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Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

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Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

#51

Post by guerrilla »

sky-kedge0749 wrote: post #47
guerrilla wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate as to why you think so?

Not GP, but here's an answer to your question in the form of a jigsaw puzzle: https://www.etsy.com/listing/739198964/crimethinc-pyramid-of...

That's equivocation between a pyramid as hierarchy and a pyramid as a specific business model. As far as I know, capitalism doesn't require constant recruitment because growth can be achieved in other ways like reducing product quality, reducing wages, deteriorating working conditions, increasing technological efficiency, enclosing commons, privatizing public goods and services, etc.

Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

#52

Post by hattmall »

selecsosi wrote: post #34
bri3d wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Same model as FedEx ground.

Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

#53

Post by antisthenes »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #45
monkeybutton wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any kind of sales where you are buying leads or paying for the right sell someone else's product. If it was as good as they say, they'd be doing it themselves not pitching it to you.

> it was as good as they say, they'd be doing it themselves not pitching it to you Counterfactual: franchises.

Franchises offload the risk on the franchisee and collect their percentage fee regardless of the performance.

There was a segment on John Oliver's program about Subway being particularly predatory about this, as well as deliberately maintaining information asymmetry to mislead franchisees.

In which sense do you think franchises are counterfactual here?

Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

#54

Post by TheDong »

javajosh wrote: post #40

This 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…

> I think the end-game will be an MLM-as-a-service (MaaS)

Arguably, the ICO boom was a realization of this end-game. There were guides to create a new etherium-backed crypto token in minutes, services to help create and manage them, and so on. Each ICO functioned as its own MLM, with the differentiating factor usually being branding, sales, and whitepaper quality.

Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

#55

Post by guerrilla »

superdisk wrote: post #44
guerrilla wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate as to why you think so?

It requires ever increasing growth to function and the world's resources are finite.

These are facts but don't explain why OP sees it as a pyramid scheme*. I'm not say it it's not (or that it is), but I think an explanation could be helpful. If you said the stock market or something was a pyramid scheme then okay I can see that, but what does it mean for capitalism to be one.

> *A pyramid scheme is a business model that recruits members via a promise of payments or services for enrolling others into the scheme, rather than supplying investments or sale of products

Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

#56

Post by HWR_14 »

RicoElectrico wrote: post #27
superb-owl wrote: post #7

There's definitely a trend where large corporations/institutions push risk and liability down onto individuals, who have a hard time quantifying it properly. They make promises about "independence" and "entrepreneurship" and "building wealth", but they're really just taking advantage of an information asymmetry, tricking uninformed individuals into accepting a deal that is much worse than they think. See: Uber, Subwa…

Yeah, I just don't understand how franchises are able to get away with their shitty tactics, at least in the EU. They do not provide any net value to the society, all they do is shift the risk onto the franchisee with a pretty much unilateral contract. You have to engage in whatever shit they come up with, like buying expensive equipment. (McDonald's pizza anyone?) The only instances where a franchise makes sense is…

A franchise makes good theoretical sense. The franchisee gets an operations manual and the ability to use valuable trademarks to streamline you business, and pays a percentage that is lower than what movie stars and athletes pay their agents. The customer gets knowing that McDonalds, which values their trademarks, is standing behind the restaurant with higher (or at least different) standards than the health department in terms of quality, and the menu and deals will be what they expect. The franchise parent company gets to expand without capital costs. Done properly, all three parties benefit.

Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

#57

Post by HidyBush »

I think an MLM business can be described as a business model that is mathematically proven to not work and is intentionally employed to make the founders rich off the money of other people. A business that simply needs to reach a certain scale to be profitable by itself is not an MLM.

For example a new chat application might require 10.000 users to pay off for the computing power needed to run the servers, so until you reach those 10.000 users you need to lure them in promising everything will work just fine. If you reach that threshold then everything will indeed be fine, but if you don't and run out of money you'll have to let a lot of people hanging. An MLM cannot possibly reach that threshold.

Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

#58

Post by kube-system »

monkeybutton wrote: post #17
superb-owl wrote: post #7

There's definitely a trend where large corporations/institutions push risk and liability down onto individuals, who have a hard time quantifying it properly. They make promises about "independence" and "entrepreneurship" and "building wealth", but they're really just taking advantage of an information asymmetry, tricking uninformed individuals into accepting a deal that is much worse than they think. See: Uber, Subwa…

Any kind of sales where you are buying leads or paying for the right sell someone else's product. If it was as good as they say, they'd be doing it themselves not pitching it to you.

The plain concept of the specialization of labor demonstrates that this is false, at least as a blanket statement. Sales is a skill. Making products is a skill. The people who have these skills is not always the same person or organization.

Information or power asymmetry is the problem. Sometimes it’s the other way around. E.g. a large retailer selling a small company’s products.

Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

#59

Post by thr0wawayf00 »

mandevil wrote: post #30

My wife is a pharmacist. Over the past two decades the number of pharmacy schools has increased and some schools have gotten bigger classes, such that now every year there are about 25% more Pharm.D's made than in 2005. The result has been a predictable decrease in pharmacist quality of life- the pay is basically the same number of dollars today that you would get in 2005 so inflation has made them poorer, the hours…

You're wondering about the software industry specifically, but what you're really asking about is the education industrial complex.

Universities are not in the business of properly meeting labor demands of the market with skilled workers, and they never have been. Their goal is to increase enrollment and capture as much grant and tuition money as they can. Universities don't care if too many lawyers, chemical engineers, etc. are being trained.

There are several paths into software engineering, many of which bypass the education industrial complex. It's getting easier to access just the education needed to do a technical job like programming.

> Is it that we are so unproductive and failure-prone that we guarantee ourselves full employment?

I think there's some truth to this, but I also speculate that software devs are much more productive as a cohort than we like to let on. Just think about quickly everything in the industry changes. There's a new way to write JS apps every 3 months and a major breaking, paradigm-shifting change to React every couple years it seems like, and that's just the web side. Most workers don't have to deal with the amount of change throughout their careers as programmers do, and it is absolutely exhausting.

Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

#60

Post by marcosdumay »

bitwize wrote: post #5

It 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...

Marketing being that important tells something really bad about innovation. (Just as high lawyer salaries tell something bad about a government.)
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