It has already been said, but it bears repeating:
"Any sufficiently advanced business model is indistinguishable from a scam."
Is Everything an MLM? (2019)
31–40 of 116 posts
Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)
#32It reminds me of a song I sang to myself to the tune of the Lego Movie theme, surveying the tech job market at the time: Everything is adtech, Everything is marketing, surveillance, and spam...
You're making me thankful I've spent all of my career working on various forms of tooling. I'd be sad if all I did was marketing, surveillance, and spam. Might very well go find another line of work.
Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)
#33It is likely that life itself is non-ergodic. It has some returns on capital but eventually a catastrophic event will wipe all gains.
Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't Amazon Truck Drivers hourly employees? What risk and liability do they have? I am not sure how this an MLM like your other examples
Amazon have a gig delivery program called Amazon Flex. Additionally, in many markets Amazon truck drivers aren't Amazon employees, they work for DSPs (Delivery Service Partners), although I think Amazon do require that individual drivers be full-time hourly employees with benefits, it's still a liability fan-out mechanism. Founding a DSP is marketed heavily at "entrepreneurial spirits" in various markets who aren't a…
Can't find the original article I read but here is some more info on the relationship the program maintains with "owners"
>The materials touted that he could make more than $75,000 and perhaps as much as $300,000 every year. The application required that you have $10,000 in startup capital, but the ad he saw also said that the fee might be waived for veterans.
>Aside from Ramos, all of the business owners and drivers interviewed for this piece see themselves as working primarily for Amazon, not for an independent small business. That mentality has added to the disappointment for workers seeking autonomy
>“It’s not a partnership. This is working for Amazon,” the veteran said. “We DSPs are not business owners, we’re paid managers. They control every aspect.”
>After the DSP owner is paid by Amazon, the owner then has to pay the drivers, taxes, leases on the vans, repairs to the vans, new clothing (the physicality of the job means some drivers go through gear every couple of weeks), worker’s comp and other costs.
https://www.protocol.com/workplace/amazon-delivery-program-t...
Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)
#35It reminds me of a song I sang to myself to the tune of the Lego Movie theme, surveying the tech job market at the time: Everything is adtech, Everything is marketing, surveillance, and spam...
If that's your view of the world you gotta stop working on B2C products and take some B2B jobs. You might start singing "Everything is enterprise sales" but at least you'll be working in an environment where the people using your software and the people paying you are the same.
Something I find interesting about the B2B space is that since there are fewer customers, you can't A/B test everything to death since the sample size is too small--you need better product vision. You're also closer to customers, so you'll get more useful direct feedback.
Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)
#36even MLMs are an MLM
Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)
#37As someone looking for a job, can corroborate. I can't tell you how many listings I see are for positions at recruiting firms. What kind of recruiting firm, you may ask? Why, the kind that finds technical recruiters for other companies, of course.
In this case, the problem is the overblown enthusiasm for 10x-type employees - because no one trains anymore - and the lengths companies will go to find them. Contrary to the situation described in the article, the end goal is to find singular workers who can be paid exorbitant salaries (but still less than the cost of the teams they'd replace). It's a very difficult problem, so if you're unsuccessful, the next best option is to simply outsource responsibility. The MLM-ization of society is something akin to cancer, in that the causes are multitudinous.
Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)
#38The analogy doesn't work. MLMs are outright fraud. Even worse than "gig economy" "jobs" that are really just stealing your car's value to pay a large fraction of your supposed income. They exploit people who are not intelligent enough to escape their come ons. in both these cases you end up with nothing. Outside of for-profit and lower-tier schools that really have no business issuing postgraduate degrees, the worst…
There's definitely a spectrum, and the big difference (my wife is a PhD student) is that the vast majority of PhDs _know_ it's all bullshit, but do it anyway. MLMs tend to have some kind of buy-in.
Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)
#39[deleted]
Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)
#40This is, I think, better to think about with the "meme" idea[0], that ideas function like organisms that land in your brain, have a lifecycle, reproduce, and so on. You can apply all kinds of useful intuition from the biological world about reproductive fitness, selection, mutation, and so on. MLMs are the ideas that are like viruses because they are minimally simple (the content is not the point), they spread easily, and they use all the hosts resources (time and money) to reproduce themselves. MLMs are delightfully devious critters because they use your greed against you, promising great wealth while simultaneously sucking you dry. They are poetic justice on wheels.
What is astounding is that the victims of MLMs never see it, not even after the fact. If greed drives the spread, delusion prevents building herd immunity. It's the weaponization of Mark Twain's old saw about the American poor believing they are just millionaires down on their luck.
I think the end-game will be an MLM-as-a-service (MaaS) which services those enterprising folk who see the only way to profit from an MLM is to make a new one, and so start at the top. Make it easy and factor out everything but branding and sales. The customer would pick their product archetype (vitamins, cosmetics, whatever), pick a name and a logo that gets put on the boxes at the factory, and be on your way. Enrollment, payments, shipping, and all of that is all taken care of. For a small fee, of course.