https://mobile.twitter.com/jherrerx/status/16123398697071083...
Men are under extreme environmental pressures to be successful providers. Perhaps it's why they suffer the highest suicide rates. Equating their eagerness to provide for loved ones with susceptibility (i.e. stupidity) is misguided.
These factories have never done too well for themselves. There's a reason they never achieve "escape velocity" into having brand recognition. Even before giant online dollar stores, their production (injection molding not-very-detailed plastic parts, etc) has always been a commodity; whoever's ordering runs of 10000 Alf stress-balls or what-have-you could swap Factory A out for Factory B at the drop of a hat. (And this is why you never hear of factories in China with genuinely good working conditions; the margins are too low for paying a living wage to be sustainable for the employer. And yes, this does imply that the businesses themselves shouldn't exist.)
Also, while AliExpress/Wish/etc do make a profit, they do so on the back of a market distortion — the Universal Postal Union's special rates+tarriffs exception for ePackets shipped from China. Remove that, and such companies would collapse overnight.
Something being an MLM, implies that the original producer of the product — either literally the factory, or the business that ordered the product from the factory as a work-for-hire to then begin marketing it — is the root node in that tree of reselling, and so is the one getting the most rich, since everyone else in the tree has part of their profits flowing back to them.
If a middle-man between the producer and consumer is getting richer than the producer is, then you're not looking at an MLM. You might be looking at some other kind of immoral market manipulation, but it's not specifically an MLM per se.
Also, I think some of this is somewhat outdated: wages in China have risen, and the really low-quality and low-wage manufacturing has started to migrate to SE Asia.
It's not quite the same as an MLM because the teacher doesn't get continuous income off the people they recruit after they finish the class, but it is like an MLM in the sense that the people recruiting people to their class are the only people making any money. And they tend to create "levels" of classes, etc to keep people paying.
MLM requires the mid tier to aggressively re-sell it down the line. Which is where the worst part comes from.
… otherwise it’s just sparkling scam? ;)
He also calls Trump and the Proud Boys MLM schemes, which shows he's using some definition completely different to the normal one. Probably just wanted to say "stupid people".