2017: "Herbalife’s $700 Million Stock Surge Is Another Blow to Bill Ackman" => http://fortune.com/2017/05/05/herbalife-stock-bill-ackman/ Looks like Herbalife is having the last laugh.
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One Billion Dollars Short, Bill Ackman, and the Siege Of Herbalife (2015)
111–120 of 144 posts
Re: One Billion Dollars Short, Bill Ackman, and the Siege Of Herbalife (2015)
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I know people that made a living and brought up two children with the help of Herbalife, so it is not THAT bad. It is not easy, and not a good job, on those points I do agree though.
What's with all the survivorship bias in these responses? For every person you know that's made money in an MLM, that mathematically means there were 1,000 people AT MINIMUM below them who were scammed somewhere around $300 to usually $20,000 (when you're poor that can be 3 months worth of savings and the difference between taking multiple overdraft hits + a title loan) to live a hijacked version of the American Drea…
A shorter way of putting it is probably:
If products don't get sold to actual consumers in sufficient numbers to pay everyone, then the money has to come from somewhere. It generally comes from "lower" distributors that one signs up. Those who are successful and see a profit by doing this talk about it; those who lose money do not.
Ergo, no social good, the majority of people talking about it are successful, and it ruins lives.
Re: One Billion Dollars Short, Bill Ackman, and the Siege Of Herbalife (2015)
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm of the opinion that John Oliver is not really a good source for changing people's minds. I agree with a lot of his points and he cites sources, but I find him difficult to watch. A lot of his show appears to endorse an echo chamber: he frequently criticizes the subjects by making them appear ridiculous. That's a very pervasive problem in political satire. It's often pandering. You have hosts taking clips of someo…
>he frequently criticizes the subjects by making them appear ridiculous That is literally his job description.
I think one of the elevations to the form that occurred as Jon Stewart and the writers evolved The Daily Show was that the coverage was more fair.
The clips were still humorous, but they were generally contextually and fairly presented so as to be an accurate statement of the target's beliefs. The subversion usually came in choosing clips where the true beliefs were exposed, rather than the PR whitewashed version.
Oliver tends to overdo the histrionics in reaction to the topic, whereas one of Stewart's most effective rhetorical devices was "... But maybe they {good reason for doing the thing that was done}" -> segue into next clip where target explicitly rejects {good reason} as motivation.
Re: One Billion Dollars Short, Bill Ackman, and the Siege Of Herbalife (2015)
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm of the opinion that John Oliver is not really a good source for changing people's minds. I agree with a lot of his points and he cites sources, but I find him difficult to watch. A lot of his show appears to endorse an echo chamber: he frequently criticizes the subjects by making them appear ridiculous. That's a very pervasive problem in political satire. It's often pandering. You have hosts taking clips of someo…
>he frequently criticizes the subjects by making them appear ridiculous That is literally his job description.
John Oliver's style is more akin to pointing a finger and laughing at someone than actually deconstructing why they are wrong. And even when he does deconstruct things, I think many of his arguments hinge on emotion and non-sequitur (e.g. It's 201X). I am an anti-fan of him, personally. He's basically the young peoples' version of a right-wing talk radio host or TV personality, yet people do not at all seem to realize this.
Re: One Billion Dollars Short, Bill Ackman, and the Siege Of Herbalife (2015)
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me you're kind of misusing the term scam. To me it's no more of a scam than buying a stock at the wrong time or working for a startup with options or any affiliate program. A lot of the time the products are really good at first they're usually hard to sell in retail and then usually the market catches up at the retail level and the product becomes a commodity. And at the same time the market saturates with reps a…
Often with MLMs you have to buy the product yourself first and then sell it. So people end up buying $1000 worth of energy drinks they can never sell, because their "employers" fed them so much bullshit about it being easy money. I would call that a scam
MLM sell their products at retail prices to their 'distributors' who then have to mark it up yet again, making the actual distributors the customer base (since normal consumers won't tolerate that level of markup).
If you're buying wholesale stock at retail prices, you are being scammed.
Re: One Billion Dollars Short, Bill Ackman, and the Siege Of Herbalife (2015)
#116I use to work in legislative affairs for the natural health industry. It's all one big scam. I try to explain it like this: Company A sells natural remedies, etc. Company B is a news organization which reports on natural health remedies, and also advertises for those companies, et. Nonprofit C is a consumer watchdog organization that investigates and promotes natural health. They are supported by the natural health i…
Seems like a sure thing to short the piss out of an enterprise like this and wage a comprehensive campaign of activism and consumer education against it. With rationality on your side, how could you lose?
Isn't that exactly what Ackman did?
Re: One Billion Dollars Short, Bill Ackman, and the Siege Of Herbalife (2015)
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm of the opinion that John Oliver is not really a good source for changing people's minds. I agree with a lot of his points and he cites sources, but I find him difficult to watch. A lot of his show appears to endorse an echo chamber: he frequently criticizes the subjects by making them appear ridiculous. That's a very pervasive problem in political satire. It's often pandering. You have hosts taking clips of someo…
>he frequently criticizes the subjects by making them appear ridiculous That is literally his job description.
Sure, and I'm not disagreeing that his opponents can be ridiculous. But they can also be very intelligent, and the audience will never see that side of them. The audience will see isolated clips that exaggerate their seeming incompetence.
More importantly, if that's his job description than it's not all that conducive to qualified political discussion. If someone really sides with Bernie Sanders, providing an elevated rebuttal to his economic policies is better than making fun of his hair, or the fact that he has a (to some) funny Brooklyn accent.
Likewise, critiquing Trump's policies is good. Making him appear ridiculous and starting every single show with, "President Trump, two words that...{funny joke}" while joking about his hair and fake tan are not conducive to educated discourse. It just further entrenches the demographics into two isolated camps. Sure he cites specific sources, but you begin to wonder how much of the audience really tunes in for that material, since a lot of it just appears to be a reaffirmation of unchallenged beliefs.
Where I do give John Oliver credit is for showcasing problems in society than many people are unaware of. I do frequently give the show a watch, I just make it part of a very diversified set of news and I don't particularly enjoy it all that much when, as another commenter mentioned, he goes heavy into histrionics. It becomes circular.
I guess to put my point more succinctly: John Oliver is not necessarily wrong in his conclusions, and he makes attempts to cite sources. But he arrives at his conclusions in a way that intrinsically encourages the same tribalism he often criticizes, and that tribalism is harder to identify because of the (real or apparent) intellectualism about it.
Re: One Billion Dollars Short, Bill Ackman, and the Siege Of Herbalife (2015)
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> With rationality on your side, how could you lose? You could lose because the rational choice model does not accurately model human behavior in the real world; people don't act based on perfect information, in part because even when presented with correct information, they are likely to reject it if it doesn't fit their pre-existing world view.
That has very little to do with the rational choice model. Rational choice agrees that people don't act on perfect information. It also agrees that even when given good information, individuals don't necessarily believe it. All RCT really boils down to is the fairly uncontroversial statement that people act in accordance with their actual preferences (even if their preferences should be different, the actions are not…
> Rational choice agrees that people don't act on perfect information
No, full rational choice theory posits that people do behave in a way which maximizes actual (not expected) net utility, or, in more detail, as if:
(1) They have a coherent “utility function” mapping each potential path through time that might be taken to a unidimensional, real-number utility value.
(2) They have perfect knowledge of the outcome (path through time), or at least resulting utility value, produced by every possible option with every decision they make,
(3) They consistently choose the option that maximizes utility.
There are more limited modifications of rational choice theory that attempt, with varying degrees of success, to close the predictive gap between full rational choice theory and actual behavior resulting from the fact that humans do not behave “rationally” in the sense of rational choice theory, but they aren't what is involved with the question “how can you lose when rationality is on your side?” asked upthread.
Re: One Billion Dollars Short, Bill Ackman, and the Siege Of Herbalife (2015)
#119Does anyone know of any legitimate MLM based companies that sell products that could probably be successfully sold without MLM?
In other words, can MLM be a useful tool for non-scammy companies?
Re: One Billion Dollars Short, Bill Ackman, and the Siege Of Herbalife (2015)
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me you're kind of misusing the term scam. To me it's no more of a scam than buying a stock at the wrong time or working for a startup with options or any affiliate program. A lot of the time the products are really good at first they're usually hard to sell in retail and then usually the market catches up at the retail level and the product becomes a commodity. And at the same time the market saturates with reps a…
Often with MLMs you have to buy the product yourself first and then sell it. So people end up buying $1000 worth of energy drinks they can never sell, because their "employers" fed them so much bullshit about it being easy money. I would call that a scam
That's illegal per FTC.
http://mlmlegal.com/MLMBlog/what-is-front-loading-or-invento...