america, where every day is a fresh grift.

25-Feb-2026 357 words 2 minutes

everything feels like it’s a scam or a grift

america has always been the land of the grift. but the past few years (and with this administration especially) it feels like it’s reaching a fever pitch and it’s being egged on at every level of society.

i can’t open my email client without getting notices that someone is trying to reset a password on one of my accounts.
in the same inbox is a “receipt” for a renewal that is, yet another scam.
i get fake meeting invites that due to the vagaries of misc. google settings and calendar apps, will just show up on my calendar.
i no longer even let my phone ring for unknown numbers. 9 times out 10 it’s for a telemarketer or a scammer looking to provide debt relief, help me with my social security query or sell me an extended warranty for a car i haven’t owned for 20 years.
at work, we get an incessant stream of fake messages from our “CEO” asking us to send them some gift cards because they’re stuck in a meeting.
crypto has proven itself to be a durable form of grifting, yet there’s a pack of billionaires who seem hell bent on wiring it into our financial system. there’s likely another bailout in the works a couple years from now on this front.
“prediction markets” are just gambling under another name. apparently, our legislation falls short of the notion of gambling on pretty much any potential news event.

this is starting to have serious societal impacts. when there’s a call for financial aid, i find myself increasingly reluctant to answer the call and there is significant friction in working to vet the request. i spend a lot more cycles than i should thinking about the right vehicle for providing assistance, or whether this is just another scam.

20260304 update

the latest 404 media podcast has a great rant on the polymarket and kalshi behaviors. there’s an interesting angle in here where they’re talking about more or less making themselves (the prediction markets, that is) the arbiters of truth, and the normalization of this behavior.