1 PMU Industry
There are many horse farms in the USA whose sole product is urine that they sell to pharmaceutical and perfume industries. The Pregnant Mare Urine or PMU Industry sells urine of impregnated horses, who endure cruel and inhumane treatment. This product is the origin of the brand name for Premarin (pre-gnant ma-re ur-ine). Unfortunately, babies are taken away from their moms and slaughtered if a rescue can’t get to them and find them homes.
2 Live Support Chats
Almost all support live chat systems provide a “Sneak Peek” feature that allows a customer support agent to see what you’re typing in real-time before you submit. This can work against you if you’re negotiating a resolution and type something (however brief) that gets taken the wrong way. Keep your in-progress thoughts outside of the chat and only enter the text you’re 100% comfortable with. In the same vein, if a call center places you on hold, mute your phone as well if you plan to talk about something you don’t want them to hear.
3 Bumped Off Flight
If you get involuntarily bumped from a flight, you can get paid out 200-400% of the flight’s cost back depending on how late you get to your destination. If this happens to you they will offer you a bunch of vouchers, but be persistent and they will pay you out. If the airline arranges substitute transportation that is scheduled to arrive at your destination between one and two hours after your original arrival time (between one and four hours on international flights), the airline must pay you an amount equal to 200% of your one-way fare to your final destination that day, with a $650 maximum. If the substitute transportation is scheduled to get you to your destination more than two hours later (four hours internationally), or if the airline does not make any substitute travel arrangements for you, the compensation doubles (400% of your one-way fare, $1300 maximum).
4 Workout Supplements
99.9% of the people that you see in ads selling workout supplements don’t actually take them and are high dosing on anabolic steroids. Muscle-building snake oil peddlers make a living (or a fortune) by preying on your insecurities and promising you results that range anywhere from unlikely to utterly impossible. FDA is not even authorized to review dietary supplement products for safety and effectiveness before they are marketed. Therefore you can’t be sure if the ingredients on the bottle will provide any promising results or if the ingredients listed are even in the stuff you brought. Also, trendy workout machines shown on television won’t get you advertised results. You won’t get washboard abs by exercising 5 minutes on an elliptical a day. The truth is that abs are made in the gym and revealed in the kitchen. Having low body fat uncovers your musculature, so exercise alone won’t reveal them, dieting is an essential part of the process.
5 Patient confidentiality
Patient confidentiality just means your name isn’t in the story, not that your story won’t get told. Also, in some cases, doctors may disclose personal information without breaching duties of confidentiality under certain circumstances, such as when the disclosure is of overall benefit to a patient who lacks the capacity to consent. Legally, a doctor must disclose information if the doctor is ordered to do so by a judge. Also, a patient’s consent to disclose information may be explicit or implied. Explicit consent is given when a patient actively agrees to the use or disclosure of information. Implied consent refers to circumstances in which it would be reasonable to infer that the patient agrees to the use of the information, even though this has not been directly expressed.
6 Mad Cow Disease
The reason why Mad Cow Disease started to spread and became a problem a few years ago was that the beef industry used to grind up some of the cattle parts that were not used for human consumption and put it back into the food supply of the living cattle, including brains and spinal cord. Since then they have determined that these parts, in particular, have more potential to be infectious and so they now only feed sheep to cows and vice versa.
7 Disneyland
The fresh chocolate chip cookie scent that can you smell outside of the Magic Kingdom bakery in Disneyland is artificial. It is piped out there to draw you into the bakery. They’re called “Smellitzers”, which are targeted scent cannons. They also purposefully crank up the air conditioning in the shops during wintertime to sell more sweatshirts. You’d think if it is really worth the cost, but then you forget that they sell their sweatshirts for a huge markup ($75 last time I checked) and they actually own their own power plant. Club 33 is the most difficult-to-access spot in Disneyland. Hidden in plain sight in New Orleans Square, this 5-star restaurant was originally envisioned by Walt Disney as a quiet place to personally entertain corporate sponsors and special guests. It’s the only place in the Magic Kingdom that sells alcohol. Also, all of the plants in Tomorrowland are edible and chewing gum is not sold anywhere in Disneyland.
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8 Bottled Water
If your store-bought water bottle doesn’t specifically say “Spring Water” then it is actually just tapped water. Companies find municipal water supplies in the US that have the ideal water conditions, and pump it straight to the bottle with little or no processing (at a marginal cost of less than a penny per bottle). Some name brands may do a little more, like having additives to give their water a consistent and specific taste profile.
9 Jury Nullification
Juries can return a not guilty verdict even if they agree that the defendant broke the law, if they feel the law itself is unjust. This is referred to as jury nullification and judges do not want jurors to know about it, even going so far as to hold people handing out literature about it in front of courthouses in contempt of court. Although, times are changing because it is very hard to prevent, and many judges now rightly defend it. Some states even have laws requiring jurors to be informed, like New Hampshire. It’s not illegal to inform jurors in the courtroom, but when someone on the street informs people going into a courthouse, the law gets murkier.
10 Modern Slavery
Many of the big brands like Apple, Samsung and Sony are profiting from child labor in Africa. Modern electronics have minerals that come from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a war-torn place rich in must-have materials that are rarely found elsewhere. It’s estimated that more than half of the world’s cobalt supply comes from the DRC. About 20% of it comes from “artisanal miners,” who are women and children as young as seven who scavenge for rocks containing cobalt in the discarded by-products of industrial mines, and who wash and sort the ore before it is sold. Exposure to cobalt dust can result in “hard metal lung disease,” which is deadly. India has a large portion of its “workforce” powered by child-labor. A 2015 report by the International Labor Organization (ILO) puts the number of child workers in India aged 5 to 17 at 5.7 million, out of 168 million globally. While there are no provable links to International Corporations, there are there are more than 45 million people trapped in modern slavery. You simply can’t get that many people trapped into slavery without big corporations being behind it.
Shitty part is that none of this is a surprise. Just glad we only eat wild caught ocean fish and we have a blackberry bush in our backyard.