We humans are funny! Never mind the follies of the stock market... just look at the Multi Level Marketing (MLM) schemes plaguing the Internet... Yeah, run off from my last post. Oh well.

What's the difference between MLM's and pyramid-schemes? As far as I can tell, calling 'em MLM's is just the lazy morons' attempt at shedding negative connotations akin to calling a turd a Wonderbar. The jargon may have changed, but the principle is the same...

And if you've ever been tempted to read the email and clicked on the link that brought you to their splashpage (which more often than not is also the 'click here to unsubscribe' link) you soon realized that the wonderful income opportunity they're selling is the exact template they've sent you, so you can sell it to others... Work, all from the comfort of your home, with just a few clicks per day.
The Internet is a strange and mystifying world to many folks, which makes it easier for them to believe in this form of virtual "marketing" than if they actually envisioned themselves doing the real-world version of what Internet MLM proposes... Nobody expects to make money by making tons of photocopies for an advert that promises to make people rich if they pay you for your ad so they can also photocopy it and sell it door to door, at work, by posting it on public billboards, advertising it on buses, or by stuffing it in people's hands no matter how many times they've said no, or even by strapping them down and taping their eyes open to make sure they read your advert - whatever it takes, and money will trickle up!
Not only is that too much work, but the thought of making money that way is totally absurd!!! and yet... electronically, in cyber space...

And so, a good portion of Internet users are cross-spamming each other!
Give humans a wonderful opportunity to network, and porn and spam and spam-like content-less sites is what makes up the majority of it in no time!

The Internet's accessibility, reach (real and imagined), and the anonymity it affords has given birth to yet a new kind of absolutely futile form of business where nothing real is created or produced or manufactured, exchanged or traded or offered. People are blindly transferring money for nothing but bits and bytes that promise yet another form of false hope that's easier to swallow as faith than the odds on the lottery. And in the end, yet again, only a handful are getting really rich out of it.

That we are sold and buy so easily into the rags-to-riches-in-just-one-hour-per-day idea is one thing...

That people are willing to take advantage of this--what points to a general sense of despair--is another...

The second is definitely a circular, chicken-or-egg type of conundrum. Think about it.

The Internet and MLM's: The American Dream, blown to Global Village proportions. But with one improvement! if you fail, it's not your fault, the people below you are responsible; they just weren't doing their share so you could reach your dream.