Megan McArdle Profile picture
Aug 18, 2020 7 tweets 2 min read Read on X
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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More from @asymmetricinfo

May 2
I’m sympathetic to protesters who are bewildered by the abrupt volte face, but as I lay out in todays column, think the reason it’s happening is that our civil rights regime is not designed to handle issues that produced conflicts between protected classes, rather than the clean “oppressor/oppressed “ frame our laws and customs assumed. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/…
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So why am I talking about it? Three reasons.
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Second, even if I were inclined to pretend that the Thing That Is True is not in fact true, in order to improve Biden's chance of re-election, it wouldn't work. Folks who think they can make the issue go away if they just work the media refs hard enough are delusional.
Read 21 tweets
Jan 5
Conservatives who are reveling in Claudine Gay schadenfreude might pause to notice that Harvard eventually realized that protecting an insider who had violated institutional norms was destroying the institution, and course-corrected, while the GOP is still saddled with Trump.
This makes an excellent lead-in to my column on that very topic: how progressives trying to fend off conservative attacks on academia instead ending up aping their opponent's worst mistakes: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/…
This episode was a giant embarassment for academia, and not a few progressive journalists, who started inventing new definitions of plagiarism, most of which boiled down to "Whatever Claudine Gay has not yet done".
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Oct 6, 2023
Well, Trump has endorsed Jim Jordan for Speaker, which should make things interesting, and provides a nice hook to discuss my column on why the Democrats made a mistake helping Gaetz oust McCarthy. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/…
As you might imagine this was very unpopular with my readers, who made various versions of the same arguments I was tackling in the column: that Republicans are bad, that they don't deserve Democratic help, that voters need to understand how bad they are.
And hey, I hear you. I am also very mad at GOP about a bunch of things. Not necessarily mad for all the same reasons--but you and I are united in our loathing of Trump, our feeling that GOP support of him is despicable, our dismay at the strength of the "burn it all down" caucus.
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Oct 4, 2023
Why your theory of how to punish Republicans out of acting bonkers is incorrect, a thread.
Here is the mental model of many people on Twitter today: "GOP is acting bonkers! They are demanding bad things! They reneged on their budget deal! They coddle Trump! We must punish them until they stop this outrageous behavior! Thus, help Gaetz vote out McCarthy!"
I get this mental model, and the sentiments behind it. But for structural reasons, it's almost certain to fail.

First, as noted elsewhere, "tit for tat" is a very viscerally appealing strategy that often works--but its failure mode is "blood feud".

washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-c…
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