Quote (russian @ Jan 7 2013 08:19am)
These "doctors are scam artists" posts remind me of the time when I worked in retail IT support cleaning viruses and reinstalling OSes. I couldn't believe how many people had a firmly held belief that I, and every other person like me, purposefully install "delayed" viruses, or do some other technical voodoo that makes the machine work fine for a limited time and then break so you'd come back and give us more money. Alternatively, we would allegedly tell them they need to buy a new piece of hardware because we get some kickback from the retailer who sells it, when the customer either doesn't need the hardware at all, or we could have easily fixed whatever was broken instead of replacing it. They basically said the same thing about us that some people here say about doctors, except in relation to their computers rather than their bodies.
Needless to say, I thought they were batshit crazy tinfoil hatters, and continued doing my best to remove whatever stupid malware shit they managed to clog their computers with. I imagine doctors the world over have a pretty similar view of their conspiracy-nut patients.
A great analogy.
It always raises the question of how many people are involved in the conspiracy, and how does the conspiracy propagate itself? How many people are like you (in this respect); lets use a conservative estimate of 50,000. So the next question is how did these 50,000 people all get put on the same sheet of music? Obviously they were taught this in school. So now we have all the instructors involved as well. But how do the instructors profit from this scheme? Do they get kickbacks as well everything you rip someone off by installing "delayed malware"? How is this tracked? The instructor who taught you to do this horrible thing; how does he get his cut of your illicit income from this practice? What recourse does he have if you screw him over and don't give him his cut? Or is it like some super universal system where every time a tech screws someone the money goes into a giant pot and everyone in the entire system gets like a fraction of a penny? What about tech's who didn't go to school and are self taught? Are they initiated into this secret system later? What happens if a self taught tech refuses to participate? Is there like some IT brownshirts who come to their house and make bad Monty Python Holy Grail jokes until they agree to participate? What about independent hackers and computer programmers? Shouldn't they have found evidence for these "delayed malwares" and exposed them? I guess they must be part of the system too. How do they get paid?
Conspiracies do happen, but they are generally only successful while the number of people required to propagate it are very small.