11Dove and Axe
Dove and Axe are owned by the same company, Unilever. One promotes female self-confidence by re-defining beauty while the other advertises itself using highly sexualized images of females. They tell both men and women what they want to hear. While they get to appear to be empowering on the surface when in reality they’re perpetuating the same kind of insecurities as the rest of the beauty industry that keep women buying their products.
12Palm Oil
If you are living in 2018, you already know that palm oil is awfully unsustainable. Many palm oil companies employ the slash and burn method. They cut down and burn rainforest, plant palm oil palms in its place. Lots of rainforest around the world has already been destroyed for palm plantations. Worse yet, there are even rumors of black market bounties from those companies on endangered wildlife such as orangutans. Kill and remove the endangered species, so that the governments will let you slash and burn. So what? You can easily avoid palm oil? Not exactly. Palm oil is in nearly every grocery store item. Look at the ingredient list of anything in your home (like food, cleaning supplies, etc.) and you probably will see a form of palm oil (look for anything with the word palm, such as palmitate).
13Ice Machines
The majority of ice machines are disgusting. The ice in your drink can be harboring really disgusting bacteria because ice machines are often last on the priority list for cleaning in restaurants and bars. In 2013, a study in the UK showed that ice in six out of 10 restaurants contained more bacteria than toilet water.
14Scientific Journals Scam
The $35 that scientific journals charge you to read a research paper goes 100% to the publisher, 0% to the authors. If you just email the author to ask for their papers, they are allowed to send them to you for free, and we will be genuinely delighted to do so.
15Radio Stations
Nearly every caller you hear on top 40 radio stations are either an intern or someone else close to the studio. Nearly all callers are fake. The “War of The Roses” episodes are obviously fake too. There’s an FCC law that requires you to get permission before you record a phone call for broadcast. That’s impossible to do with the live radio if you’re really surprising someone. So, you can pretty much assume that all “prank calls” on the radio are either fake or illegal. Contests are rigged too and are mostly won by regular callers all the time. Most of the music and the chat for the shows is also set for the week.
16Military Wastage
Everyone knows that the government wastes money, but the general population has no idea how much the army will spend on a vehicle that will quite possibly never get used. If you ever drive on a base and see the lineup of heavy armored vehicles that look brand new, it’s because they probably haven't moved since they got them. Plus the military has no concept of investment. Meaning that it will gladly make the decision to save $1 million now, but pay $10 million down the line for maintenance/upgrades/training, rather than pay $5 million now and actually save money over time. This bad practice is compounded by the fact that they will often refuse to scrap the poor investment until well after its run over budget. “Sunk cost” is a concept that is completely lost on the military.
17Stealing Ideas
Large corporations regularly steal ideas from small-time inventors. Imagine this scenario, you have a new invention that you are sure will make you an overnight millionaire. You have gotten a meeting to show it to this major corporation that is interested in buying the product and putting it on the shelves. Millions of households will soon be able to purchase your ingenious product. Except, at the meeting, the major retailer will ask to keep one sample so that the product can be passed around to all of the decision-makers, some of which unfortunately couldn't be in the room that day. The moment you leave the office, that product will be shipped to China where it will be dissected, copied, changed just enough as necessary, and then that will be the ingenious new product that is sold on the shelves at this major retailer. Because they are a billion-dollar corporation, they can afford to keep a team of lawyers fighting any patent infringement lawsuits until the entrepreneur either gives up or takes a paltry settlement, just to pay off the debt of fighting the case. That’s why if you’ve invented something great, the first person you should talk to about it should be a lawyer.
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15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
18Pharmaceuticals
Pharmaceutical companies are using a loophole to patent certain drugs that have been used for decades to treat certain diseases effectively, but those drugs were never actually FDA-approved for that particular disease. The most controversial case in point is the drug colchicine, which has been used for decades to help people with flares of a painful and disabling condition called gout. A drug company did a simple and inexpensive study recently that showed statistical significance that colchicine helps people with acute gout flares, something all prescribers have known (again, for decades). They went ahead and got FDA approval and now have the rights to re-brand it. Colchicine is now ONLY available under the trade name Colcrys and sells for about $5 per pill. When it was produced generically it only cost a few pennies per pill.
19Egg Industry
Industrially farmed egg hens are starved to produce more eggs. They're viewed as machinery, therefore when their productivity drops, they are taken off feed which causes their body to go into the last ditch “pump out as many eggs to reproduce” cycle. Their feathers fall out, their combs bleach and their bones break. They're then ground up and turned into pellets to feedback to the other chickens.
20Commercial Pilot
The pilot flying your plane (primarily budget / short haul) may only have gotten four hours of sleep last night and is so tired he can barely be trusted to drive his car home after he lands the plane. In one survey, 56% of pilots have admitted to sleeping on the job, with 29% waking up to find the other pilot asleep as well. Despite the tiring hours, for the first few years, the person fueling the plane makes more than the regional pilots.
