Didn't feel like a misdiagnosis to me. My spouse around 2017 was one of those that got sucked into a course to earn income with an Amazon store. As I read the article basically every point resonated with my experience.
The dog walking business example was also appropriate in my mind. My spouse fortunately broke even, minus time, on her attempt with drop shipping garbage nobody really needs. Now she makes decent money with her oil paintings. Not "passive income" but real money and profit. Not enough to retire (that's what I am for!) but actual money nonetheless.
Would you mind sharing a little about how your wife does business? Like, are her clients regular people or art shops? How does she put a price on her work?
I'm the least interested person in art you'll ever know, so how she prices her work I'm not sure. I know she doesn't go by time spent on a piece, but instead how good it turns out. I think she just casually looks at other art for sale that is around the same quality and prices accordingly. After so many rounds of that I think you just get a good intuition for it.
She also has a few art shows she applies to and goes presents at those. I think this is where most of her recurring customers come from honestly, and not Instagram. Though she has had a few commissions from Instagram.
A side note on those looking to buy art, you might refrain from asking for a custom piece. If you see something you like, there's a good chance you don't know why you like it even if you think you do. So when you give the artist a picture you want them to translate into something like oil, it'll probably disappoint. The frustrations I've seen my wife go through trying to get a commission right is tiring.
Dropshipping was also MASSIVE in /r/startup at around this time. I even got caught up in it: I spent a spell on flipping designer clothes found at thrift stores on eBay (overall lost more than I made, though not by much. Surprisingly intense business; definitely not passive.)
I'm not in any way doubting that lots of people were swept up in Amazon drop shipping scams. My argument is that this was not some sort of unique "passive income trap that ate a generation of entrepreneurs".
Years before your spouse enrolled in that Amazon course, people were spending tens of thousands of dollars on Trump University. Many years before that I had a friend that got sucked into the Equinox International MLM scam. Point being those types of promises of easy money after paying for a course, or outright scams, are not something new or unique.
I think this kind of "get rich quick" scam has always been around (MLM is a perfect example) - the interesting thing about the amazon drop shipping one is that it did actually work for a bit for quite a few people - until China realized they could cut out the middleman and drop ship directly (and things like Temu and friends came into view).
The vast majority of people who fall for things like MLMs will continue to pursue similar scams and never graduate to "real entrepreneurship" even when there's obvious and not terribly difficult paths (most anyone can become a realtor and at least not lose terrible amounts of money, even if they never get to "full-time job" levels).
I also picked up a couple languages as an adult and can attest to this. You have to be willing to talk and know you are butchering the language. Nobody cares either. People are genuinely pleased to hear the effort, especially if you're a guest in their country.
I’m French, this is definitely not an urban legend, for some unknown reason « wrongly » spoken French sounds especially grating to me and all the other French people I know. We might not say it to your face , but it is extremely hard to ignore.
I wonder if it’s the same with other Latin languages, or if it is just some consequence of years of forced standardisation of the French accent.
Weird, I'm French and most people I know are rather delighted to hear foreigners speak French. We have quite a few English pensioners living around where my family lives, and I live myself along the Flanders/Wallonia border in Belgium so we're quite accustomed to hearing "bad French" speakers I guess, but the popularity of foreign speakers singing in French seems to indicate that foreign accents isn't really a problem for many French speakers.
People being annoyed at bad French is stereotypically Parisian to me.
I would assume it's grating for anybody to hear their mother tongue butchered. More so when both sides know they could just switch English and have an adult conversation instead of struggling to buy a loaf of broad and a bottle of water. I always feel the urge to switch and have to remind myself that the other person is making a big effort on their side and that should be appreciated and respected.
P.S. My mother tongue is Spanish and it's many accents are anything but standardized.
iirc it was bmw who was selling their electric seats as a service. It maybe the only way to avoid this exploitation is a socialist model, nationalize industries and/or pay the workers for their time inside of for their product.
That worked in a case i know of locally, there was a forestry company that had workers speeding for years. So a karen i know got on to a politician and managed to get them to pay by the hour instead of by the load. I still see the trucks on the road, they are much safer now.
Very few armed forces members have enough information to make actual meaningful trades. The low ranking ones do not have enough money to make meaningful trades even if they did.
It isn't a new thing at all, and the term has been around for a while. I was an Infantryman from 05-08 and heard it back then. I have also more recently been a defense contractor. I don't think members of the military prefer any title, honestly. In the most broad sense, good terms are soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines. Defense Contractors constantly refer to the military as "warfighter" and have for a while. In short, nobody in the military is going to flinch one way or the other if you use either term. Just don't call marines anything but marines.
I've come to the same conclusions. I don't think the feelings are complicated though. It's just personal when you find use in it. It's kind of like cryptocurrency in the way that it doesn't democratize efficiency and usefulness amongst everyone. So for a few it is a powerful and useful tool, but ultimately at the cost of everything else.
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