Category: Econ & Business

“Successful entrepreneur” offers free video on how to make money… obviously not a scam

This “press release” for “infinite cash secrets” is datelined from my hometown.  Google helpfully sent this to me in the form of a News Alert. Looks like since I left Somers has become a hotbed of multi-level marketing scams:
Shawver has achieved his online success by using the principles found in a program called The Infinite Income Plan.

“The Infinite Income Plan allows members of our team to consistently earn $5,000-10,000 dollar weeks by combining its state of the art back office with it’s vast array of cutting edge tools, with even more advanced and state of the art tools we provide to our team,” according to Shawver.

Shawver recognizes that just being handed a plan doesn’t mean that people will put that plan into action, and if they aren’t willing to put some time and effort into it, they won’t succeed.
 

How far does the economy have to tank before we are all Nigerians?
 
On a related note, I am totally in love with this site Skeptoid, a podcast (with transcripts) dedicated to debunking pseudoscientific junk like Reiki and homeopathy. While the site is generally a gold mine (see my favorites on how to argue with a creationist and the myth of peak oil), most relevant to the topic at hand is his take-down of pyramid schemes called “Bend Over and Own Your Own Business.” To wit:
 

Here’s a typical way this works. You see an ad in the paper or on the Internet promising financial freedom, owning your own business. For some fee, say $500, you can become a authorized sales agency for XYZ Company, which sells timeshare condominiums or some other product or service. In exchange for your $500, XYZ Company will provide you with qualified leads, and you are free to pursue those leads however you see fit. Call them on the phone, knock on their door, chase them down on the street and make dramatic flying dive tackles, do whatever you can do (at your own expense, of course; you are self-employed), and hopefully get some sales. You, of course, do not have any timeshare condominiums yourself, XYZ Company does; so you need to spend a portion of the money you earned from the sale to have XYZ Company provide the product to the customer. Everything works out swell for everyone. The customer got his timeshare; you earned a profit; and XYZ Company made a sale. So what’s the problem?

Well, your friend Bob was applying for a job at ABC Company at the same time you were selling your old record albums to raise the $500. Bob was given a nice office at ABC Company, was freely handed the same list of leads that XYZ Company made you pay for, and he proceeded to make phone calls on ABC Company’s phone bill until he made a sale. ABC Company paid him a handsome commission, deducted nothing from it, and Bob went home for the day, secure with his employee benefits package. Bob is not only $500 richer than you, he incurred no costs of his own, and ran no risk of being poor since most salespeople like Bob are paid base salaries.

But I understand why you don’t want to turn green with envy. After all, you have your freedom and are self-employed! Bob is not, Bob has to answer to his boss; and that’s a lifestyle you don’t want no matter how nice of a BMW Bob gets on a company lease. Your friend Red feels the way you do. Red is an independent sales rep. He sells products from various companies, and earns a nice commission on every sale. He comes and goes as he pleases, and answers to no man. But when you ask Red how much he had to pay each of his companies for the business opportunity, he looks at you like you’re from Neptune. Red explains “You don’t pay companies to be their sales rep, they pay you.”

And now you see how you’ve been taken advantage of. XYZ Company has sold you on becoming their sales agent, working at your own expense and at your own risk, and also managed to take $500 from you for no good reason. If you wanted to be an independent sales agent, fine; you could easily have gone and represented any of the same companies that Red sells for, and not paid them a dime.

What will the news look like in the future?

Happy new year everyone!

The New Yorker had a nice, concise piece on the financial state of the newspaper industry recently (it’s bad), which concludes:

Does that mean newspapers are doomed? Not necessarily. There are many possible futures one can imagine for them, from becoming foundation-run nonprofits to relying on reader donations to that old standby the deep-pocketed patron. It’s even possible that a few papers will be able to earn enough money online to make the traditional ad-supported strategy work. But it would not be shocking if, sometime soon, there were big American cities that had no local newspaper; more important, we’re almost sure to see a sharp decline in the volume and variety of content that newspapers collectively produce. For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime—intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on—and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.

A third alternative could be to bundle a “news service” fee into your monthly Internet service provider bill, as has been proposed for “illegal” music downloading.

In his “Cyber Libertarian” column for Ascii, economist Nobuo Ikeda forecasts that newspapers in Japan will become “platforms” — meaning they will eventually shed the high-cost paper distribution system and even their newsrooms in favor of publishing outsourced content under their venerated imprints.

I am not sure what to make of it all, but it’s fascinating stuff and I would love to hear your thoughts!

The Himeji Monorail

I just learned of the existence of the Himeji Monorail, from my housemates who spotted it today when walking around after a castle visit. Japanese Wikipedia has a decent article on it. It opened in 1966, but shut down in 1974. While it was a novelty, it was so expensive that “two people could ride the bus and have change left over” for the same money, on top of fulfilling no practical need in a small city with a decent bus system and low traffic density. After the novelty factor wore off, ridership declined precipitously and it was left running in the red. The final nail in the common was the withdrawal of Lockheed, who had manufactured the system, from the monorail industry. This made further maintenance impractical, particulalry for a money-bleeding system. After years of “suspended” service, it was officially decomissioned in 1979, but most of the ruins survive.

The car depot/terminal station, which still has all the original cars in it, is currently closed to the general public but is scheduled to be converted into a museum by 2011.

This Japanese page has a bit more info on it, but this one has an excellent collection of images, including original tickets.

Burying the lede?

The NYT has a new article explaining in a decent length how currency-finagling led to a codependent financial relationship between China and the US over the last few years. Yes, that’s all very informative, but as is often the case they slip the best part in towards the end, where most readers will have already given up.

In a glassed-in room in a nondescript office building in Washington, the Treasury conducts nearly daily auctions of billions of dollars’ worth of government bonds. An old Army helmet sits on a shelf: as a lark, Treasury officials have been known to strap it on while they monitor incoming bids.

With a line like that, it’s criminal that the photograph for the article was Secretary Paulson and President Hu wearing boring suits.

I am making a fictitious investment in $43 oil

NYMEX oil prices are currently $42.96. I have decided to place my fictional life savings ($10,000) to buy approx. 233 barrels of oil in the spot market. Let’s see how this fictional fee-and-tax-free portfolio does over time.

Simultaneously, my fictional friend Dork Yenbuyer has decided to place his life savings (also $10,000) in uninvested, no-interest yen cash. At the current rate, that will give him 898,100 yen. Let’s see if the superyen will go even stronger, contrary to today’s weakening of the yen against the euro.

How different, really?

Thomas P. Barnett says the institutionally entrenched bureaucracy in federal agencies is more powerful than the leaders who take over for short terms when we elect new politicians.

There is the assumption that it’s the political appointees who run things or change things or are the real power players in DC. My experience has always been that the real power in DC is the persistent class of senior bureaucrats just below the political level. The appointees typically last about 12-to-18 months, getting up to speed for most of that period and–maybe–having some actual impact if they’re quite focused in their goals. Otherwise they come and go, leaving nary a trace. They may think they run things and we may hold them ultimately responsible, but the truth is they’re more powerless than powerful.

The dominance of the bureaucracy over the elected officials and their direct appointees has been a mainstay of just about all English-language coverage of Japanese politics going back decades.

With discussion that Caroline Kennedy may be appointed to replace Hillary Clinton’s soon-to-be vacated senate, many people (such as in this piece  by Glenn Greenwald or this one by Nicholas Kristof, who also suggests an alternate and more qualified woman) are pointing out that dynastic succession is at an all-time high in American politics. (As an aside, I think I’ll take a policy in the future of never supporting any dynastic candidate. I was disgusted in 2000 when GWB made it to the nomination based on no other qualifications than his father. I was disgusted when Hillary Clinton won her seat based on the political influence of her former president husband, which is one of the reasons that led me to prefer Obama early on.) Joe Biden tried to get his son to replace him, Jesse Jackson Jr. is a leading candidate in Illinois (to be fair, his father wasn’t an office holder so it’s more of a celeb issue than legacy per se) and Greenwald points out that “at least 15 current U.S. Senators — 15 — with immediate family members who previously occupied high elected office.”

In Japan, legacy politicians are such a fact of life that the standard Japanese language Wikipedia template for Diet members actually has a field to list how far back their political dynasty goes. Here’s one example, listing a third-generation legacy.

And finally, the American financial crisis is being repeatedly compared with the Japanese crisis of the 1990s, and any number of sources are pointing to Japan’s response as either a model to follow or a model to avoid like the plague. And overnight, blatant state corporatist control of industrial policy ala MITI has gone from anathema to conventional wisdom.

All of which raises three possibilities.

A) Differences between the American system and the Japanese system have been historically exaggerated.

B) The systems are becoming more similar.

C) Current similarities are being overblown.

Comments?

1905 NYC Subway footage

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This is all kinds of awesome, particularly since it looks basically the same as today. The first 5 minutes is more or less the same, but at 5:00 you can see a station full of people.

Where will all the eikaiwa teachers go?

I have decided to cross-post a comment I made on the “Jason’s Random Thoughts” blog. He wrote a post laying out the decidedly grim options for unemployed eikaiwa teachers who want to find a way to stay in the country by working outside the eikaiwa industry.

Comment by Adamu:

You seem ready to blame the decline of eikaiwa on the financial crisis, but while a decline in personal consumption will not help struggling schools, people began writing Nova’s obituary back in mid-2006. Put very broadly, there is an excess supply of eikaiwa teachers here and demand has clearly peaked and is now falling off. The adjustment of supply to meet the real demand is no doubt painful for a lot of the workers, but at the same time the years of easy money produced some very bloated companies, NOVA probably the worst among them. Now only the best schools will survive but in the end consumers will be better off.

For years, those involved in the Eikaiwa industry took it for granted that the Japanese public was a money-well, always willing and eager to sit in front of a white face and pay him to speak in his native tongue. But the industry has changed and teachers can no longer dip into the well. Having eikaiwa as a free ride may have been a good opportunity and life experience for many, but in the end I don’t think it does people or society at large much of a service. You are paid to act as a human tape recorder without much in the way of skills, and the service itself is about as effective as weight-loss clinics (a good tool for the motivated minority but a ripoff for everyone else). Now that you dont have that job anymore you are seeing just how content-free the job was. You mention experience working in a foreign environment, but I saw no clear description of any real practical experience gained.

This was an interesting essay, but maybe you should have been honest with your readers and written “Am I Prepared” instead of “Are YOU Prepared”. It would have given much more focus to the essay since you offer advice willy-nilly to a group of people that probably has a very diverse array of skills and experience, while you are you and actually “know your strengths” and weaknesses. And as someone who’s obviously very candid, your readers probably have a lot to gain by following your experiences.

You make a fairly thorough assessment of the prospects for a former Eikaiwa teacher who wants to stay in Japan at all costs but have little skills or experience to offer. But the prospects sound REALLY grim. Looking at what is out there, it is obvious that there is FAR greater opportunity to be had back home rather than struggle as a gas station attendant in a foreign country. Far from “taking living in Japan to the next level” these options seem singularly unambitious and really pretty sad. I hope you can aim higher.

First I would like to ask — is being in Japan at all times forever an end in itself? And even if you do want to be in Japan for the long term, how could you ever be satisfied working at the functional equivalent of a janitor just because it’s in a country you like? For the short term you may need to make ends meet, but sweet Jesus you have got to think bigger.

It seems like getting sent home might be a blessing in disguise for you just so you won’t have to slave in jobs that are even more dead-end than teaching English. Now might be a good time to stop and think about your real strengths and weaknesses as a person, not just as a “gaijin.” And besides, being away from Japan geographically doesn’t necessarily mean cutting ties altogether. The Japanese Internet is huge and allows you to access basically the full spectrum of culture and discourse. While you are off pursuing self-development you can keep track of the Asahi or even the Family Mart website if that’s your thing.

On his blog, Debito has posted his advice from 2001 and it still basically holds, though the examples could be updated. Ken Worsley from Japan Economy News is an interesting case of someone who turned from English teaching to entrepreneurship, but the clear thing distinguishing him from many is that he’s quite talented. There just is no escaping that.

It is interesting to see that positions like convenience store clerk, gas station attendant, and even electronics salesman are now open to foreigners, even American-looking white guys. That phenomenon was all but non-existent seven years ago.

Nice to see you mentioned translation, which is a much more viable option for the people you are apparently writing for (it also happens to the job I do “in a regular office building”). If your language skills are tight enough you can make decent money as a translator, even if you just do it freelance (though IMO 2-kyu is pretty worthless. You need much better than 1kyu to be successful). Employment agencies like Tempstaff can help you with details of what you need to do to land that kind of work. Of course, the driver of translation demand is somewhat connected to that of eikaiwa — it depends on Japanese people having sub-standard English skills. If somehow the Japanese education system gets it right, the demand for translation might fall as competition among translators rises.

I also have to seriously doubt whether “hundreds of thousands” of people have really been fired from eikaiwa schools and face the decision of whether to stay or go. Government statistics seem to show that the number of teachers at private-sector language schools peaked at 15,000 or so, and the numbers now are somewhere just under 10,000. NOVA only employed 4000 teachers and it once boasted that it was the biggest employer of foreign nationals in the private sector. Add to that number the JET program, which accepts about 5,000 people each year, meaning that at any given time there might be as many as 20,000 on JET contracts (though in reality it is probably far less). Then there are the local school district ALT programs and unregistered English teachers/schools, but I don’t see the number topping 100,000. If you want to talk six figures, maybe it would be more accurate to say the decline of the eikaiwa industry has forced hundreds of thousands worldwide to reconsider even attempting a career teaching English in Japan, not to mention future generations for whom it will be basically out of the question.