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Take Back Control of Your Life, Fire Your Boss and Join My [MLM Scams]
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The oldest guys who know nothing about the job negotiate for themselves, take part of my paycheck, and always give me the line "Well you're lucky to be employed at all in this economy." when I ask for help with a small issue (incorrect overtime, unfair hours).
Last negotiation we lost a lot chunk of a raise for everyone in exchange for an extra week of vacation for people who had been with the company 10+ years. Which is, shockingly, the Union leaders and maybe 30% of the rest of the staff. The gap between veterans and newcomers gets wider and wider because they literally are only in it for themselves.
In a technology driven business, the Union has made it so that I have a lot more work to do, because as we upgrade to more and more hi-tech stuff, that I know because I'm 30 and grew up with computers, they older people have no idea how to operate. And don't bother learning. And when I ask my boss why my workload is tripling, he responds "I cant get rid of them because of the Union." And obviously complaining to the Union doesn't help, because they're the ones who's job I'm doing in the first place. It reminds me of tenured teachers.
Obviously, the answer is to start running in elections for these seats (which, shockingly again, they tend to post the day of an election...), but apathy has become the norm and usually so few people vote it doesn't matter.
So I have a very sour opinion on Unions, but I also understand that run properly they can be great and do great things. I think Unions CAN turn INTO an MLM, but never really start out as one and it's not the intention. It's just the framework is there to exploit.
My understanding is alot of mall type clothing stores (a&f, etc) require a % of your paycheck be used to buy product in the store. I'd probably still consider people who work there marks.
I had some friends who worked for hot topic and they weren't required to shop there but their low pay combined with their discount left them basically no choice
I host a podcast about movies.
Unions only seem like pyramid schemes because they both aim for complete market penetration. The difference is, that once a union hits saturation point of workers (customers) it has succeeded and will now be able to work BEST. When a pyramid scheme hits saturation point of consumers/sellers it has failed because the scheme cannot continue to exist if it doesn't keep expanding. It's why companies like Tupperware AREN'T a true pyramid scheme, because people will buy new tupperware to replace their old stuff. So if you are a Tupperware salesman living in a market where noone else wants to pay to sell it, you can still make a small amount of money reselling the product to old customers.
My friend works at one of the mall stores, and the only requirement like that is that the employees must wear "their" brand jeans. So she went to a thrift store and picked up a pair for cheap.
http://www.libertynetworkers.com/
Well, this thread has been good theater, but we're obviously all crazy. Afterall, if someone drew a cartoon and one of the characters in that cartoon says that you're five times more likely to make 100K via MLM than an ordinary job, that cartoon character must be right.
Unfortunately, the majority of MLM businesses are a scam due to the fee's / fine print of their business model.
MWO: Adamski
That's like saying that phone Nigerian e-mails don't have to be scams, because maybe some guy is only pretending to be a Nigerian prince to wish you a happy birthday.
Or someone saying that all door to door sales are for charity / fundraisers, when only a majority of them are.
MWO: Adamski
It got bad enough that by December we had to move out of the apartment we were in and stay with my Grandparents, who luckily had some money so we could still have Christmas. I think that may be when I started the slow change to Atheism, and it really changed my relationship with my parents as well. I think it even changed them a little bit, but that's a story for another thread and another time.
Long story short, I think the worst part about this is the indoctrination process they subject people to. My parents weren't bad people, but they believed that they would get rich quick. These people prey on you, build up your trust by using things like faith, ignorance and desperation against you. Somewhere along the way, this seems to invariably turn the marks against their own friends and family.
The people who start these scams are amongst the worst kind of scum in the world, and deserve nothing but pain.
Basically, dude took a plastic handle grip, attached a swiveling metal rod to it, and called it a 'bomb detector'. Also a drug detector. And a weapon detector. And... well, basically, it 'detects' whatever it's target market might want to detect.
The Iraqi military bought $40 million dollars of these things! I am just dumbfounded. Of course, they don't actually detect anything - the antenna just swivels around randomly, like a dowsing rod, and there are reports of soldiers dying as a result of believing they were safe because the ADE 651 seemed to indicate no presence of explosives.
Clone products are the 'Quadro Tracker', 'GT200', 'Sniffex' (also called the 'HEDD 1'), 'Alpha 6' and 'DKLabs Lifeguard'.
Just crazy. James McCormick, the founder of ATSC (who manufactures & sells the ADE 651) has been arrested for fraud, but all of this crap is still out there and at least some of it is still in 'use'.
That's probably a good point with society and technology marching on but older companies not quiet understanding the dynamic.
http://www.mancaveworldwide.com/
Anyone have any more information about this company?
MWO: Adamski
30 seconds of google reveals... it's a scam. But you already knew that.
Speaking of beverages...
http://www.vemma.com/vervezero/faq.cfm
http://www.energyfiend.com/verve-energy-drink-the-biggest-ingredients-list-ever
I'm sure an actual chemist will find this even more amusing than I will, but...
Why do I doubt these ingredients are actually real?
dat thorium juice
I don't doubt that it contained mercury.
I did alright there, but the issue wasn't so much the pay (though the pay was horrible for the hours I was working, it was better then being unemployed which is why I stayed so long). The issue was the absolutely toxic corporate culture. Despite the fact that the way your day went, and how much money you made, was often determined entirely by what territory you were given for the day (one week I was given territory that was way out in a rural area, and after that I was given territory that hadn't been built yet--it was all empty lots), you were expected to keep a wholly positive attitude and were insulted if you didn't. I worked 6 days a week with the expectation that Sundays would be my day to schedule meetings for the next week (also though I said I worked only 50 hours a week you were expected to come in 1-2 hours early to get tutoring from other reps).
It was only after I was promoted that things became really sketchy. As a leader, it was expected of me to monitor the people working under me, making sure that they didn't have a negative attitude that would lead to them convincing other people to quit. And while I was told I'd be making 1200 a week as a leader, in reality I was splitting my income with that of the people working under me, and given how unreliable that income was I actually made less in the week I worked with my person then I did before I was promoted. I quit soon after that.
Well for one, there's no way they are selling a drink with that shit in it. Many of those elements are just flat out poison.
But I'm curious who they think they are marketing to. Is there some crazed group out there who thinks they need to eat the entire periodic table for health?
I can't say anything about the company in question, but I have heard it multiple times that Utah is like a safe haven for skeevy con-men. From what I have been told its because of Mormonism. Apparently Mormonism consider wordly wealth as a sign of divine favour, that prayer gives you the ability to commune with god and that fellow believers are to stick together.
Combining those atributes you get people that want to become rich and are willing to trust people claiming to be of the same faith. The punchline being when the victim has any doubts, the con-man just says "why don't you pray on it and let God guide you to a decision". End result being that "God" tells them to invest their money. Victims usually fall for it hook, line and sinker.
Being a Mormon and graduating BYU does not make you nice, it makes you a Mormon graduate of BYU.
As for MLM...there is some direct marketing that's somewhat legitimate. Avon, Mary Kay, Tupperware, Cutco, etc may be overpriced, but my understanding is that they are based more around selling the product than recruiting new sellers. For a long time, there were a lot of useful products that could only legitimately be marketed by those methods. It's a bit archaic in today's Amazon world, and in a world where every town of 10,000+ people has a million square foot big box store, but for a long time direct marketing was the only legitimate way to reach a lot of people.
But anyway...yeah, nobody should ever pay their employer for a job, and there definitely needs to be better education on what constitutes a scam or not. Still, like cults, these scams are designed to exploit bugs in human psychology and target people who are vulnerable. Also, the amount of profit you can make off anyone who does buy into the scam is so great that it doesn't need to be widely successful, even if one in a hundred or one in a thousand people buy into it, that's all you need to perpetuate the scam.
I really pity people who buy into these scams because they are usually the people who can least afford it.
There is a quote in Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven where an FBI agent in Utah has to tell people: "God is not an investment advisor."
U-232 is not particularly radioactive - it's half-life is longer than the age of the earth - and also you're probably getting trace amounts in everything you eat anyway.
I guess I'm the bigger fool for looking for accuracy in the scientific terminology used for a bullshit product.
Get this: you can buy organic salt.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
And this has fucked us all over as well - when the FDA tried to regulate dietary supplements, guess which state's Congressional contingent made it illegal for them to do so?
That's not really 'trace amounts', though - it would literally be just a few stray atoms. Maybe as few as one or two atoms (and quite possibly none at all).
You can't list that as a fundamental component of the beverage. Well, I mean, i guess you can - but it makes you a liar.
So what you're saying is U-232 is included in the drink and they get Th-228 to energize out of that decay in that drink?
Even though it's got a ~70 year half life, handling U-232 is pretty dangerous. I wonder which isotope is in there!
I think you mean Ultra-Trace.
I think you mean "You can't prove that it's not in there, so I'm gonna say it is."