And so it ends. Hello, world.

Well, I wasn’t planning on putting more than a week between blog posts, but I’ve realized it takes a whole lot of discipline to blog regularly. Sitting down and finding time to document life and riff on it is actually kind of hard, even for a shut in like myself. I suppose being in the middle of New York isn’t helping (moving to Iowa might…).

Social skills have gotten better, although they’re below par. I still can’t figure out what normal people talk about: usually, I rely on the ‘year/major/dorm’ question list, and after that it’s hard to figure out where to go from there. Note that sometimes I pick up on things like musicality, but many times I don’t have too many threads to pick up and run with. An obvious first effort would be to try to talk about music with everyone, but that doesn’t quite work: for instance, trying to talk about classical music with most people is somewhat painful. Additionally, you have to stick with semi-universal subjects. I have a feeling trying to get people to talk about what they love is a good approach (Feynman once commented that you have to have asymmetrical information for a discussion. Or, well, he said something like that. I suppose he would say something more like “you can only talk when someone knows something and someone else doesn’t”. I’ll have to find that quote… and I have to work on being clear in communication. Drat!), but I have no idea how to draw people out and get them to talk about their passions. I tried it with an English major during orientation, which led to quite the failure in interesting communication. Ah well, I’ll get it one day.

On a tangent, church went okay, big take away thought is that I need to get back into debates. I’ve forgotten how fun they can be, and I have more ammunition than ever! Granted, I had no idea what I was doing with it, so it didn’t actually help. One very, very bad thing that I found when debating, though, is the fact that I am scared of losing. Honestly, it took me about a week to realize this, and another 5 minutes to get myself to stop rationalizing. If Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has taught me anything, it’s taught me that honest self-examination is progress: you have to train yourself to stare at the pain instead of flinching away. So, I’ll say it again: I am afraid that Christianity is right, and I am wrong.

So why is this bad? It means that I’m not internally balanced, rationally off-kilter, basically unable to examine evidence without bias. I undermine my own basis for debate, undermine my own credulity. Now, I’m not saying that there’s a bunch of evidence that Christianity is right, and I’m afraid to acknowledge it because it’ll undermine my atheistic position and I can’t go on sinning, but rather that I’m afraid of being wrong, especially after I switched sides already. Hogwash! you may be thinking. Evidence has compelled you in one direction, and more evidence may compel you in another: there’s nothing wrong with going where the evidence leads you. True, but I never said the basis for this fear is rational. I feel I must point out that the fact that I’ve singled out Christianity is not rational either: there’s a whole pantheon of pantheons to choose from, and I’m still fixating on the religion I’ve been brought up with. Ah well.

Moving away from abstract topics, classes seem not-too-hard, the city has cooled down considerably, and I’m starting to really get the hang of walking across the street. Attended the New York Tech Meetup, which was enlightening: I feel it lends credence to Paul Graham’s musings on city environments.

On a completely unrelated note, I hope this program I’ve been working on for the last week or so will get finished soon, so I can show all of you and… uh, be done with it! Whoooooooooo.

Anyways, it’s time to find some food.

tldr: I’m annoyed by how a particular Amway marketing scheme works.

I don’t like it. It’s been a semester (and a year) since it’s happened, and I still don’t like it. It’s not a raise-a-ruckus dislike, nor a taser-toting-demonstration dislike, but just a post-on-a-blog level of dislike, especially since no one else is talking about it.

Okay, so what am I talking about? On my particular campus, I’m been solicited twice to join the Worldwide Dreambuilders (mostly because I have feet in the music and math communities), an organization dedicated to helping young people like myself build a business and make some money. Specifically, using the power of the internet, people can create internet storefronts and empower themselves to break free of the stone-and-mortar stores that we’ve been dependent on for so long, cultivating young businessmen and women in the process.

So that’s the executive summary. The operation must be legit, since it’s apparently worldwide, and someone somewhere would have caught on eventually if it wasn’t. However, it looks a whole lot like a modified pyramid scheme: once you buy into the business, you get newly minted business licences and a web site (among other things: I’m not familiar with the process). Now, you want to generate money, so you tell all your friends about it (I like to call this ‘forced word of mouth’), and point them towards your storefront. Also, you obviously start to rely on your storefront for goods rather than any where else, since you get wholesale prices (I’m not sure how these compare to retail). But, if you tell your friends about it, then they might just set up their own storefronts and stop buying from your store. You need to keep the secret of your success to yourself, right? Wrong; you get a kickback for each referral you pull in, so you’re still winning from advertising yourself fully.

So how’s that like a pyramid scheme? You buy into the process, and have an incentive to keep it going; one easy, quick way to get a fix is to get someone else into the process, too. The fact that they incentivise drawing other people in is the key point. A secondary point is that the process utilizes your personal connections and acquaintances to try and make a profit: if you remember that BK marketing ploy, which exchanged burgers for dropping friends on Facebook, it’s similar (in a way. It has a tendency to twist your world view so you view people as potential profit streams, although I guess it isn’t any different for any other business, other than the fact that no one outside of your circle of friends would care about your business).

So I don’t like how they operate, especially with their pitches. You can tell that pitch is packaged: when someone tells me they want to pitch a business proposal to me, I want them to get to the point. If my understanding of the industry is hamstrung to the point that I can’t figure out what your business does in a 30 second pitch, then I shouldn’t be even considered as a business partner (and if you can’t do a 30 second pitch, especially with preparation, then you probably shouldn’t be in business).

For such a grass-roots marketing campaign (which is the essence of the process), it’s surprising to find out that Amway is behind it. The whole deal with selling shell businesses must be working for them, though, since they wouldn’t continually run a profit drain.

Also, they seem to be targeting impressionable college students. A talking point I remember is that since we’re young and understand the internet, we’d be the best at running these sorts of businesses (tangent: I brought my work on EZLO to one meeting, since I thought that he wanted to see some actual web-programming work that I had done, since he was pretty vague about what the business would actually do). It’s not because we’re young and understand the internet, but because the old formula (choose your target demographic (preferably gullible), and tailor your message to it) still works on the internet. We need money, and they promise some if you put in some work. However, there’s no value added by the shell business, so the only value comes from the personal connections made by the business owner.

What’s also creepy about this is that there’s next to no information on the web on these guys anywhere, except for the disgruntled former member that shows up everywhere. No one is willing to tell us what goes on in these seminars or business meetings that these guys attend, which raises red flags for me; does one need to pay to enter these seminars? If so, then the matter is much more serious: heck, if you have to pay for anything to essentially work for Amway, then it is still a much more serious matter than I’ve made it out to be above.

It’s been a while since these things have happened (at least a semester ago), but I’m going to post this anyways with hopes that someone does their homework before joining up, and perhaps gets to the bottom of this, or gets a ‘real job’ or runs a real business that adds value to society.