Maybe I'm old fashioned. In my opinion people who prey on others who are desperate looking for food/job, and who prey on elderly/kids/disabled, are the lowest scum.
I honestly don't think so, at least not in the scammy way most people think.
Most of them are simply deprioritized and situationally used. Most companies with more than 50 employees (and less than 5,000 let's say) want something more like a pipeline. They often have some interchangeable work and might decide to hire 3 SWEs. So they interview a pool and eventually fill the 3 roles. But why take down the listing? When they post they get 1,000 resumes instantly, but every week they get 100 new ones. So if they decide to hire again they just cull the top 50 most recent and take a look. You could be the best person in the world but if you are resume 51, you are ignored.
AI (on both sides) and hiring manager laziness has made lucky timing the most important factor for any hiring chance.
How do people even go about finding jobs these days? I've been with my current place for a few years and it seems like all the ways I used to find jobs just don't work at all anymore.
I went looking for a new job a couple of months ago. As before, I uploaded my CV to a bunch of career sites, but didn't get any reaction at all. Not even from recruiters, who, when I was looking for a job 5, 10 or 15 years ago, who start spamming me with unsuitable jobs almost immediately after uploading my CV.
So I applied to jobs myself. However, because a lot of these career sites don't put in relevant details in the job descriptions, I now used AI to find the companies behind the vague job descriptions. That worked like a charm!
Once I found the companies, I checked if they had any job openings listed on their website and applied through their website.
I applied to six job listings. Three companies didn't bother to react at all, including one from HN's "Who's hiring" page. The other three companies reacted to my message, two were a possible match, and went to in person interviews etc. One of them I picked for my new employer.
All in all, it took a couple of weeks from actively looking for a job to finding one.
However, I had my CV up for quite a while, but looking for a job passively didn't do a thing at all. That's decidedly different from the early 2000s and 2010s.
Google "$field jobs in $location". Whatever sites come up, sign up for all of them and search them individually. Apply for jobs. Maybe 1 in 100 isn't a scam. Get an offer at 1 in 10 of the non-scam jobs. It sucks but there doesn't seem to be a better way.
at first I was just going to say that screenshot of McCovy looks like a cringey amateur rap video but zooming in I see his eyes and I'm unsettled, distracted
After that report from Reuters came out saying that 10% of META's revenue comes from ads pushing scams and prohibited products I'm starting to think a very large chunk of the internet (and national economy) basically runs on scamming people.
And that's not even considering perfectly legal "scams" like shitcoin pumps and politicians awarding shady contracts to buisness people who donated to them without a technical bribe happening. I would love to know how much of the actual economy is above-board business and how much isn't, but the older I get the larger the "isn't" seems to grow. Is the scam-economy 1% of all real financial transations? 5%? 10%? 20%? I'm honestly not sure.
It's surprising most MLM's are still so obvious. AI is going to be revolutionary for scammers. We're rapidly moving past call-bots that are good enough to bilk seniors. Imagine a MLM where the thousands of other suckers lining up to do the same thing are effectively invisible to the mark. That small fee the mark pays will seem like an unusual and extraordinary exception, but a necessary one. Suspicions will be allayed slickly, deadlines will be adjusted to add just the right amount of pressure, and the payoff will always be tantalizingly close. Every mark's online presence will be scraped so they can receive a custom tailored experience designed to press all their buttons.
It's also going to be about as easy to hold a data-centre in Nigeria responsible for scams running on their hardware as it is to prosecute a crooked call-centre in Mumbai today. The AI-supercharged MLM's are going to be harder to block too. A call-centre can be blocked by telecoms (even if most don't currently bother). A MLM exploiting multiple forms of social media, websites, and networking apps on top of phones?
We need to start pressuring our governments to devote more resources to police anti-fraud units. We can't rely on journalists do this job.
>"It's surprising most MLM's are still so obvious."
From what I have heard & read, the obviousness is either intentional or unintentionally helpful, because it filters out people who would eventually figure out the scam (and would take up the scammers' efforts in the meantime). That said, more complicated frauds like what you're describing will likely proliferate.
My personal theory, which has no evidence either, is that the obvious scams exist to make you believe that you can easily distinguish scam from non scam.
That's a trick used by street con artists anyway.
I had a phone call the other day from someone identifying as police officer saying they raided a house and found something likely belonging to me and there is ongoing investigation. They knew my basic personal details. What was interesting that there was almost no gap between what I said and their response and voice sounded quite natural. I kept it for a while, because once I had a doctor call me who sounded like AI, but it was actually his real voice and it was embarrassing as I called him out for being AI. Anyway, they tried to get me to fill a police form (they knew my email as well) - this is where I realised this is a 100% scam. The email was spoofed. I reported this to the police, but they were not interested. I thought impersonation of police officer would be a serious matter. Apparently not in the UK.
There's a specialist action fraud line you can call for this, and I believe they track this stuff. Otherwise it will be like trying to tell a traffic cop about a non traffic offence
I think it's worse than that. Even what people think of as a "legit business" like Amazon and Walmart are scamming a significant percentage of their customers.
Selling people mountains of cheap garbage that will break almost immediately is not much different than theft to me. But it's a scam that benefits enough other people like the shipping industry than nobody will rock the boat.
The economy in general is trending more into figuring out how to siphon wealth from people without money into the pockets of people who already have everything. Poor people are actually pretty profitable because they have little choice in spending.
Amazon is explicitly auctioning off (and not even second-price auction) search spots. So if you search for something you don't get shown what you search for but something that Amazon extracts the maximum amount of money from.
I wouldn’t consider that a scam so much as the inevitable result of brand reputation being diluted into nothing. Intermingling is part of the problem, but the real scam is every single Reddit-brand-check for BIFL is always “20 years ago this was a top-tier brand, now it’s garbage. Check craigslist/ebay”
Which is probably a direct result of things like consumer reports going down the gutter.
With the massive expansion of information available today, reputation should be utterly paramount to sort out the chaff and somehow it’s instead become entirely meaningless
I don't consider selling cheap junk as a scam. To me its more an indicator of what consumers want and are willing to pay for.
If we wanted better quality stuff and weren't willing to buy cheap crap they would stop selling it or they'd go out of business.
These businesses haven't shifted from selling high quality products to junk quietly and without lowering prices. We all know the quality, how is that a scam?
I think, though I have no way to prove it, that the "Amazon's Choice" is also a "scam"-like moniker. In many of the electronic products I come across, it is often a poorly reviewed product compared to many other options, making me think it is the one that Amazon profits from the most.
Hey, it's Amazon choice. Whatever positive attributes you associate with the term is up to you. Treat is as any sticker a shop puts onto a product. Its the equivalent to Costco or Walmart home brand.
That gets much closer to what I'd consider them being party to a scam, though I'd have to be able to prove they know about it and actively choose not to fix it.
They could pretty easily claim they have too many products to monitor reviews, and that reviews are user generated content they can't be legally liable for (like social media).
Someone can tell me the product they own and want me to buy is top quality, its up to me to believe them.
Its also a bit of a fool me once situation. If I believe their quality claims and buy a product to find its junk, shame on them. If I keep going back expecting quality, shame on me.
This is why many governments have "anti-capitalist" functions like the FCC and FTC...
But there's also private industry solutions like Angie's List (at one point) and non-profits like Consumer Reports.
Basically, the junk enshittifies until people demand society dedicates money to stop snake oil salesmen.... Or it becomes a legitimate business model to say your product is your reputation on vetting products.
In the same as you need to defend against thieves and other evil people.
It is not changing that fraudsters, scammers, thieves, rapists et all are evil and we should eliminate their activities using various available methods. Taking side-effects into account.
The person sending their life savings is absolutely partly at fault there, you do still have to pay attention. Your example is very different though, it isn't Microsoft on the other end of that scam, its a person lying about who they are and using Microsoft's name to run a con.
I question that people truly want this cheap throwaway garbage. Just look at all the seasonal produced use once stuff (think Easter, Halloween, xmas, etc.) that people buy because they are cheap and do it for a moment, the. They go into the bin. When I was young such decoration was previous, cherished and stored for next season. Over time it grew. Now everyone buys some plastic spiderweb because it's cheap and the neighbors down street have deco up as well. Mountains or crap.
People clearly want it or they wouldn't buy it. No one forces you to buy cheap junk, and there's plenty of non-disposable decorations you can buy and use, or you can go really old school and make your own decorations. That people are buying this tells you that they do want it, because they wouldn't buy it otherwise.
Broke people, or simply people looking to stay frugal, existing in a society that subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) conditions it's citizens towards ever-increasing levels of consumption maybe aren't overtly "forced" to buy cheap junk but if you are conditioned to consume and you can't otherwise afford to consume, you will buy cheap junk. It's a bit of a manufactured demand. I would reckon, all things being equal, most people would take quality goods over poorly-made junk.
I guess you could say to simply get a hold of yourself but there are powerful forces at play in this conditioning process. There's a reason the ad industry is worth so much money.
This type of view takes away effectively all agency away from the individual.
Yes advertising is coercive, and yes people will look at their neighbors and feel the need to compete.
People also make their own decisions. If they choose to buy cheap crap as a single use product its their choice. They don't have to decorate for Halloween, as the example, and they don't have to follow what others around them are doing just to fit in.
People have agency within the framework of their environment (time, place, culture etc etc), and ingrained behaviors are often hard to override.
Consider diet; grubs are considered a tasty snack in many places whereas in most of the "western" world, the vast majority of people would be completely turned off from even thinking about it. Sure, if you were literally dying of starvation this aversion could be overcome but it would take extreme desperation to make most Americans or Europeans consider this option.
This is a very obvious and easy to parse example for ease of demonstration but it extends to lots of other, less obvious behaviors
Humans are automatons. They can't help anything that they do. They are bound by their nature and their environment, 100%. There are no other forces guiding their behavior.
If that's your view, there's no point in considering scams, corporate practices, etc. The people making and selling cheap products aren't doing anything wrong, they aren't even choosing to do it.
Further you must find laws entirely useless, only existing because its in our nature and environment to create them and punish people for actions they have no say in taking.
This seems like a very difficult and sad way to view the world, though I guess maybe not if you don't believe you chose the view at all and emotions are simply nature and environment anyway.
Broke people in days of old would make their own decorations because in days of old they couldn’t afford pre made decorations. That is still an option, so the fact that they buy cheap disposable decorations instead tells you that they want that. They would prefer to spend their limited budget on a cheap disposable mass made product than spend their limited time making their own. It’s still a choice, but unlike the good old days that you long for, they have that choice today. And they’re choosing the cheap decorations.
Cheap in quality, not price. I do agree though, its hard to tell the junk from the quality on Amazon. If a person cares about quality just don't buy from there.
This is my thought too. Nobody is surprised when their $12 bluetooth headphones break. As much as I may dislike it, some things are purchased to be used a few times and then thrown out. If you want nice things you need to pay for them
Mine lasted two years, then stopped charging reliably (I presume due to oxidation of the contacts, but cleaning didn't help). I was walking down the street one evening with my unreliable charging earphones in, came past one of those bodega-like phone shops with earbuds advertised in the window so I popped in to see what they were selling. They laid out 5 different options on the counter and, all about $20-30, giving me the choice of fake Apple, fake Xiaomi (he was clear they were counterfeits, so no scam), or a couple of various no-name brands. He gave me a recommendation for sound quality; I picked one based on battery capacity instead, paid the $25, haven't had any complaints with them in the months since.
He also had genuine Apple ones for $150 or whatever ridiculous price Apple is charging for them, but I made it clear I wanted cheap ones that worked. I have no doubt they would've died sooner or been incompatible with my non-Apple phone.
Point is, price doesn't guarantee quality and this stuff is genuinely commoditised now. While some brands try to get maximum money per customer and brainwash their customers into thinking every other brand is flimsy shit that breaks so you'd better pay up, and some brands pump out flimsy shit that breaks, there's plenty in the middle.
> The economy in general is trending more into figuring out how to siphon wealth from people without money into the pockets of people who already have everything. Poor people are actually pretty profitable because they have little choice in spending.
There are levels to the game everywhere. One example that I can think of is on the timeshare stuff in Mexico where they exploit retired older people into buying fake ownership of something and end up instead just owning a huge debt.
It’s like the world has entered an era of abundance where the game is no longer about value but rather perception of value and ways to pressure your psychological makings.
> It’s like the world has entered an era of abundance where the game is no longer about value but rather perception of value and ways to pressure your psychological makings.
Not to preach, but it's stuff like this that always makes me itch slightly and start wondering if there's something to the idea of an epochal Tendency in the Rate of Profit to Fall.
On the flip side, all the money for timeshares could be plowed into construction in those old rich peoples' communities, but they have NIMBY'd themselves out of that legitimate, straightforward investment and growth. So: absolutely no sympathy.
Unfortunately that is the same mentality that drives offshoring and such.
Most people are fully aware of it, hence why cheap 1 euro shops (nowadays a bit more than that however) are so prevalent across the globe, or buying counterfeit goods at street bazaars.
Most will rather buy something five times, than one good enough that will last.
I'm in the buy for quality camp, but with rampant enshitification and private equity cashing in on brand cachet, plus the manipulation of reviews and astroturfing, I find discoverability a real challenge.
> Selling people mountains of cheap garbage that will break almost immediately is not much different than theft to me.
Really? Let me help. Selling something anything involves respecting them enough to allow them to make a choice, and deliver an item in exchange for money. Stealing is the exact opposite - you deprive someone of what they lawfully acquired by choice.
It only gets mixed up if you think you’re qualified to make consumer decisions for others.
Amazon and Walmart are weird targets. They are some of the most consumer-friendly places to shop (low prices, good return policies). It's easy to take for granted, but the variety, quality, and prices at mass merchants like those (and Target, Costco, Aldi, etc.) are absolute modern miracles.
> I think it's worse than that. Even what people think of as a "legit business" like Amazon and Walmart are scamming a significant percentage of their customers.
Amazon actively puts barriers to reporting fraudulent products and cancels bad reviews by claiming it's their fault when the review had nothing to do with the delivery, so duh?
Fraud has been the fastest growing sector for about 20 years now. Much of this is movement of previously simply scammy products into actual scams. The kinds of things that you used to find advertised on late night television are now supercharged by Amazon availability, by ads that can directly target likely marks, and by the terrible state of reviews; it's so easy to manipulate that there's effectively zero correlation between quality and reviews on any major site, and paradoxically the sites actually selling products are the least awful at this.
This is only the start, though, because growing even faster are obviously criminal exploitations. Flat out forgeries dominated the Amazon marketplace due to Amazon's binning practices. This ruined the margins and destroyed the reputations of every quality vendor. They have reversed this course, but too late, the quality vendors mostly went under or were bought up by scammers to ride their reputations, and we are left with marketplaces full of fly-by nights. Every major retailer dropped their quality to zero to keep up.
And last, we get to do the brazen criminality, pig fattening scams, tech support scams, identity theft, criminal gangs raiding supermarkets en-mass, and all manner of wire fraud. These are growing even faster, as an aging population has provided ample prey for these sorts of scams. They are generally headquartered overseas and effectively immune from prosecution.
It is not all Doom. These are problems that have been dealt with before. There is an idiom that has softened with use, "wild west", that accurately describes this. The solution, historically, was the posse system, state authorized activity that otherwise looked an awful lot like vigilante justice. We haven't demanded that yet, but we will soon.
Why isn't there, like, a website that is like Amazon but not a scam, and people actually use? Actually I know many of these, but nobody talks about them and everyone only talks about Amazon - why is that?
The logic of profit turns everything towards allowing scammers. eBay, Etsy, and many more have started out with high minded marketplaces of trust before they succumbed to the reality that crap shovelers are lucrative.
I think part of the dynamic is that Amazon allows itself to be “scammed” a certain percentage of the time by its own consumers, in order to provide genuinely desired convenience features, but passes the costs and burdens on to you in other more subtle ways.
Look no further than return policies. The brutal truth is that all return policies will be abused and really they need to charge a fee to make any real impact - but consumers dislike this, and often will “run the risk” of getting a crappy product with a good return policy rather than run a smaller risk with a “bad” return policy. Unironically, if a website charges a restocking fee, it’s often a good sign. (Businesses like Wayfair aside which, in a classic evolved predator style, reorient a huge portion of their entire business around milking restocking fees)
In Europe (and many other locations) governments (or more like towns and cities) use to have designated areas for markets, some every day fixed hours, some weekly, some free, some with paid stalls, and combinations of those. It was actually normal to have a giant paved void in the middle of a city for the market, usually around the church.
It gradually became a great way to extract more and more money from the citizens using a lengthy list of excuses. Billing per meter, business registrations, service cost, cleaning, licenses, etc etc
It was normalized but there is nothing normal about it. Normal would be for a government to use taxes to organize things for the citizens. They can just build a mall and set a low rent for each shop, do inspections, monitor complaints. You are not providing a service to the citizens by maximizing their exploitation.
Not that you should but you can set up an online marketplace in 20 minutes. Any forum software will do it. If you want it to be fast and full of high resolution media the citizen will have to pay something like $0.001 for hosting.
You can go full retard with a blend of top notch nepotism and bureaucratic inefficiency and make a platform that costs whole dollars per citizen.
Do the full paper trail where the goods come from, digital ID, encrypt and lock everything behind court orders, automatic taxes if you sell more than $30k, tax foreign merchants.
You will have an inevitable explosion of economic activity and a huge surge in purchase power.
It is completely obvious.
I found a word for what we are doing in stead, I'm calling it COLONIALISM.
Yep. And it's only going to get worse as the population of wealthy older people suffering from mild cognitive impairment continues to grow. They're the perfect target for online scams: still able to use computers and in control of substantial assets but also lonely and gullible.
Land of the lie, home of the scam, the worst of which is the red team / blue team garbage you people devour everyday designed by the political elite to give you a distinction without a difference and keep you distracted and in conflict with your fellows.
I hear things are way better over there except for freedom of speech. Everything to do with standard of living is much higher and they actually build stuff for their population instead of trying to extract value for free. Or so I hear.
>I'm starting to think a very large chunk of the internet (and national economy) basically runs on scamming people.
It's called convergence. As we import people from India and China en masse, we become a little bit more like them.
With no corresponding reverse flow, they remain unchanged, so the process is stable for as long as we allow it to be (and for as long as the cultural arbitrage exists.)
>I would love to know how much of the actual economy is above-board business and how much isn't, but the older I get the larger the "isn't" seems to grow
and I was explaining that the growth he felt he was observing is due to our importing large numbers of adults socialized in low-trust societies for whom scams, theft and so on are considered ordinary behaviors among healthy adults.
> I was explaining that the growth he felt he was observing is due to our importing large numbers of adults socialized in low-trust societies for whom scams, theft and so on are considered ordinary behaviors among healthy adults.
What the heck. have you actually visited these countries and talked to ordinary people there?
USA has been exporting its culture for decades. Things are all blending together. Niche languages are disappearing. Even skin tones are also changing through mixing.
High trust cultures are becoming more skeptical. Low trust cultures are learning the value of establishing trust.
The point is not that antisocial behavior is somehow unique to India or China, or that it does not (or did not) exist in white America, but that increases in both its prevalence and our tolerance of it are due to our importing huge numbers of adults who were socialized in societies where it is considered normal, healthy adult behavior.
Very strange opinion indeed. For you information, there is hardly place on the globe where "[scamming and thievery] is considered normal, healthy adult behavior.", not an more than Americans think their elites ripping them off is normal behavior.
It's a continuum. Ranging from competitive markets that deliver high-quality useful goods at historically amazing prices (food and automobiles come to mind) all the way to pure scams like shitcoins and Bernie Madoff. The majority of businesses are in the middle where they exploit their customers lack of knowledge and or manipulate them with advertising and marketing: HVAC companies, car dealerships, financial advisors, dentists, non-profit, etc. etc. etc.
My last 4 jobs were all LinkedIn; but the last was 8y ago. They were all Apply Now.
I clicked. Provided a few things. Had an interview within a few days and the offer a day or two later. It was absolutely lovely compared to Monster or ZipRecuiter or CareerBuilder or whatever was popular at the time.
Now the only Apply Now links appear to be resume harvesters or agencies reposting other open reqs.
While I'm not in your side of the truth I'm glad you posted this. It's good to know it's not a total waste of time at least for some (I don't really use it, except for scanning through to see what folks deem worthy talking about on LI, time to time.)
This is just a drop in the bucket. Hopefully, this snowballs into a sustained effort to enforce no ghost listings. Its understandable from both the recruiter and recruitee perspective, but something needs to change and it’s probably policy.
I made a job board scraper when I was looking for work. I found job listings from at least 6 years prior. I replied to some of them to call them on their stale listings. Not surprisingly no response. The lack of oversight or quality control is annoying, so make your own
You're not misremembering, Ontario did pass a law, but there are exceptions, and you have to trust the Ontario government is actually going to take action (hard to do with Doug Ford in power).
More shocking is, some non-fake postings also turn out to be result of company internal politics and not really to hire someone. They do conduct interviews, but don't select anyone. They probably want to have unfilled positions as a justification for all their failures or for some other mysterious reason.
Its really bad (scamming everywhere), and worse - anyone who tries to market anything with intentions to be good/not scam, have to compete with the scammers.
Even companies I would not have thought did anything scammy.. I've seen very obvious fake people, 100s, maybe 1000s of AI bots (just my guess) posting fake posts (what's it like having a job in marketing these days?) claiming to love the product, or even bash / make up fake stories about their competition.
Some of this is obvious to me but I can see that a lot of people don't notice and start trying to engage with the bots. Maybe it has to do with people's assumptions that they can easily detect AI - but its only the super obvious / lower effort stuff that's 'slop' looking. Plenty of it looks human, you have to spend time digging in like a P.I. to figure out the truth.
Seriously, this platform is a big shitshow - lots of premium profiles posting AI-polished or AI-generated posts, corporate bootlickers, cringe posts, messages from random recruiters who didn't even bother to read your description.
I've gotten a few scam emails recently and they stem from a post I made on a Who's Looking For Work thread here, years ago. I finally tracked it down and deleted it.
So annoying.
They all were vibe-coded websites of teams in "Japan," looking to collaborate and encouraging me to jump on a call. I was initially excited (because of this job market) before slowly realizing I was being scammed. If you're a scammer reading this: KYS.
I got one of those many years ago when I was in college. I desperately needed money, so I found a job listing on Craigslist, sent my resume, got a call back, we agreed on the in-person time and place, it was neat.
I show up at a building 2 blocks from school, a random tenant tells me to form a line by the door that was locked. I was confused because I was the only one there. A second person came in, joined the line. Then a third, fourth, fifth. We were a crowd, standing in front of a door, where I thought I'd interview for a entry level job in tech.
When the door opened and the person on the other side greeted us and a good number of people immediately left. More luck for me to get this job. But turns out, it was going to be a group interview. In fact, not exactly an interview. It was a pitch. And a few lucky ones would have the privilege to sell high tech knives. All we had to do was buy the first batch of knives for something like $300.
I had the same exact experience in high school. I think I found the ad online and the interview was at the mall. I knew something was off but couldn’t pin it down exactly at the time (now I know it was probably some MLM type scam). I stuck around and was “interviewed” but didn’t accept anything. Later they called my house and my parents told them I wasn’t interested.
If MLM commissions form a sort of geometric series (the guy three levels up gets 20% of 20% of 20% of your sales) and the market required grows exponentially (you sell to 20 people who each sell to 20 people who each sell to...) then mathematical intuition should form a red flag.
I took over an abandoned daytrading sub on Reddit. I think when I took over it had something like 30k weekly visitors.
It basically had no rules, anyone could post whatever they wanted. It was mostly ads, funnels to some apps or YouTube videos, courses, private chat groups, and so on.
I decided to do a cleanup and ban all the cross posts, obvious AI posts, bots, and ads. And it killed the entire sub, it had zero legitimate posts after.
Makes me wonder how much of LinkedIn is actually just fake jobs, either MLM or ghost jobs, etc.
LinkedIn, Indeed, Monster, all the same scam jobs. I don't bother with any of them, any more since jobs are sadly disappearing.
Microsoft, Recruit Holdings, BOLD Holdings all making money off people's suffering. Basically, same old, same old. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 6.6 ms ] threadMost of them are simply deprioritized and situationally used. Most companies with more than 50 employees (and less than 5,000 let's say) want something more like a pipeline. They often have some interchangeable work and might decide to hire 3 SWEs. So they interview a pool and eventually fill the 3 roles. But why take down the listing? When they post they get 1,000 resumes instantly, but every week they get 100 new ones. So if they decide to hire again they just cull the top 50 most recent and take a look. You could be the best person in the world but if you are resume 51, you are ignored.
AI (on both sides) and hiring manager laziness has made lucky timing the most important factor for any hiring chance.
So I applied to jobs myself. However, because a lot of these career sites don't put in relevant details in the job descriptions, I now used AI to find the companies behind the vague job descriptions. That worked like a charm!
Once I found the companies, I checked if they had any job openings listed on their website and applied through their website.
I applied to six job listings. Three companies didn't bother to react at all, including one from HN's "Who's hiring" page. The other three companies reacted to my message, two were a possible match, and went to in person interviews etc. One of them I picked for my new employer.
All in all, it took a couple of weeks from actively looking for a job to finding one.
However, I had my CV up for quite a while, but looking for a job passively didn't do a thing at all. That's decidedly different from the early 2000s and 2010s.
And that's not even considering perfectly legal "scams" like shitcoin pumps and politicians awarding shady contracts to buisness people who donated to them without a technical bribe happening. I would love to know how much of the actual economy is above-board business and how much isn't, but the older I get the larger the "isn't" seems to grow. Is the scam-economy 1% of all real financial transations? 5%? 10%? 20%? I'm honestly not sure.
It's also going to be about as easy to hold a data-centre in Nigeria responsible for scams running on their hardware as it is to prosecute a crooked call-centre in Mumbai today. The AI-supercharged MLM's are going to be harder to block too. A call-centre can be blocked by telecoms (even if most don't currently bother). A MLM exploiting multiple forms of social media, websites, and networking apps on top of phones?
We need to start pressuring our governments to devote more resources to police anti-fraud units. We can't rely on journalists do this job.
From what I have heard & read, the obviousness is either intentional or unintentionally helpful, because it filters out people who would eventually figure out the scam (and would take up the scammers' efforts in the meantime). That said, more complicated frauds like what you're describing will likely proliferate.
Selling people mountains of cheap garbage that will break almost immediately is not much different than theft to me. But it's a scam that benefits enough other people like the shipping industry than nobody will rock the boat.
The economy in general is trending more into figuring out how to siphon wealth from people without money into the pockets of people who already have everything. Poor people are actually pretty profitable because they have little choice in spending.
Which is probably a direct result of things like consumer reports going down the gutter.
With the massive expansion of information available today, reputation should be utterly paramount to sort out the chaff and somehow it’s instead become entirely meaningless
If we wanted better quality stuff and weren't willing to buy cheap crap they would stop selling it or they'd go out of business.
These businesses haven't shifted from selling high quality products to junk quietly and without lowering prices. We all know the quality, how is that a scam?
They could pretty easily claim they have too many products to monitor reviews, and that reviews are user generated content they can't be legally liable for (like social media).
What about selling cheap junk while claiming it is a high-quality long lasting premium product?
while it may be legal, and may be hard to outlaw, it is still a scam
Its also a bit of a fool me once situation. If I believe their quality claims and buy a product to find its junk, shame on them. If I keep going back expecting quality, shame on me.
But there's also private industry solutions like Angie's List (at one point) and non-profits like Consumer Reports.
Basically, the junk enshittifies until people demand society dedicates money to stop snake oil salesmen.... Or it becomes a legitimate business model to say your product is your reputation on vetting products.
I've walked away from multiple used cars because the few mechanics I trust weren't available to do an inspection at the time.
They can change names all they want, if people continually find shit products from those companies then stop trusting anything on their shelves.
In the same as you need to defend against thieves and other evil people.
It is not changing that fraudsters, scammers, thieves, rapists et all are evil and we should eliminate their activities using various available methods. Taking side-effects into account.
Broke people, or simply people looking to stay frugal, existing in a society that subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) conditions it's citizens towards ever-increasing levels of consumption maybe aren't overtly "forced" to buy cheap junk but if you are conditioned to consume and you can't otherwise afford to consume, you will buy cheap junk. It's a bit of a manufactured demand. I would reckon, all things being equal, most people would take quality goods over poorly-made junk.
I guess you could say to simply get a hold of yourself but there are powerful forces at play in this conditioning process. There's a reason the ad industry is worth so much money.
Yes advertising is coercive, and yes people will look at their neighbors and feel the need to compete.
People also make their own decisions. If they choose to buy cheap crap as a single use product its their choice. They don't have to decorate for Halloween, as the example, and they don't have to follow what others around them are doing just to fit in.
That's the goal of monopolists, yes.
Consider diet; grubs are considered a tasty snack in many places whereas in most of the "western" world, the vast majority of people would be completely turned off from even thinking about it. Sure, if you were literally dying of starvation this aversion could be overcome but it would take extreme desperation to make most Americans or Europeans consider this option.
This is a very obvious and easy to parse example for ease of demonstration but it extends to lots of other, less obvious behaviors
Further you must find laws entirely useless, only existing because its in our nature and environment to create them and punish people for actions they have no say in taking.
This seems like a very difficult and sad way to view the world, though I guess maybe not if you don't believe you chose the view at all and emotions are simply nature and environment anyway.
One of the advantages of LLMs, is likely to be a fairly significant rise in the base quality of most software.
We've become so used to developing and selling garbage, that there's nowhere left to go, but up.
The die is cast…
He also had genuine Apple ones for $150 or whatever ridiculous price Apple is charging for them, but I made it clear I wanted cheap ones that worked. I have no doubt they would've died sooner or been incompatible with my non-Apple phone.
Point is, price doesn't guarantee quality and this stuff is genuinely commoditised now. While some brands try to get maximum money per customer and brainwash their customers into thinking every other brand is flimsy shit that breaks so you'd better pay up, and some brands pump out flimsy shit that breaks, there's plenty in the middle.
There are levels to the game everywhere. One example that I can think of is on the timeshare stuff in Mexico where they exploit retired older people into buying fake ownership of something and end up instead just owning a huge debt.
It’s like the world has entered an era of abundance where the game is no longer about value but rather perception of value and ways to pressure your psychological makings.
Not to preach, but it's stuff like this that always makes me itch slightly and start wondering if there's something to the idea of an epochal Tendency in the Rate of Profit to Fall.
I'm sure you have some solid evidence for that and your comment isn't just lazy Reddit-tier boomer hate, right?
Most people are fully aware of it, hence why cheap 1 euro shops (nowadays a bit more than that however) are so prevalent across the globe, or buying counterfeit goods at street bazaars.
Most will rather buy something five times, than one good enough that will last.
Whilst paying less than a living wage. It’s scams all the way down.
Really? Let me help. Selling something anything involves respecting them enough to allow them to make a choice, and deliver an item in exchange for money. Stealing is the exact opposite - you deprive someone of what they lawfully acquired by choice.
It only gets mixed up if you think you’re qualified to make consumer decisions for others.
Amazon actively puts barriers to reporting fraudulent products and cancels bad reviews by claiming it's their fault when the review had nothing to do with the delivery, so duh?
This is only the start, though, because growing even faster are obviously criminal exploitations. Flat out forgeries dominated the Amazon marketplace due to Amazon's binning practices. This ruined the margins and destroyed the reputations of every quality vendor. They have reversed this course, but too late, the quality vendors mostly went under or were bought up by scammers to ride their reputations, and we are left with marketplaces full of fly-by nights. Every major retailer dropped their quality to zero to keep up.
And last, we get to do the brazen criminality, pig fattening scams, tech support scams, identity theft, criminal gangs raiding supermarkets en-mass, and all manner of wire fraud. These are growing even faster, as an aging population has provided ample prey for these sorts of scams. They are generally headquartered overseas and effectively immune from prosecution.
It is not all Doom. These are problems that have been dealt with before. There is an idiom that has softened with use, "wild west", that accurately describes this. The solution, historically, was the posse system, state authorized activity that otherwise looked an awful lot like vigilante justice. We haven't demanded that yet, but we will soon.
Look no further than return policies. The brutal truth is that all return policies will be abused and really they need to charge a fee to make any real impact - but consumers dislike this, and often will “run the risk” of getting a crappy product with a good return policy rather than run a smaller risk with a “bad” return policy. Unironically, if a website charges a restocking fee, it’s often a good sign. (Businesses like Wayfair aside which, in a classic evolved predator style, reorient a huge portion of their entire business around milking restocking fees)
It gradually became a great way to extract more and more money from the citizens using a lengthy list of excuses. Billing per meter, business registrations, service cost, cleaning, licenses, etc etc
It was normalized but there is nothing normal about it. Normal would be for a government to use taxes to organize things for the citizens. They can just build a mall and set a low rent for each shop, do inspections, monitor complaints. You are not providing a service to the citizens by maximizing their exploitation.
Not that you should but you can set up an online marketplace in 20 minutes. Any forum software will do it. If you want it to be fast and full of high resolution media the citizen will have to pay something like $0.001 for hosting.
You can go full retard with a blend of top notch nepotism and bureaucratic inefficiency and make a platform that costs whole dollars per citizen.
Do the full paper trail where the goods come from, digital ID, encrypt and lock everything behind court orders, automatic taxes if you sell more than $30k, tax foreign merchants.
You will have an inevitable explosion of economic activity and a huge surge in purchase power.
It is completely obvious.
I found a word for what we are doing in stead, I'm calling it COLONIALISM.
Illegal drugs are absolutely a single digit percentage of the economy.
It's called convergence. As we import people from India and China en masse, we become a little bit more like them.
With no corresponding reverse flow, they remain unchanged, so the process is stable for as long as we allow it to be (and for as long as the cultural arbitrage exists.)
True blue Americans don't scam? Lol
>I would love to know how much of the actual economy is above-board business and how much isn't, but the older I get the larger the "isn't" seems to grow
and I was explaining that the growth he felt he was observing is due to our importing large numbers of adults socialized in low-trust societies for whom scams, theft and so on are considered ordinary behaviors among healthy adults.
What the heck. have you actually visited these countries and talked to ordinary people there?
High trust cultures are becoming more skeptical. Low trust cultures are learning the value of establishing trust.
The point is not that antisocial behavior is somehow unique to India or China, or that it does not (or did not) exist in white America, but that increases in both its prevalence and our tolerance of it are due to our importing huge numbers of adults who were socialized in societies where it is considered normal, healthy adult behavior.
Full of dark patterns.
It is lame, but some people treat perspective employees as a fungible service. =3
I clicked. Provided a few things. Had an interview within a few days and the offer a day or two later. It was absolutely lovely compared to Monster or ZipRecuiter or CareerBuilder or whatever was popular at the time.
Now the only Apply Now links appear to be resume harvesters or agencies reposting other open reqs.
I sent out over 415 applications and got three interviews. It's pretty bad.
https://www.ontario.ca/document/your-guide-employment-standa...
That’s not how they make money though. They make money by selling listings.
Same mistake that people make about journalism (including journalists). The amount of news reported is a function of ads sold.
Even companies I would not have thought did anything scammy.. I've seen very obvious fake people, 100s, maybe 1000s of AI bots (just my guess) posting fake posts (what's it like having a job in marketing these days?) claiming to love the product, or even bash / make up fake stories about their competition.
Some of this is obvious to me but I can see that a lot of people don't notice and start trying to engage with the bots. Maybe it has to do with people's assumptions that they can easily detect AI - but its only the super obvious / lower effort stuff that's 'slop' looking. Plenty of it looks human, you have to spend time digging in like a P.I. to figure out the truth.
Seriously, this platform is a big shitshow - lots of premium profiles posting AI-polished or AI-generated posts, corporate bootlickers, cringe posts, messages from random recruiters who didn't even bother to read your description.
So annoying.
They all were vibe-coded websites of teams in "Japan," looking to collaborate and encouraging me to jump on a call. I was initially excited (because of this job market) before slowly realizing I was being scammed. If you're a scammer reading this: KYS.
I show up at a building 2 blocks from school, a random tenant tells me to form a line by the door that was locked. I was confused because I was the only one there. A second person came in, joined the line. Then a third, fourth, fifth. We were a crowd, standing in front of a door, where I thought I'd interview for a entry level job in tech.
When the door opened and the person on the other side greeted us and a good number of people immediately left. More luck for me to get this job. But turns out, it was going to be a group interview. In fact, not exactly an interview. It was a pitch. And a few lucky ones would have the privilege to sell high tech knives. All we had to do was buy the first batch of knives for something like $300.
"If any of you think you're too good to sell perfume in a parking lot, leave now."
I hadn't even considered I might be too good to sell perfume in a parking lot until that moment, but it turned out that I was.
I took over an abandoned daytrading sub on Reddit. I think when I took over it had something like 30k weekly visitors.
It basically had no rules, anyone could post whatever they wanted. It was mostly ads, funnels to some apps or YouTube videos, courses, private chat groups, and so on.
I decided to do a cleanup and ban all the cross posts, obvious AI posts, bots, and ads. And it killed the entire sub, it had zero legitimate posts after.
Makes me wonder how much of LinkedIn is actually just fake jobs, either MLM or ghost jobs, etc.
What about a cleanup on "Who's Hiring"?
Microsoft, Recruit Holdings, BOLD Holdings all making money off people's suffering. Basically, same old, same old. The more things change, the more they stay the same.