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 27
As I wrote in 2022, about why affirmative action eventually became untenable: “One of my favorite statistics for shocking Washingtonians is to reveal that in 1960, more than five out of every six accounted for in the census were White”.
This shouldn’t be shocking but it is; people tend to unconsciously assume that there must have been a lot of non-white people around, because that’s what they’re used to. They understand the numbers used to be lower, but not how much lower.
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May 19
I've talked about this with lawyers because I've been repeatedly surprised when folks I didn't know very well would openly say to me that they were looking to hire a woman of color for X position. I understood that this was illegal even before SFFA; they very clearly did not.
How did this happen? Well, because effectively in liberal institutions there were three safe harbors that made this behavior seem safe.
First, members of a majority group had a higher bar to sue than members of a minority. The Supreme Court now looks set to overturn this: washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/…
Read 9 tweets
Mar 8
This 1000%. I too used to think male strength was mostly about size until my super-skinny college boyfriend, who actually weighed less than me, effortlessly pinned me in a (playful) wrestling match, then held me down with one arm while he ostentatiously took a bite of his sandwich
Even now people will sometimes name check me in the trans sports debate, along the lines of "sure, most men are bigger than most women, but women like Megan McArdle exist" and yes, I do exist, but no I am not as strong even as men a foot shorter than me.
In grip strength, for example, the male and female distributions only barely overlap; the very strongest women can outdo only the very weakest men. The difference is so great that a super-strong prime-age woman would struggle when arm-wrestling an average 80-year old man. Image
Read 4 tweets
Feb 18
The problem is that these extra payments are used to provide extra benefits, in the form of lower copays and add-ons like dental and vision. Cutting the payments wouldn't necessarily make the retirees less healthy, but it would make them mad as hell.

There is no magic pot of money that can be cut without pissing off voters. If there were, it would have been cut in previous hunts for revenue to spend on tax cuts or new benefits.
Oh, and fun fact: in many states, you can't get Medigap insurance if you've been in Medicaid advantage. So you would be cutting the primary reason people choose MA, and those people would then find that they can't really transition back to traditional. The politics of that would be fun.
It's not that I'm against making these cuts, mind. It's that no one should convince themselves any of this is easy. If it were easy, it would already have been done.
Read 4 tweets
Dec 5, 2024
This is, btw, why the fantasies of getting US costs down to European levels through the power of single payer will never work. Governments are more vulnerable to this sort of pressure than private companies are, not less. "Call your congresscritter and ask them why they want patients to die!" is a super effective ad.
(Then how did European countries do it? By holding costs down, not by getting providers to take a pay cut).
Our legislators try to avoid this by enacting all these complicated, opaque reforms in hopes that providers won't notice we're cutting their pay but the thing is the providers care more about paying their mortgage than legislators do about saving money.
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Nov 8, 2024
I think this is bad, but also think it's a sign of something I thought a lot about after 1/6: it's really important for elites to uphold election norms precisely because normies won't. They'll be happy to indulge in election denial if the political elite goes along.
Democratic norms aren't a bedrock fact of democracy. They're a truce between opposing groups of political elites. Which is why it is in fact extremely important to have elites who are committed to those norms, and will swiftly crush even minor violations.
The biggest example is obviously Donald Trump. But Democratic elites dabbled too, with their little games about election certification, and their humoring of Stacy Abrams, and their looking the other way when Clinton said he wasn't a legitimate president.
Read 4 tweets

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