Money Making Schemes

Nagesh answers:

You stated it well,a long time ago my father told me follow the money and he was right in every situation try to find out who stands to make a buck and it is easier to see why they take the positions they do.

Nagesh answers:

To qualify for the “passive income”, you’ll likely have to spend many years of working full-time. In my time the promised passive income was in the range of 400-500$ (and a next stage of over 1000$), and I can’t remember anyone who made it that far.

You do need to have a lot of family connections, or many friends. It won’t work very well on strangers. Not that it’s going to work very well on your family, they will usually only do it to support you, which is what Amway is counting on. Still, don’t expect that a lot of people will agree to sign up or buy things. Most will simply start avoiding you at some point.

To make money, you need to both sell products and recruit people, and the people you sign up have to succeed as well. By design, you need to recruit new people on a regular basis to qualify for anything worthwhile. Also keep in mind that by signing up your friends and family, you’re actually causing them to lose time and money, since a lot of people never manage to earn anything from it.

Guys at the top don’t exactly make money like you do. They were in it from the beginning, so everyone else including you is making money for them. They also don’t just sell products or sign up people. A large chunk of their income comes from books and motivational speeches, which you are often encouraged to buy (your superiors might tell you that you need them if you want to succeed). They also usually have other investments, so Amway is only a part of their income, and not a fundamental one.

Your friend means well, but you should do some calculations and make an estimate on how much you’ll actually have to invest, how much time you’re likely to spend, and how many people would actually be interested. In other words – market research. This is business, there’s no room for trusting friends.

Nagesh answers:

It’s still illegal, because the entire transaction is illegal.

Pyramid schemes are considered fraudulent because the last several levels of participants never get paid. It’s NOT correct to assume that “this isn’t hurting anyone, but helping everyone by making money, why is it illegal?”

Think about it…if “everyone” is making money, where is the money coming from? All a pyramid scheme does is transfer money around not create money.

A pyramid scheme dies when you run out of new people to bring into the scheme (either because the whole community has now bought in, or because everyone who was willing to buy into / fall for a pyramid scheme has bought in, and the remaining people in the community are not willing to join).

As a result, only the top few levels of the pyramid get rich. The bottom levels (and often the middle levels) never get paid because the scheme runs out of possible participants long before the time their name reaches the top of the payout list.

Nagesh answers:

I think you would refer to me as an “AGW-deniers”, but not as a “overpopulation-deniers”. Clearly, those are 2 separate issues. However, that said, there is a tendency for politics to combine issues for the lemmings who follow the party line. Thus, religious Conservatives tend to be skeptical about both issues, while religious liberals tend to be convinced about both issues.

There is no religious reason to be skeptical about AGW other than the fact that it is the party line. However, it is difficult to be religious in the United States unless you buy into the make babies life style. If that is what you live for, then the guy who tells you that you are doing something bad is likely to be disbelieved. Some religious people accept that human population would be a problem were it not for the “fact” that the rapture will occur before it becomes a serious problem.

The commandment is to go forth and multiply. Many believe that sex for any other reason is a sin. It must be irritating for them to hear that procreational sex is also a social evil.

The “hockey stick” curve for temperature is highly controversial, http://www.geo.utexas.edu/courses/387h/PAPERS/conf05mckitrick.pdf
as is the “hockey stick curve” for CO2. Http://icecap.us/images/uploads/EE_18-2_Beck.pdf
Neither really hold up to scrutiny despite some of the ridiculous claims by Warmists. Http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/03/remember_eg_becks_dodgy.php
Note, in the above link, the Warmists graphed the raw data from 1912 to 1942 with Keeling’s more recent data as though Beck did not believe that some correction would be appropriate before releasing such a graph, and the rest of the arguments were nonsense about the peer reviewed publication “Energy and Environment”. If those arguments were to be taken seriously, then Nature is not peer reviewed either after reading the link from utexas above.

Even so, CO2 and temperature do not correlate well in the recent past, except for the notion that both went up over the last 31 years. Http://climate4you.com/images/HadCRUT3%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1958%20AndCO2.gif
They also do not correlate well in the distant past, except with CO2 as a lagging indicator for temperature. Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok_Petit_data.svg
Usually, when CO2 concentrations were high in the ice core record, temperatures were dropping. Http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/16/searching-the-paleoclimate-record-for-estimated-correlations-temperature-co2-and-sea-level/

Edit @Weise Ente:
Having read some of your other answers, I think you probably know better than to imply that the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory (AGW) http://brneurosci.org/co2.html
depends on the concept that we are running out of natural resources. AGW depends on the theory that human produced CO2 is the primary driver of the climate temperature across the globe. There really is no scientific connection between AGW and the peak oil theory. Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil

Nagesh answers:

Wikipedia generates its money from donations and grants. Other internet services which seemingly have no ads such as Yahoo Messenger have ads on other parts of their websites. As the top website Yahoo hosts a number of services. Those who use one service generally use the others also.