With businesses failing, I'm watching the multi-level marketing people scrounging on personal finance boards to lure in desperate people. So PSA: your friend who is making great money from home and offers to schedule a time to tell you all about it is not your friend.
Multi-level marketing is mostly a legal Ponzi scheme where the money comes from recruiting new victims, not selling product. Even if this were not true, a pandemic is not a great time to try to be selling stuff through in-home demonstrations!
The in-home or social network distribution channel basically died as a viable business with the advent of the radio. The only way you actually make good money from home this way is by recruiting lots of salespeople under you, who "invest" in worthless product they can't sell.
This is morally abhorrent, and even if it wasn't, it's hard to keep up after you have run through your network of friends and family.
Also, you will lose your friends and maybe your family if you do this.
If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Like, a job that requires no skills and allows you to have a top-10% income while putting in a few hours a week from your living room. IF someone pitches you this proposition, run screaming in the other direction.
There are some companies that sell through the in-home channel, notably Thermomix (Vorwerk), Avon, and Tupperware. Of the three, only Thermomix still has any reason too (product is expensive and novel and benefits from extensive demonstration.
This is why vacuum cleaners were once sold door-to-door. But frankly, even Vorwerk could probably replicate the benefits with infomercials and a QVC deal. And vitamins? Cleaning products? Automotive accessories? Geddoutttahere.
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Time walks without footsteps.
No sound, yet every clock bends to it.
It slips through the ribs of morning,
collects sunlight in quiet pockets,
and spends it slowly on the evening sky.
We try to measure it—
in calendars,
in wrinkles,
in the cooling of coffee left on a table—
but time is never really caught.
It is a river that refuses a map.
A child releases a laugh into the air;
years later the echo becomes memory.
A tree lifts its branches through decades
as if asking the sky a question
only time can answer.
Sometimes it feels cruel—
a thief of voices,
a dissolver of moments we begged to stay.
But sometimes it is gentle, too:
it sands the sharp edges of grief,
turns wounds into stories,
and stories into quiet wisdom.
And somewhere, in the turning of a planet
no one hears the hinge of,
time keeps opening the same door—
moment
after moment
after moment.
Claude:
Time is the river no one sees until they're standing wet to the knees, wondering how they crossed the shore and why they can't go back for more.
It pools in photographs and rings of ancient trees and wedding rings, in the slow forgetting of a voice, the way loss never felt like choice.
We try to hold it—fill our palms— watch evening turn to quiet psalms, as something slips through every seam the way that waking swallows dream.
Yet here it is: this breath, this now, the light that falls across your brow. Not caught. Not kept. But briefly, bright— a match struck once against the night.
Journalism will lose the war on AI because it will hit us from all sides: some writers will make unauthorized use that's hard to prove, some outlets will use it, undercutting everyone else's margins. It won't stop unless readers decide to care, and I suspect most won't
I suspect I will get replies saying "I care" and yes, I do too, because I like good writing better than midwit AI takes. But the taste for well-crafted prose is a very minority taste, and if you are tempted to argue, I point you to 50 Shades of Gray. Case closed.
Highly verbal people who make their living with words have great difficulty modeling the minds of readers whose idea of a good book is self-help, a phoned-in celebrity biography, or a James Patterson novel, but those folks outnumber us by a lot.
I don't think our duty is too ignore it; our duty is to figure out the response that maximizes the future health of our society, while taking into account that Trump's character flaws and intense partisan polarization make the best solution--moral shaming--completely ineffective
Robert Nozick coined a great neologism, "Normative Sociology: The study of what the causes of things *should be*". It's counterpart is normative policymaking: the study of what solutions *ought to work*. A lot of reactions to Trump fall into that basket.
For shaming to work, you have to share a moral community with someone--loosely defined as "the people who could effectively shame *you* out of doing something, at least under some circumstances". Left and right no longer share that moral community.
This article is the worst argument I have read against driverless cars, and I've read a few. Unfortunately, I think this what's running through the minds of a lot of city planners: let's stall the development of an incredible lifesaving technology to bail out transit.
Why is this a bad argument? Well, for starters, Waymos mostly don't substitute for busses. They substitute for Ubers, taxis and personal driving. The capital requirements for these things are huge and will never be as cheap as cramming dozens of people into one vehicle.
Number two, as a political argument, this moral exhortation fails as a political strategy. No one is going to ride the bus because poor people can't afford Waymos. Nor will they ignore the tradeoffs between busses (waits outside, transfers, having to walk at both ends) because you tell them to.
My latest column is on the WBD merger drama, and why anyone wants to buy this company. My commenters are extremely mad that I focused on strategy and market economics rather than the specter of David Ellison controlling CNN. So here's why I didn't write about it.
I don't think the possibility of David Ellison owning CNN is even among the top 10 most interesting questions about this merger. It might not even break the top 20. It is a sideshow that has been blown up into the main story by a self-obsessed media.
Why doesn't it matter? Because I regret to inform you that it is no longer 1995. I am not a lithe and energetic 22 year old enjoying a rich and varied nightlife. And the mainstream media does not enjoy one tenth of the agenda-setting power it had back in those golden days.
AOC should talk to some women’s swimmers and find out just how intense the training they do is, and how long you have to train to get to a Division 1 final. Most of these swimmers have been doing it daily since they were eight years old.
More broadly, this is why Democrats keep losing on this issue: they make sick dunks for each other without thinking about how they come off to normies. People with kids in serious sports know, as AOC apparently doesn’t, just how much commitment it takes.
Until I went to Ivies, I didn’t understand a key component of why the other swimmers were angry: for most of these girls, this is the last time they get to swim competitively (the girls who might make it to the Olympics are at a handful of ultra-elite programs.