sparkyb

The headline says 100 times more accurate than Kinect, but I don’t believe it. It has a much more limited range than Kinect which gives it smaller spatial resolution within that space than Kinect has, but Kinect would be able to discern smaller details with its same amount of resolution too if it were focused on as small an area. I believe Micrsoft has even said that Kinect could have detected fingers (which it doesn’t currently) if it wasn’t also tracking your whole body. They solve two different problems and can’t directly be compared. Now when you have a motion control system that has the range of Kinect (my whole living room) with the spatial resolution of this thing (.01 mm) then I’ll get excited.

Selling a book about how to make money on the internet or pick up girls isn’t a promise of success. Sure they may say “if you buy this book you’ll earn $10,000 a week!” but I think most people know a book is just a book and not a magic bullet. If you buy a book for like $50, and you get a book and its pages aren’t blank, then you got what you paid for. I’ve bought books before that weren’t scams that still sucked. Even if it is intentional, selling crap is a far cry from the more expensive and less delivered on promises that follow.

Also, it seems to me like it is mainly these 2nd level, boiler room, guys that are the real scam. The level 1 guys who are selling these e-books and videos and stuff seems mostly straightforward, and I’d say very sleazy but not inherently fraudulent. They have a real product even if it is mostly useless and they use exaggerated claims and shady marketing tactics to sell it. At least when you’re talking about the guys like the pick-up artists or the self-help gurus I get it why some might think there’s real info in there even if it isn’t going to be that helpful or non-obvious to most people — it’s not that expensive and you mostly get what you pay for. And while the other half of their job, selling your contact info to the boiler room guys, does make them complicit in the larger scam, I don’t think this is truly evil because being on the scammer’s mailing lists by itself doesn’t cost anything but a little annoyance if you don’t fall for their pitches.

I think this is an excellent piece of investigative journalism, but there’s one thing I still don’t understand. What is the “make money on the internet” plan they claim to sell? Does “Internet Marketing” only describe what the scammers do, or is it like a pyramid scheme where that’s also the business they are claiming their marks can buy their way into?

I know that the classic pyramid scheme (aka multi-level marketing) often involves having some kind of junk product you sell, but the real money comes from recruiting more people to be below you on the pyramid. The people on the bottom get screwed because you really can’t make money just selling the products, especially if there’s some kind of buy-in cost. All the money comes from the aggregate buy-in costs and sales trickling up from many people below you. So is this Internet Marketing thing just a variant of that with those e-books as the product?

What I gather from the article is that there’s really just 2 levels to this thing: the level 1 guys who market and sell e-books and videos and stuff and also harvest contact info to sell to the level 2 guys, and then the level 2 guys who purport to sell their victims a money-making internet business. But what is that business? Is it basically the job of level 1 internet marketer selling e-books and sitting below the level 2 guy on this not-quite-pyramid recruiting new victims? If that’s the case, do they provide you with the e-books to sell, or just help with the website and marketing tips for products you have to come up with on your own? Do these marketees ever successfully set up website and become marketers (is that how any of the level 1 guys got started?) or is it a 100% false promise with 0% chance of actually getting in on the business?