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Earlier quoted context omitted.
$150 is real money.
It represents what, two days of work at minimum wage? Sounds like a cheap price to pay for falling for a scam. You could lose a lot more in this world. A lot more.
$7.25 * 16 hours = $116 gross
Annually: $15,080
Percentage of annual salary ($150): 1%
$150 is not “a cheap price to pay” if you are below the poverty line.
(Disclaimer: this is not my ad, and the only thing worse than the unconscionable stupidity of participating is the support you're giving to the the stupid person above you to keep being stupid.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
$150 is real money.
It represents what, two days of work at minimum wage? Sounds like a cheap price to pay for falling for a scam. You could lose a lot more in this world. A lot more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It represents what, two days of work at minimum wage? Sounds like a cheap price to pay for falling for a scam. You could lose a lot more in this world. A lot more.
There are few things that appear more crass than this. Have you ever been poor?
Once I did have more money though, I did get swindled, and for probably 10x as much. But I learned.
Maybe the people taking part in these pyramids aren’t as poor as you think, but probably still poor by some standard.
There are a lot of judgment posts in the comments here. Let me ask a few questions of the HN crowd: * When were these kids educated about pyramid schemes and other scams? When were they taught the patterns to look for? * Who is responsible for teaching them? Most of you will say "Parents", but are they equipped to understand and teach? The old cliche is Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it but who is…
Maybe games like this are the education. Part of me wants to see Instagram/venmo allow these to continue to happen because it's better for these kids to lose $150 now than $10,000 later.
Instead think about vaccinations: It's supposed to be distributed universally and it does not harm the individual receiving the inoculation. This is what you want. We can design tools for parents and teachers that have the same educational impact without the side-effect of harm.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There isnt much damage. No money is lost, it just moves. Admittedly into fewer hands. The damage is mostly capped at $150 or so, I would imagine. Normally in a ponzi there is a pretense of a business that you are funding and so you can really empathize with those who were fooled, but no one is being fooled here. They know the risks. This is a ponzi game, not a ponzi. It's social gambling.
> No money is lost, it just moves. Admittedly into fewer hands. The damage is mostly capped at $150 or so, I would imagine. I mean, that describes literal robbery too.
There are a lot of judgment posts in the comments here. Let me ask a few questions of the HN crowd: * When were these kids educated about pyramid schemes and other scams? When were they taught the patterns to look for? * Who is responsible for teaching them? Most of you will say "Parents", but are they equipped to understand and teach? The old cliche is Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it but who is…
>* Who is responsible for teaching them? Most of you will say "Parents", but are they equipped to understand and teach?
learning by getting you own bruises seems to be the learning way of choice of human species. Beginning of 199x pyramids of all sorts and at all scales swept across former USSR - pretty much everybody was a "kid" back then when it came to anything market/capitalism related, and thus they had to pay for their "practice based economic education" out of their own pocket :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMM_(Ponzi_scheme_company)
"МММ was a Russian company that perpetrated one of the world's largest Ponzi schemes of all time, in the 1990s."
I expect that some ICO will soon finally beat the MMM record :).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
$150 is probably not that cheap for a teenager; and I bet that a lot of them will re-"invest" into multiple stacks once they succeed once.
I think you're missing parent's bigger point. Nothing is big for almost any teenagers, because at the end of the day they don't have to pay rent or buy groceries or that type of thing. Plus, a good percentage of them are about to be saddled with 100-1000X that amount in debt. $150 is water under the bridge.
When I was in high school, losing $150 meant that I'm out of gas money for the next two weeks, which means that I'm riding the school bus every day at 6am, holding on to a paper bag with a sandwich I made the night before.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are few things that appear more crass than this. Have you ever been poor?
When I was poor I couldn’t afford to go dumping 2 or 4 days worth of work into weird schemes. Once I did have more money though, I did get swindled, and for probably 10x as much. But I learned. Maybe the people taking part in these pyramids aren’t as poor as you think, but probably still poor by some standard.
$150 was a huge amount of money when I was poor. It represented several-days to a week's worth of earnings. You've got to be doing alright for yourself for $150 to only be a day or two's worth of pay, after taxes and expenses.
It seems like they're putting THIS IS A PYRAMID SCHEME on top and people are still buying into it. (Admittedly, pyramid schemes usually do work if you're the one starting them and you don't get caught. It's also nice to see someone starting a pyramid scheme that doesn't involve blockchains for a change :) ) One thing that makes me skeptical about this post is talking about "sweeping instagram" in the title and "hype"…
[1]: https://twitter.com/itsdreebetch/status/953111010092621824