Bill Ackman was wrong about Herbalife. According to wikipedia, he lost between $400 million to $500 million by shorting Herbalife last year. What that means is that other investors disagree with his (and this article's) analysis of Herbalife.
No. Bill Ackman was right. Herbalife is a terrible business. For reasons outlined in the OP link, it has seen growth - but is ultimately doomed. Specifically: when there are no new markets to enter; when every dupe has been duped.
Though, unfortunately, before it crashes entirely - those handful at the top will have their next big sham ready to seed & perpetuate into the world; and a significant number of the dupes who were duped before will be duped again.
And hence, the endless, relentless cycle of MLM. Despicable.
You sound like a person who doesn't really know what he is talking about.
The data in this article shows some trend in two countries 10 years ago and then draws some grand conclusions on the business model, which is absurd.
If you look at the business fundamentals, the picture is a bit different.
Herbalife sells high quality products, used happily by millions of permanent customers worldwide.
They are leaders of one of the hottest industries - wellness.
Looking at the amount of unhealthy food sold in supermarkets today (almost all of it), it's no wonder there are entire industries trying to fix people's health after consuming the food sold to them.
The other industry is Health Care.
Now the MLM thing.
All the 'those on top earn everything and new people earn very little' is both true and fair. The fact is, no one has appointed anyone on 'top', everybody starts out as a simple distributor and builds his/her business from the ground up.
It's a tough business and only the best (most motivated) move up and others move on with their life.
Just like any other business.
I have been there when my sister started in Herbalife 20 years ago. She started from zero, as a simple distributor.
Now she earns about $100k/month plus bonuses, drives a Porsche and lives in an incredible house on top of a mountain.
What's more, she made dozens of other people rich. I know them all personally, they started from owning one set of clothes to driving expensive cars and travelling all around the world.
And thousands upon thousands of customers who changed their lives after loosing a significant amount of weight.
These are the customers that don't go away easily, not after they have been reborn.
Anyone who has lost 20+ kilograms (like myself) knows what I'm talking about.
Bill Ackman is full of shit and a hypocrite when he states that he wants to help millions of low income people from loosing money with Herbalife.
It's a personal and emotional war he's engaged in and so far he has been loosing it, because his premises are wrong.
Unrealized losses over a short time period have nothing to do with being "right" or "wrong" about a stock investment.
Fluctuations of investor expectations (i.e. stock price movements) have especially nothing to do with this article's analysis. It presents data and comes to a pretty reasonable conclusion from it. Whether you wan't to call it a "pyramid scheme" or not is semantics, the conclusion speaks for itself.
Short-term investors can make money betting in the opposite direction of long-term investors who will also eventually make money. Herbalife can be a pyramid scheme and short-term investors can make money as the stock price rises -- the 2 aren't mutually exclusive.
(I am a Wikipedian, and in general I don't trust Wikipedia for current news AT ALL, and especially not for current news that touches on health-related businesses.)
Actually it probably wasn't this large since Ackman didn't fully covered his short, those are most likely mostly paper losses. I believed he covered a proportion and bought puts instead.
Could you share a bit more information about how well it works for you ? Are you making an income comparable with a 'decent' corporate job (eg. 100K + a year) ?
But let's say what we really hope for is true.
What if we somehow discover that a large number of these planets are teaming with life ?
What then ?
How would that help us ? Spiritually, economically ? Wouldn't that make us feel even less significant ?
I'm just wondering, why are we hoping there is life out there and what would we do if we find it ?
Hopefully, we'd get a little attitude adjustment, question religion more and work together as a human race in the newfound awareness of our place in the universe. Perhaps also work towards actually surviving as a race for a while instead of selfishly exploiting every resource before others do.
It'll revolve around the Native American Experience, hopefully minus the conquest and genocide, more likely as a pattern than an anti-pattern.
In the long run, some high school sports teams controversially named after the aliens, some B-list movies, some academic interest, and that's about it?
In all sincerity, that's what I honestly think will happen.
Humans are the apex predators of Earth. Give us starships and we would be the apex predators of the galaxy in short order.
For tens to hundreds of thousands of years, there have been no creatures on Earth about which some human didn't think, "I wonder what that tastes like?" For Pete's sake, our ancestors ate giant, super-fast cave bears to extinction using little more than sharp sticks. Eskimos hunt huge multi-ton whales in the open ocean in flimsy canoes with hooked spears.
Sure alien life will be examined in labs and some will go to zoos. But, eventually, Monsanto would sell you Venusian steaks with a side of Martian scrapple. And, the most telling thing is, I would buy some and eat it. My mouth is already watering.
Probably most advance life would have evolved from predators. If you look at earth, the most intelligent animals are either predators or some sort of scavenger-predator hybrid. Which makes sense, predators need intelligence, cunning, sometimes pack awareness, to bring down prey. They need to be at the top or near the top of the food chain to devote some time to pursuits other than not being eaten.
Probably, nothing changes untill we start communicating with them, what may take a while. If we start feeling less significant, well, list that in the benefits... But I doubt it'll happen.
Rationaly, we should start looking hard for the explanation to Fermi's Paradox. Since it's not in our past, it must be in our future, what's very bad. But we are not rational, so we probably won't.
So we meet the aliens, we communicate with them, we become friends, they share a bunch of technological discoveries with us.. Then what ? We travel some more ?
If we can travel parsecs to meet them, wouldn't we be supremely technologicall advanced ?
I mean, the human race is pretty technologically advanced today, too advanced actually and it's hurting us as much as it's helping.
Will we some day realise that it is of no use to pursue higher mountains or more distant stars, because at the end we're still stuck within ourselves ?
What if the supremely advanced aliens realised this a long time ago and renounced technology all together, because it ended up destroying them ?
Renouncing technology you say... Also Medicine? If not so, overpopulation would soon become a problem and if by then they still don't know how to colonize further into space they face a serious problem.
Assuming this life is not techological civilizations that were hiding in plain sight, such a discovery would be bad news for us because it put us before the great filter.
Well, SETI isn't free, but it doesn't seem too expensive compared to some of the things we invest resources in. As for the spiritual danger of the seeking, I can't say it seems too fraught - finding, on the other hand, would at least require some adjustments to a few creation myths...
Community norms would be an interesting dynamic. Some groups of humans like to conform more than others. What does equal rights for beings with different numbers of tentacles mean to us? Humans think its hilarious good time to fight and kill each other over multinational corporations "owning" teams of grown men playing childrens ball games, so if you think humans aren't going to kill each other over "equal rights for unequal tentacles" from some alien culture, you're a little over optimistic.
Looking at politics, many humans behave as quislings and support groups that basically exist to ruin the groups the quislings are members of. What happens when the same type of quisling susceptible personality meets space aliens is so weird I can't even think of a sci fi story about it.
Also assuming light speed communication is more realistic than light speed transportation, something along the lines of internet trolling behavior is unfortunately highly likely. If you thought your mom browsing 4chan would be uncomfortable, wait till the space alien sociologists start reading /b/ and related. Or even worse, watching televangelist TV shows. Or reality TV. If they discover us by watching honey boo boo and decide to photon torpedo the whole planet, can we really blame them?
Does venture capitalism work across light speed delays? It would probably screw up exponential growth if the bubble has already popped before the IPO news even reached the other side. Can you do a bitcoin like protocol as a concept with multi year light speed delays between 3+ civilizations? What if latency is so long that it increases the likelihood of factoring attacks?
I would be most interested in learning about space alien UI fads. Our own fads are somewhat slow paced compared to faster paced ladies clothes/shoes fashions.
Humans think its hilarious good time to fight and kill each other over multinational corporations "owning" teams of grown men playing childrens ball games...
This is obviously tangential to your point, but it doesn't make you sound smarter or more evolved when you talk this way about sports. This sort of stuff is just tiring. As a software developer in one of the cities that sent a team to the World Series this year, I assure you I've heard every "sportsball" joke a dozen times and each time delivered as though the person saying it thinks they're the first person to realize some cultural blind-spot.
In general, I agree, but I think it does serve a valid rhetorical point in this case- i.e., that is the way in which we are likely to view a lot of the weird, different, unexpected practices of an alien culture. And yet, there will be people who embrace those things in all seriousness.
Most multiplayer games are quite playable over the network. The difference is that the graphics are rendered locally and the world state is streamed over the network.
A fast enough pipe (100Mbps fiber is quite common and cheap here in Europe) could deliver good results, even if the whole world is rendered and then streamed as video.
Multiplayer games run with a synchronization/prediction model. Most are not run with a purely server-driven world-state. The entire game simulation code and logic runs locally and is sent to the server, the server than collects all the inputs and calculates differences to the world state and sends back the diffs with predictions based on latency. These diffs may differ from the local state, and so corrections are applied. In the majority of cases, the differences are minor enough that the player doesn't notice. When they are severe, the player notices hitbox inaccuracy or worse, rubberbanding as his actions are "snapped back".
So when you're playing an FPS and you press a button to shoot, the local game logic and physics computes and displays the result immediately (firing animation, sound start playing). A short delay later, the server confirms a kill.
Even with this fairly sophisticated model, you still want <50ms pings. Video streaming and running the entire game in the cloud just won't work for games that require rapid hand-eye coordination.
Here we go again. Let's enumerate the technologies which are shit:
HTML is horrible
CSS is an abomination
HTTP is wasteful, slow and old
C++ is a horrible language (Linus Trovalds)
C is dangerous
Java sucks
..
I'll stop there and let you expand the list if you want.
Turns out the whole computing world is built on top of this terrible tech which many people hate, yet somehow it's moving forward.
All I know after years of being in the tech industry, every programming language ever invented has pissed off enough people that no one should ever use each language. I'm quite sure that languages not yet invented has already pissed enough people already that they'll be hated the day they are released.
Personally, I find such people childish in a way.
It's a tool in a toolbox. I've never seen a mechanic rant about the substandard design of a standard screwdriver because he pulled it first despite actually needing a phillips screwdriver.
Turns out the whole computing world is built on top of this terrible tech which many people hate, yet somehow it's moving forward.
Well, yes. Your hyperbole is actually the current state of affairs. Progress doesn't mean the things you're building on are good, just that they can be made to work. In fact, progress is the evolutionary process of throwing away some of the old stuff, calling it shit, and replacing it with the new hotness.
Because concepts from the bleeding edge of language research are slowly trickling down from Haskell & Co. to mainstream languages. Ten years after they emerge.
What's wrong with dying ? I mean, obviously people want to live longer for some (mostly selfish) reasons, but isn't dying part of the 'living' deal ?
Dying is similar to being born - your whole universe changed when you transitioned from womb to this world and the same happens when you die.
In other words, they have cookies and chocolate there :).
The whole deal about spirituality is that one discovers that we are in fact immortal and that this life is a step of an infinity of other steps, before this life and after.
The other thing one realizes is that each individual is actually a facet of an infinite whole (some call this God, but it is actually You), or in other words - We are all One.
That's what all the religions and mystics have been telling us for millenia.
This is somewhat equivalent to saying "isn't dying from infectious diseases part of the 'living' deal?" It is, but antibiotics are really nice, and now that we have them, it's hard to imagine a world where people would happily give them up because getting infected is just part of living.
Anti-death technology sounds really similar. If we were to have this technology now, it would be a pretty big stretch of imagination to picture a world where people would happily give it away because death is part of living.
The whole deal about spirituality is that one discovers that we are in fact immortal
We're immortal once you break down duality, but that's not what we're talking about here. People want to have the option to live forever in the conventional reality, not the ultimate reality.
It's such a terrible waste. All that knowledge accumulated over years of life... gone. We don't know what the species is capable of if we could double or triple human life span. What if we could indefinitely extend the most productive years? Where might we be if we could have given Einstein the chance to live hundreds of years with his mind and body in prime condition?
> "same happens when you die. In other words, they have cookies and chocolate there"
wouldn't it be great if that were the case? Unfortunately there is exactly zero proof of any kind that this is so.
> "each individual is actually a facet of an infinite whole, in other words - We are all One"
This sentence is completely free of information.
> "That's what all the religions and mystics have been telling us for millenia."
Religions and mystics have been exploiting the normal human fear of death for millennia. Science might one day give us the keys to finally dodge that inevitable final bullet.
>Unfortunately there is exactly zero proof of any kind that this is so
Oh but there is for those who seek it!
One kind of proof is called dimethyltryptamine. It lasts for 10 minutes, but when you come back, you might have a radically different view on these matters.
Other psychedelics, like LSD, also offer a different perspective on life and death and there are also different kinds of spiritual work one can do - meditation, holotropic breathing or living life in nature. They all help you realise just how fragile and transitory life is in nature and that that is a good thing.
>Religions and mystics have been exploiting the normal human fear of death
Isn't science (or rather scientists) driven by the same fear ? Isn't the knowledge that we're going to die a factor in making us go out and do stuff to survive ?
Wouldn't immortality lead to a state where we'd have to invent a simluation of mortal life in order to actually feel alive ?
How can one tell that this life isn't such a simulation ?
What's wrong with dying? I don't want to die. I don't want to see the people I love die. It's not "part of life" or some other crazy rationalization to make us feel better about it. It's just ceasing to exist. There is no other life.
We used to think there was some magical soul thing, but now we can look and see how the very neurons in your brain work. And when they stop working, that's it.
I don't accept death. It isn't part of any greater purpose. The universe isn't optimized for human values. But we can change that.
One day future humans will look back on ancient Earth and wonder how terrible it must have been to live for mere decades. If you were to try to convince them that dying was a good thing and they should give up their immortality, they would laugh at you.
> That's what all the religions and mystics have been telling us for millenia.
If they have been telling it for millenia, they are probably right.
>What's wrong with dying ?
This is actually a subject I speak of with my parents once in a while, they never expected to live longer than a century, so they accept death as a 'natural' part of life, whereas I see death (even of old age) as tragedy, because to me it is supposed to be (or at least to become) optional.
I was convinced death will be optional for me before my majority. It is a belief, since I have no proof of what will be, a belief in mankind's capacities.
Even being a baseless belief, it has literally changed the way I live, and the way I plan my life. I have literally all the time in the world (and hopefully quite a bit more), so no rushed decision.
It also changed the way I see knowledge acquisition, so even if I am actually a currently employed software developer, if someone have an interesting job in genetics, biology or unconventional computing for a software developer, I'm ready to jump ship.
I've been using JUCE for various project for about 5 years.
I really enjoy coding with it, once you understand the naming convention (which is different from everything I've used before), it's quite intuitive.
If you use the API in a wrong way, it will assert somewhere inside the library, and the assert has a nice comment above it explaining what you did wrong.
The main benefit for me is the size of the executables - no other cross-platform GUI toolkit that I've used before can end up with such tiny executable files.
QT might be more powerful, but it's HUGE and that is a problem for most of the apps that I develop.
Although I didn't properly RTFA, there are may ways in which one can hook narcissistic gamblers in forums or news sites.
The price of the comment can be set in a bid-like fashion with people raising their bids and paying more and more to keep their comment first.
They can also pay to upvote or downvote comments or plain remove them.
You can have comment wars with real money in no time :).
Bitcoin sounds like a perfect fit for such a system, allowing anonymous comments as well. But haven't I seen something like this somewhere already - reddit tips , for instance ?
