and complicated solutions. Nothing is black-and-white. There is no one simple answer to anything.