You’re Not a Girlboss – You’re Just Trapped in an MLM Scheme (2020)
thefinancialdiet.com
thefinancialdiet.com
> Until we all begin to acknowledge there’s more to life than “the hustle,” and that struggling financially is not a personal failure, MLMs will continue to recruit and exploit aspiring girlbosses under the guise of female empowerment.
You could easily change that to:
> Until we all begin to acknowledge there’s more to life than “the hustle,” and that struggling financially is not a personal failure, startup culture will continue to recruit and exploit people under the guise of [getting rich, disrupting tech, changing the world, etc.].
I mean, it’s not an organized thing like an MLM, but I see a lot of the same toxic language and behavior around startups.
So many startups pop up and they don't even seem to have a good idea for solving a problem. It's a bunch of MBAs who think hiring a million engineers and having them build something will make everyone involved rich.
And as long as the staff and founders areon payroll and not making terrible sacrifices, it’s just voluntary wealth transfer.
https://mobile.twitter.com/jherrerx/status/16123398697071083...
These factories have never done too well for themselves. There's a reason they never achieve "escape velocity" into having brand recognition. Even before giant online dollar stores, their production (injection molding not-very-detailed plastic parts, etc) has always been a commodity; whoever's ordering runs of 10000 Alf stress-balls or what-have-you could swap Factory A out for Factory B at the drop of a hat. (And this is why you never hear of factories in China with genuinely good working conditions; the margins are too low for paying a living wage to be sustainable for the employer. And yes, this does imply that the businesses themselves shouldn't exist.)
Also, while AliExpress/Wish/etc do make a profit, they do so on the back of a market distortion — the Universal Postal Union's special rates+tarriffs exception for ePackets shipped from China. Remove that, and such companies would collapse overnight.
Something being an MLM, implies that the original producer of the product — either literally the factory, or the business that ordered the product from the factory as a work-for-hire to then begin marketing it — is the root node in that tree of reselling, and so is the one getting the most rich, since everyone else in the tree has part of their profits flowing back to them.
If a middle-man between the producer and consumer is getting richer than the producer is, then you're not looking at an MLM. You might be looking at some other kind of immoral market manipulation, but it's not specifically an MLM per se.
Also, I think some of this is somewhat outdated: wages in China have risen, and the really low-quality and low-wage manufacturing has started to migrate to SE Asia.
It's not quite the same as an MLM because the teacher doesn't get continuous income off the people they recruit after they finish the class, but it is like an MLM in the sense that the people recruiting people to their class are the only people making any money. And they tend to create "levels" of classes, etc to keep people paying.
MLM requires the mid tier to aggressively re-sell it down the line. Which is where the worst part comes from.
… otherwise it’s just sparkling scam? ;)
Men are under extreme environmental pressures to be successful providers. Perhaps it's why they suffer the highest suicide rates. Equating their eagerness to provide for loved ones with susceptibility (i.e. stupidity) is misguided.
He also calls Trump and the Proud Boys MLM schemes, which shows he's using some definition completely different to the normal one. Probably just wanted to say "stupid people".
In startups we're pushed to solve challenges that no MBA or CS curriculum would ever have conjured, plus we have a chance at making a dent in the universe. In sports people make friends and get regular fitness. These aren't financially beneficial, but they may be enough to make the pursuit worthwhile.
But it's hard to find positives in a MLM Business. The participant is constantly stressed from short-term sales goals and has no spare time left for personal development.
Markets are "efficient" at transferring money from "stupid" to "smart" people. Here "stupid" or "smart" is directly related to lower or higher in that information/power hierarchy.
This hierarchy is also self-amplifying in that it grows the asymmetry gap rapidly such that it becomes a very tall/pointy pyramid. So you could call it a "pyramid scheme".
Some schemes are overt/explicit pyramid schemes where flow of value from people lower in hierarchy to people higher is explicitly structured and visible (like most MLM schemes) and some schemes are obfuscated/implicit in this aspect (like corporate job ladder with perf/promo process within employees and between employees vs founders/execs and investors).
The defining characteristic of a pyramid scheme is that the income at each level is predominantly connected to the recruitment of new members into the scheme. Twice as many new members per unit time translates to twice as much income, roughly speaking.
In management hierarchies, that may play a certain role, but your manager in a company isn't payed proportionally to how many new employees they recruit each month (unless they are explicitly a recruiter). It is rather proportional to the amount of responsibility which often correllates to the number of reports and their reports.
In other words, oversimplified, in corporate hierarchies, the pay relates to the number of people below you, while in a pyramid scheme, it relates to the first derivative of that value.
My company gives 5k if I reference a developer that they hire. But he gets his normal salary, it’s not like he has to pay 5k, or even it’s deducted from the salary.
The problem with MLMs is that the money comes from other “members” not from sales… (Basically more than 80% of the revenue is other members and only 20% sales)
A normal company 100% of the salaries comes from sales (or shareholders, never from employees).
Why not just say "Markets are efficient at transferring money from less powerful to more powerful people." then?
> Markets are "efficient" at transferring money from "stupid" to "smart" people. Here "stupid" or "smart" is directly related to lower or higher in that information/power hierarchy.
Tangent: while this clearly applies in this context, I generally get really frustrated by this narrow way of modeling markets and by extension the economy, TBH, because it leaves out basically everything that's relevant to solving the really hard problems. Specifically, it ignores that real-life scenarios are not only strict hierarchies but complex networks that feature a ton of intransitive asymmetries (think rock-paper-scissors). Like, Buffet and Gates allegedly know about this[0] so it's not exactly obscure, and when you actually ask people on how they deal with trivial examples of it it becomes obvious that it's everywhere and people somehow try to work with it all the time[1], but whenever I hear people discuss markets it seems to be ignored. I dunno, I hope actual economists are less naive than the armchair kind (to which I certainly belong).
It kind of makes the misuse of the model feel like applying an algorithm that only works with DAGs to graphs full of cycles. It's not useless (just like how identifying DAGs is really important and useful), but when used to oversimplify complex scenarios it obscures the potential "good" cycles (virtuous ones) and "bad" ones (vicious cycles, deadlocks).
[0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-roll-dice-and-...
[1] https://aeon.co/essays/attempts-to-choose-the-best-life-may-...
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 my 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 simply remembering 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.
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.
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.
Care to point out where I made any universal claims about startup culture?
For the record, I agree with you.
Kids will also easily believe that is cryptocurrencies.
The beautiful cryptography is completely shadowed by speculation.
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."?
I did not. I read that comment and thought "now the most upvoted thread will talk about startups" instead of MLMs and how they should be regulated like for profit schools.
> 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 today, 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.
[edit]
I realize replying to the other comment is - I didn't want the most upvoted thread to be about how toxic, predatory startups are. I could see this forum would easily agree to that and discuss it at length. And that's why I called it "whataboutism" because it's focus shifting and you're right, probably less about mischaracterization.
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.
There was a knowing extraction of youthful “enthusiasm to do good”. It became a common warning passed around much like “HR is not your friend” etc. “They will use your enthusiasm” was what I heard.
The only alteration in your formula necessary would be “struggling to live ‘ethically’“ for “struggling financially” and mutatis mutandis re empowerment/disrupting/changing the world.
In my journey as a 2x failed startup founder I meet many nice people, most of us were entranced by startup as performance theatre, occupying ourselves with every sort of entrepreneurial busy work except the harder work which would result in putting a product or service in front of customers, haunting an overpriced flexi-desk / office in incubator hell. And I met a few of the usual narcissists and sociopaths, scratching red in tooth and claw to become the Steve Jobs they knew themselves to be.
The only success I saw coming out of this system was an idea founded by some serious programming talent that had obvious shot at product market fit before they wrote a single line of code. Everyone else was just fooling themselves.
1. Generally there are very few if any "full-time" expert witnesses. Obviously to be an "expert" one generally has to have engaged in something other than testifying as an one. Some might be semi-retired or retired professionals.
I don't know, it seems to work for a great many consultants.
https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_com...
It’s hard because to me the whole thing sounded like a bad deal, but you also want to support your spouse. We ended up just talking through our hopes/concerns, what would be an acceptable amount of money to lose, etc.
She decided she wanted to do it anyway, and I resolved to support her (basically just keep my mouth shut and not say “I told you so”). Nothing really came of it and we ended up losing an inconsequential amount of money. No regrets really.
But if it had been an MLM scheme that also required putting pressure on friends and family, or the costs were bigger, that could have been a much harder conversation.
Sounds like Agile Certifications.
Did she get a Google Cloud certification?
Anyway, employees are always free to start their own company and potentially receive all the reward they can get.
The expected return for an average MLM joiner is deep in the reds.
From an individual perspective that's a huge difference.
But it isn't multi-level marketing (MLM) until he starts pushing some product onto his peers, or unless the employer starts hiring aggressively with equity as the main salary.
I think "empowerful" isn't the best term for this phenomenon, as it's used widely for all sorts of things and programs that are anywhere from helpful, to probably well-intentioned, to unironic examples of the very thing I described.
The ethics for running a business successfully and raising/managing a family are pretty high contrast.
(My mother got into one 20 years ago and dragged some people with her in, fortunately she was the only one with significant money investment lost..).
The MLM metastasizes through social networks and often damages them pretty significantly. Having a personal relationship turn into an avenue for sales pressure is very dispiriting.
I don't think business must be ruthless. If it's a coop...
I have an interview today. Wish me luck. :-D
You aren't the boss, you're a bag holder.
If I never again see a “super cute!”, eye-searingly gaudy pair of leggings or other clothing being flogged online by one of my sweet but socially-susceptible high school classmates, it will be too soon.
Thought I made a friend, then it was an MLM setup like damn.
I’m well aware of the criticisms of the industry but it surprises me that no one ever tells the story of the hundreds or thousands of women in each of these organizations that are variously getting rich, making a living, or getting decent side money doing this.
Maybe they’re all exploiting the women in their down lines. Fair. But why are people reluctant to tell their stories?
I promise you - with the women at the top, there’s a lot of cocaine and sex and wild stories to tell. But that doesn’t seem to be enough of a draw for anyone to show a balanced picture.
Damn - now you’ve piqued my interest. Someone needs to make a “Wolf of Wall Street” movie but for Amway.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/sep/15/lularic...
But I think the Lularoe documentary covered some of this.
(I'm just curious about your perspective because I couldn't work at a place like that, so I'm trying to understand. I'm not looking to pass judgement or get into an argument.)
I saw all this mostly from a detached view looking at tables in a SQL database, with the occasional glimpse of in person convention Bacchanalia. Many of my friendships and much of my professional network were forged in my 20s in this industry so this colors a lot of my views.
I'm not going to try and convince you of anything, but I'll offer my perspective to you. My guilty pleasure is watching MLM debunking videos, so I've happened to see a decent amount of MLM recruiting and training material. (I've known a couple people involved with MLMs, but not anyone I was close with, so I can't really say it's touched me much personally.)
Honestly I find it chilling. It's not just how they are manipulative with the people in the MLM, but how they coach them into manipulating their friends and family. They give them scripts to twist the language of love and support into cash transactions.
This is a tame example but the only one that's top of mind at the moment. I was watching a video the other day, and they said something like, "your friends and family need to understand that your launch party is a big deal. You're launching a business, and they need to be there to support you. Ask them if you can count on them to be there to support you."
And I just can't help but imagine getting a phone call from someone in my life, talking about how excited they are about something new they're up to, and then the feeling of dread as I realize what's happening.
"Can I count on you to be there to support me?" How do you respond to that? If you agree, you're enabling them to make a terrible decision, at what's probably the best time for them to turn back. If you refuse, you're hurting their feelings and pushing them away, into the waiting arms of their manipulators, and the line between MLM and cult can be pretty blurry.
Fair? You have just explained that its fair for the workers at the lowest and lower tiers of any company to be exploited.
MLM is just a type of business, Ann Summers in the UK and Ann Summers parties is another example besides the US Mary Kay, how ever unlike Mary Kay, Ann Summer parties were exposing kids to sex toys and lingerie, especially as some of the poorest lived in small homes with no where to hide the "sales catalogues" and the toys, or the disruptions to kids that ensued when you got a group of sex starved women together round a house.
Remember the world hysteria comes from the Greek word hystera which means uterus as in hysterectomy.
In general the MLM's that tend to work is because they rely on the sales persons buying into said products. Female MLM selling female jewellery, I think there was a jewellery company called Pandora that did this, female MLM selling cosmetics eg Avon, Vorwerk vacuum cleaners being another.
Thing with MLM is its just a particular way of selling products, some are like franchises like McDonalds in that you have to hand over money before accessing the brand's products to sell on. Some are door to door, others are established in their own bricks and mortar retail outlet of sorts, other online only, or sometimes both.
MLM is just one way of getting staff lock in and selling to the public. IS it any more exploitative than other methods? Thats a legislation issue, just like uber and the london black cab drivers have found out.
Politicians can screw over groups of people with the ballot box.
Mostly losers though.
Because in these scale-free networks, each incremental person who is successful harms incrementally more people. For the network to grow, it must produce an ever-expanding long tail of losers. Nothing to celebrate there.
~98% are making ~$255 or less PER YEAR in commissions. And then losing a tonne on expenses.
Then the ~2% making ~$25K/year in commissions are likely making a lot less once you account for expenses.
Only “Independent National Sales Directors”, ~0.044% of the salesforce, are making a good income. So about 1 in 2000, with the other 1999 making somewhere between “not much” and “large losses.”
FWIW, these numbers aren’t unique to Mary Kay, they’re pretty typical for MLMs. There’s some decent studies out there on MLM earnings, and all the big MLMs are reasonably similar. An exceptionally small number of people making legit good money, a small number making a little bit (still worse than minimum wage, after accounting for expenses), and the vast, vast majority losing money.
My ex was into Mary Kay. We lost a lot of money on it, but I wouldn’t say it was particularly abusive.
I don't know, if a business partner or employer really has no prospects for compensating you for your effort and doesn't level with you about that, I'd call that at least dishonorable if not dishonest and, yeah, abusive.
Have a little empathy with all the poor suckers at the bottom. They're trying to better themselves, and most of them are kind, hardworking people. It's too bad the MLM pushes them to become exploitive b_stards, and it would be nice to use all that energy ethically instead of just shutting them down.
https://www.amway.com/en_US/income-disclosure
https://www.marykay.ca/en-ca/pages/earnings-representation
https://library.youngliving.com/en/us/U.S.-Annual-Income-Dis...
These businesses are simply more devious manifestations of that art.
Honest effort and intent was at least somewhat common on both sides of paid service at one point.
Honor is a dead concept.
Because they wrote the law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amway#Politics_and_culture [1]
[1] And if the surname DeVos seems familiar, that's because Betsy Devos was picked to be the Secretary of Education.
I don't care, it should be. Humans shouldn't be expected to be experts in every domain of their lives just to avoid being exploited.
Recruiting others to sell more stuff isn't illegal, as long as you actually have stuff to sell.
The problem is, only AmWay reps bought it.
They discuss exactly this question in a lot of detail. The FTC had started to go after some early MLMs, but then strong lobbying and political connections created a situation where you could have a "legal MLM" by following some rules, and the rules were basically written by Amway.
It’s odd to me, because he was a super standup guy in everything else - this part of him always struck me as out of character
It also always turns into something sour, probably repressed guilt, trying to scare the youngsters off.
My girlfriend is successful as an independent massage therapist, after working many years in day-spas where she had to accept lower wages and give up a lot of her income. Because she's successful, she's constantly being hit upon by female friends either inviting her into schemes or asking her for advice. (Some of these friends, she helps do their taxes - for free, because these 30-something women can't figure it out - but she doesn't give them financial advice).
Knowing a lot of these people and watching their schemes get derailed, I've come to a few conclusions.
1. Financial literacy basically doesn't exist. It's a miracle that my girlfriend taught herself. I'm not one to say that it's being intentionally suppressed in our educational system; I think the people who teach and write curricula are equally unequipped, so it's just a generational problem now in America.
2. The most paranoid / suspicious / likely to believe conspiracy theories are the ones who fall hardest for obvious ponzi schemes over and over. It's not clear to me why people who wouldn't accept a sandwich from a stranger are willing to put their life savings into an obvious scam (other than low IQ?)
3. It's brutal being a girl who gets into her 30s with a few kids and has no money and no prospects. Big companies hiring these women thrive on their desperation, so they're tolerant of smaller scams screwing them over and perpetuating the sense of there being no creative/industrious outlet for them.
4. Women's lib has been hijacked to the point that it's just another excuse for oppressing American women. This doesn't have to come in the form of workplace discrimination at Google. It's that the very inclusiveness of Google gives an excuse to the rest of society to dump the worst tasks and the most burden on women, with the excuse that everyone's now equal. That combined with a serious deficit in understanding the complicated schemes taking advantage of people results in this head-shakingly bizarre situation where tropes like "taking control of my life" are, over and over, just joining the latest iteration of Avon or tupperware parties.
So not to just sit here and complain, I'd offer a couple solutions: 1. Bring back real accounting and home eq classes 2. Have serious discussions in school about the life-altering consequences of early pregnancy 3. Tech companies need to take an active hand in labeling these things as MLMs or viral fads or simply not good investments 4. Women in their 30s-50s, who are a huge driving force of our economy, need to have paths to advancement that don't require going through get-rich-quick schemes, and this isn't something that can be accomplished by a few companies trotting out female VPs of marketing or something. Equal pay isn't enough; equal opportunities are what's needed.
A final thought; Jan 6th was supported by as many women as men. So was the Nazi occupation of Poland. Women can't be discounted as a force of political disaster if you create an underclass of so many disenfranchised people. The growth of these schemes among women is a very bad sign for our future as a democratic / market-based polity.
Tl;Dw this man has been involved with ponzi-MLM after ponzi-MLM, and after coming on Coffeezilla to discuss one that's just blown up - it comes out that he's already in another one. But as he's fallen for scheme after scheme, he's also built a network of equally gullible people (he's a financial educator (!!!)) - so he actually ends up being pretty high up in the pyramid and making money.
Who knows what reflections he may have had after this interview and what changes he may have made to his life, but when Coffeezilla tries to explain this to him in the interview, it just sort of rolls off of him. (Iirc anyway, I haven't watched this interview in a year.)
Not for nothing, he's also prone to talking about taking radical measures to protect his kids from climate change, and doesn't feel it's worth living if the climate warms up by 3ºC.
He's one of my oldest and best friends, so I've spent a lot of time thinking about where this all comes from. His grandfather was an SS officer (and I'm a Jew- my grandparents, of course, were also Jews)... his father, a wonderful human being, and a serious anti-racist Austrian. Yet this form of obsession continues.
Timothy Snyder makes some great remarks in "The Black Earth"-
"There need not be any compelling reason for concern about life and death, as the Nazi example shows, only a momentary conviction that dramatic action is needed to preserve a way of life. [...] Perhaps the experience of unprecedented storms or relentless droughts will jar expectations about the security of basic resources and make Hitlerian politics more resonant. As Hitler demonstrated [...] humans are able to portray a looming crisis in such a way as to justify drastic measures in the present."
No one is immune from this kind of thought process, but all of us should be immunized by our socialization with one another. And rational investment (as opposed to irrational risk-taking) is a security token for society. The opposite is a bet against a rational future.
I agree with literally everything else that you said except this one snippet. Women still aren't taking jobs that kill them and they're still not taking jobs that give them PTSD and cause them to commit suicide.
If you think the worst tasks and the most burden are being given to women, please remember that we're talking about office work exclusively and not hard, body/life-destroying labor.
Men just aren't complaining about it.
Also workplace discrimination at Google is equally as likely to go the other way. Every tech company that I've worked for has boldly and loudly claimed that they pay women more money for the same roles as their male peers to counteract the gender pay gap. Even the hedge fund I worked at 15 years ago made it very transparent that women were paid 4-8% more in the same roles.
A pertinent digression: I know 4 women in their late 30s who are currently enrolled in IT courses at community college. None of them are for standard IT stuff. It's like, "Info Security" (how do you do that without coding?), "Intro to Artificial Intelligence", etc. These women have kids and come from things like - nail salon, lash girl, massage therapist, woo-woo crystal shop owner. The trend is unmistakable: The lifestyle of tech work as a white collar path for women which does not actually exist is being sold as a path out of poverty. I do know one woman who did 6 months of serious bootcamp from nothing, taught herself JS/React, and has a good job at a Fortune-500. But she's a severe nerd and has the wiring for it; she can sit there and talk to me about underscoreJS versus JQuery. The others I know ...it's just an idea, like becoming a rock star or something.
That was what I meant. It doesn't negate your point that men aren't complaining, and I wasn't trying to say that the biggest burdens in tech were being given to women, just that this is dangled out there as a means to freedom and it's almost completely a rip-off.
that's the problem in a nutshell.
What people think they deserve is a little like pain tolerance. Do you ever have pain and think, should I be screaming right now? When other people say they're taking pills for chronic pain, are they describing something I shrug off every morning, or maybe is their experience of the exact same feeling so much worse, or have I just yet to experience that much pain? All the variables are subjective; no one knows. There's no counterfactual.
Same with people's perception of "deserving rewards".
1. not alone
and
2. financially secure
and when it's a family of 2 adults plus kids, that means either one losing their job will not impact the family as strongly as if it was a single mom.
Affinity fraud. Pretend to share the Mark's beliefs as a shortcut to building trust and then scam them.
This article was written in mid-2020. I don’t know how the article was received at the time, but presumably the author was not blacklisted or fired for it.
She can be easily found on the Web (I won’t directly link to her stuff, but a quick google brings it up).
I wasn't really expressing a judgment on the person or the journalist, just an observation.
What actually happened I don't think we'll ever know.