I recommend "Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins" by "Folding Ideas" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw
Amount of wannapreneurs loosing money on scams, amounts of young adults exploited to work for below market rates for years, amount of scammers hiding under "startup" banner getting money from VCs or small investors are not "one Deepak using quantum healing".
I must not be understanding what you mean. The field of quantum healing is entirely corrupt. There is no such thing, it's all bunk. Do you mean that quantum physics isn't corrupt? Because I doubt anybody thinks that.
This is so pervasive. Even in the mainstream economy where we see universities marketing courses that might seem to lead to employment but in fact are very niche with little chance of leading to a job in that specialism.
I've been looking for piano tuition recently and it's refreshing to see marketing along the lines of how much enjoyment you'll get, with potential to entertain your friends at parties.
I have not. Probably because they simply aren't a significant part of tech or startup culture.
Kids will also easily believe that is cryptocurrencies.
The beautiful cryptography is completely shadowed by speculation.
Care to point out where I made any universal claims about startup culture?
For the record, I agree with you.
MLMs are especially pernicious and harmful, but we do ourselves a disservice if we blind ourselves to the toxic culture that enables them - one that extends far beyond just MLMs.
The comment you replied to wasn't "Startups are MLMs" and in fact goes out of its way to state that it's not implying they're identical, yet you still force your way into interpreting it in the least useful way possible.
The fact is, of course startups are not MLMs: but there are shared threads in how they lead to fallacious thought that puts someone else's goals and profit ahead of your own time, money, and general sanity based on not much more than a vague promise of a future payout.
I'll agree with you on this because I am trying to switch the concern - putting it back on how bad MLMs are in line with the article.
If you read the article and then read the most upvoted comment, it says "Oh yeah that's terrible, and look at how startup's terrible too in really similar ways!" That is "what-about-ism" - This is bad, "but what about..." Focus shifting.
You're on a site where a disproportionate number of people are involved in startups/startup culture, and are also disproportionately in socioeconomic positions further removed from the effects for an MLM than a random population sample*.
(* I hesitate to even say this since I don't trust you won't try and build an enormous strawman argument out of it, trying to paint this as a "oh well readers here are to rich to care?!". I'm from a 3rd world country, so no, that's not it either.)
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Drawing parallels to a topic that's relatable to the reader is exactly what you'd expect in any half decent comment section.
At the end of the day you're saying you intentionally interpreted the comment in bad faith as a springboard to push your own take. A take which just repeats the literal contents of the article rather than interpreting it in a novel way.
> did the comment try to use startups to make MLMs look less bad, and in fact it did the exact opposite.
So you read OP's comment and thought "Wow, MLMs are even worse because startups have toxic culture."?
> Drawing parallels to a topic that's relatable to the reader is exactly what you'd expect in any half decent comment section.
> At the end of the day you're saying you intentionally interpreted the comment in bad faith as a springboard to push your own take.
Again, agreed, I do take the comment in bad faith, which is why I voiced my disagreement and downvoted. Because the parent comment did exactly what you state, drew parallels to something that "people understand" here by trying to make startups and MLMs morally equivalent with the phrase "You could easily change that to:".
That surface deep parallelism detracts away how destructive MLMs are - hence my comment from personal experience.
> I hesitate to even say this since I don't trust you won't try and build an enormous strawman argument out of it, trying to paint this as a "oh well readers here are to rich to care?!"
Not sure what you're trying to preempt here, but quite a weird comment, sort of a strawman of strawman.
It's interesting because we're starting from the same position. What you're accusing me of - I'm agreeing with you because that's what I'm trying to do, but the conclusions end up being different - thus, never eye-to-eye.
Whataboutism is necessarily a deflection relying on a stated or implied moral equivalence between something under scrutiny and something irrelevant. Accepting the premise that something is problematic and asking whether that reflects a problem in other places is introducing a new topic of discussion to a conversation. You are free to criticize that, but whataboutism is a mischaracterization.
(And in a strange coincidence, this is the second time I've defined whataboutism tonight, in unrelated threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34919705)
I think this is the root of it. That the parent comment does the moral equivalence action with "You could easily change that to:" and then inserts startups.
The assertion that I'm rejecting is the mischaracterization of startups. There absolutely are predatory startups, 100%, but to say as-a-group/whole that they're anywhere near the moral equivalence is what I'm rejecting.
Paradoxically, I personally believe that only by accepting this and giving up on trying to steer the conversation or convince anyone of anything can you engage in a way that might accomplish those things. Or at least, for myself personally, I find that when I get too invested my rhetoric gets too heated and I feel all sorts of perverse "someone is wrong on the internet" pressure, and I write dumb stuff that makes people angry but convinces no one of anything.
Startups do not usually require the people brought in to put in actual money. They put in time, for which they are paid with a mixture of cash, and equity which is basically a lottery ticket. But they do not flow money back to the founders. Generally the only people putting in actual money are those who can afford to lose it. Occasionally on HN I've seen people complaining that they can't sell shares to friends and family - or buy a startup they "know" is going to take off. But this is why: it's too easy to be fraudulent.
Now, what field has no such protections? ICOs and cryptocurrency. What field is rife with fraud that's been called "MLM for men"? ICOs and cryptocurrency.
One is funded by VCs, pays you a healthy salary, and gives you a shot, if you're lucky, at wheelbarrows of money from stock options.
Another is a pretend job you do from the age of about 23 until 37, mostly by yourself, bouncing between "accelerators" and "mentors", paying yourself a wage that a graduate student would feel sorry for, slowly getting old, and eventually realizing, as you approach 40, that you are now actually unemployable.
They're not the same.
I dislike the hard-link comparison to startups. I personally know people who got sucked into MLMs and are almost exclusively lower income families. There are literal playbooks, talking points from the organized MLM's themselves on how to "recruit" your families and get them to buy their own product so they raise in "status".
If you're connected to military moms' or lower income groups you know how pervasive and destructive these MLMs can be to these families. Not sure if you have any idea, but it is incredibly frustrating, disheartening to talk to them about how it's hurting them. In this case, it was their own cousin who got them involved and ultimately into debt. Not a 20's single-no-attachment, but this friend has a family to care for. I get angry just thinking about this. The only thing worse was for profit education.
Startups simply aren't at that level and even bringing this argument into play detracts from the focus of how destructive MLMs are.