Monday, August 28, 2006

Life is a scam

What can you do? Most of life is really one form of scam or another. The biggest scams are being uncovered as scientists peel away the layers of reality to reveal that nothing is really as firm as we believe them to be. A piece of wood may look solid enough so that if one were to be hit in the head with it, some form of damage would be inflicted on skin of the head if not fracturing the skull itself. On the sub-atomic level, the atoms that comprise that piece of wood have another kind of reality. An atom is composed of a nucleus and orbiting electrons. The nucleus and the electrons never meet such that it might as well be infinite space that separates them This ghostlike quality of an atom is a far cry from the solid manifestation of a bunch of atoms that comprise a piece of wood that is capable of inflicting great damage to a head or a portion of the human body that comes in contact with it as when a wooden bat is swung to strike a man. A neutrino on the other hand, is a particle so tiny that it would pass through most anything as though nothing exists except itself

One of the biggest scams in human history is the belief that the world is flat. Sailors and mariners would be afraid to stray from charted waters for fear of falling off the edge of the world. Ancient maps would say, "here be dragons" to denote parts of the world which people know nothing about.

Christopher Columbus in his quest to find treasures for his king by charting a route to the fabled land of India mistakenly thought that the Indies was India hence the name and the indelible appellation of native Americans as Indians.The fiction of Heven and Hell is one of the biggest scams perpetrated on gullible Christians who swallow hook line and sinker anything professed by Church Fathers and Evangelists who know how to write and orate better than to use their reason.

Galileo Galilei was a genius who fell victim to the ignorance of the Church Fathers who found his notion of the Heliocentric System contrary to the Religious belief that the sun revolved around the earth. He spent his life in house arrest so to speak unable to share his wisdom and knowledge for the good of humanity simply because his theory challenged popular Christian belief.

Even today, the general population is held captive by the ignorance of so-called leaders who foist their own brand of authoritarianism in the name of Democracy and freedom and economic progress. Proponents of terrorism also promote the fiction of a holy war on clueless adolescents and young people who feel dispossessed and hopelesss enough to end their own lives along with their intended victims by a tragic act of self-annihilation.

Life is a scam and scams are not limited to economic scams perpetrated in the Internet by unscrupulous marketers who prey on the naive desire of people to make money online. Every day there is a new scam being concocted by people and every day there are people falling victim to these scams. The Romans in their legalistic wisdom knew that scams were difficult to prevent so they merely decreed: Caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware.
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posted by webnight at 12:48 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

There's a sucker born every minute

Was it P.T. Barnum, the famous circus impressario who said, "There's a sucker born every minute"? This astute observation underlies a very basic fact that powers commerce which is: Information. A very simple example will suffice to make my point. Let us say a product is selling in a warehouse for $1 and very few people know about it. An enterprising man would canvass the people he knows to see if they would buy that product and at what price. If he could find 10 people to buy the product at $5, he might go back to that warehouse and buy 20 items. He knows something which the warehouse owner doesn't know which are the people who would buy the product and he also knows something which the people who want to buy the product do not know which is where to buy the product at a lower price. The enterprising businessman has leveraged his knowledge or information to make profits.

This scenario is all very good business practice and most businesses are conducted in this manner. In fact, this is the whole basis for International Trade. In times past, the explorer who could find a way to the East which is where spices were plentiful could create an empire. The tiny island of Britain became a vast, powerful empire due to her enterprising subjects who brought Eastern products to Europe which had an unending appetite for Oriental goodies.

All of this is very good and the activities of businessman provide the goods which satisfy men's wants. There is however, a different kind of businessman or enterpreneur, one who exploits ignorance or curiousity or need utilizing means which are less than honest. A circus or a carnival is a prime example of this type of enterpreneur who ply their trade in an overtly legal manner: they take your money from under your nose and there is nothing you can do about it because you gave that money willingly. In simple words, you were suckered into it.

This brings us to the question of products or schemes of questionable nature. We are all aware of the infamous Pyramid scheme where you are enticed to invest sums of money for out-of-this-world profits. A skeptical man is easily duped by initially receiving double the amount of what he put in, all in a matter of days. He begins to suspect that this smooth operator might have a real money machine and greed reels him into the scam. Of course, it is quite easy to double a small sum of money. The real winner in this game is the smooth operator who runs away with vast sums of your money once you let him have his hands on it.

There are scams and there are suckers and the world goes on whirling in space as the song goes.
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posted by webnight at 9:28 PM 0 comments