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Ponzi Schemes Multiply On YouTube
Hugh Pickens writes "While it's probably not true that P. T. Barnum was the originator of the saying 'there's a sucker born every minute,' the proliferation of nearly 23,000 Ponzi schemes on YouTube, with an astounding 59,192,963 views, proves that the sentiment is still alive and well. The videos usually don't ask for money directly, but send viewers to web sites where they are urged to sign up for the 'gifting program,' usually for fees ranging from $150 to $5,000. One of the videos recently added on YouTube featured Bible quotes, pictures of stacks of money and a testimonial from a man who said he not only got rich from cash gifting, but also found true happiness and lost 35 pounds. 'They make it seem like it's legal and an easy way to make money, but it's nothing more than a pyramid scheme,' says Better Business Bureau spokeswoman Alison Southwick. Some of the videos claim that because it's 'gifting,' it's somehow legal. 'They talk about "cash leveraging," whatever that means, and other vague marketing talk,' says Southwick, but the basic scheme is that participants are told to recruit more people who will put in more money. 'It's just money changing hands,' says Southwick, 'and it always goes to people at the top of the pyramid.' A spokesman for YouTube, which is owned by Google Inc., said the company doesn't comment on individual videos."
Just as the government learned it by watching Ponzi, these youtubers learned it by watching the government.
"His name was James Damore."
...this is precisely why we really need to reconsider our public schooling system.
If we abolish forced schooling, and insist that people "educate themselves" They'll find one of these scams, get taken for an expensive ride, and then left dumbfounded as to what happened.
Solid critical thinking skills start with a decent education. Decent education starts by making it free, neutral and accessible.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Just like during the Great Depression, this will be a time of resurgent con-men as the majority will (in desperation) try anything to get cash.
The notion that you can "gift" (or "buy") your way to being rich without doing any hard work, or having a creative idea, is so completely stupid that anyone who believes it, assuming they're in full control of their mental faculties, deserves what they get.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
You'd be surprised how quickly a sucker learns after his money is gone forever. Sounds like a cheap education to me.
How we know is more important than what we know.
You'd be surprised how many people fall for one of these schemes, then move on to the next, lose out, and move on to the next to lose out again...
Why should it be illegal to play pyramid schemes? Just because people are stupid enough to fall for them? I have no sympathy for people who are lured in by promises that are quite bluntly too good to be true, where thinking about it for only a minute would give you enough reasons to stay away from it.
Libertarian intellectualism at its finest. Why don't we just scrap all the laws and let people fuck each other over every way imaginable? People do stupid things, laws try to prevent and minimize the harm done by those actions.
Want to see an economy tank all we need is a couple million illiterate people come of working age.
Solid critical thinking skills start with a decent education. Decent education starts by making it free, neutral and accessible.
That's a good start, but critical thinking must also be focused on as a skill. It's far too easy to regurgitate a textbook and even regurgitate what other people have thought on the matter. In things like math it's easy to learn the method without understanding, and in things like science you spend a lot of time catching up with that others have done or experiments with an expected outcome that is more reproduction than experimentation. Linguistics teach you to express things but again doesn't really help critical thinking alone.
Sure, you can do more critical thinking on subjects already discussed to death by millions of scholars around the world, but given the tendency to google instead of thinking yourself it really only works on those who already want to think for themselves. To teach critical thinking you need to make them "think where no man has thought before". Make up a situation they won't find on google, ask them to argue some opinions, form arguments and give reasons for their logic. Unfortunately that is orthogonal to teaching them about the big and important events in history, which is so much more concrete and measurable. So we get people that know a lot about the world and understand little of it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Yes, because economy is a zero sum-game.
Here's why:
If it illegal to take someone's money by use of force, so it should *not* be legal to do the same with a pen or a computer.
If the strong of body cannot rob the weak, the strong of mind should be prohibited from doing the same.
Because outside of the damage they inflict upon naive individuals and their families, if left unchecked (as we basically saw with the housing bubble) they have the potential to inflict damage upon the real economy.
Because a large percentage of people are not smart with money but are otherwise extremely capable of being productive contributors to society. As a society it benefits us for people to be justly rewarded for their fruitful labor, which requires mitigating the potential harm of their money-foolish character flaw.
And finally, to the extent that money becomes a hack as opposed to an accurate representation of labor and capital, it is devalued as a concept, which decreases its global worth and utility.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
1 year later I'm a bit stuck because I've paid off most of the loan to the FED but that last $5 is a real bitch because it just doesn't exist. So what do I do?
If it's (hyper)inflation you spend it as soon as possible before it loses value until it collapses like the reichmark in 1920s germany or just recently the zimbabwean dollar. If it's stagflation you hoard it as money is increasing in value. What you're missing here is that somewhere, real value is produced. Imagine that there's 100$ total and there's 10 foobars, the only goods to trade so each is worth $10. Now there's a foobar maker, which produces another foobar - there's now 100$ and 11 foobars and the new market price is 9$. Who's earned value? The people sitting on a 10$ bill. Now imagine how well it works if everyone wants to sit on their 10$ bill.
So what's the solution? To print money, they print one more 10$ bill and suddenly there's 110$ total and 11 foobars and the money market works. Of course they can fall to the temptation and print more money than actual growth, say 110$ and 10 foobars, meaning you can sell a foobar for 11$. The government basicly took part of the value out of everyone's 10$ bills. But people have a very simple way of fighting this - don't sit on money, sit on goods as printing money only increases prices. In those situations money is just an intermediary as you swap one good for another, you buy gold or a saner currency.
Of course the government like everyone else like skimming something of the top, but for the most part they work hard to keep the financial system going. Once you stop believing in the currency you also stop believing in deposits and credits because they make you "stuck" in that currency and so the whole economy withers. Like with the human body, you have vital organs but if you have no circulation system then none of those will survive either.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings