As a teenager growing up in Ontario, I always envied the kids who spent their summers tree planting; they’d come back from the bush in September, insect-chewed and leathery, with new muscle, incredible stories, thousands of dollars, and a glow imparted by the knowledge that they’d made a new forest with their own blistered hands.
I was too unathletic to follow them into the bush, but I spent my summers doing my bit, ringing doorbells for Greenpeace to get my neighbours fired up about the Canadian pulp-and-paper industry, which wasn’t merely clear-cutting our old-growth forests – it was also poisoning the Great Lakes system with PCBs, threatening us all.
At the time, I thought of tree-planting as a small victory – sure, our homegrown, rapacious, extractive industry was able to pollute with impunity, but at least the government had reined them in on forests, forcing them to pay my pals to spend their summers replacing the forests they’d fed into their mills.
I was wrong. Last summer’s Canadian wildfires blanketed the whole east coast and midwest in choking smoke as millions of trees burned and millions of tons of CO2 were sent into the atmosphere. Those wildfires weren’t just an effect of the climate emergency: they were made far worse by all those trees planted by my pals in the eighties and nineties.
Writing in the New York Times, novelist Claire Cameron describes her own teen years working in the bush, planting row after row of black spruces, precisely spaced at six-foot intervals:
Cameron’s summer job was funded by the logging industry, whose self-pegulated, self-assigned “penalty” for clearcutting diverse forests of spruce, pine and aspen was to pay teenagers to create a tree farm, at nine cents per sapling (minus camp costs).
Black spruces are made to burn, filled with flammable sap and equipped with resin-filled cones that rely on fire, only opening and dropping seeds when they’re heated. They’re so flammable that firefighters call them “gas on a stick.”
PSA, as we enter a recession (or are already in one, depending on who you ask)…
now is NOT the time to join a multilevel marketing business.
it’s never the time (because they’re pyramid schemes) but now is ESPECIALLY not the time, and they’re gonna be out in full force trying to recruit people, especially if we start seeing widespread lay offs
If someone wants to offer you a “job opportunity” but won’t tell you the name of the company, RUN
if a company requires you to purchase a starter kit, FUCKING RUN
if someone invites you to an “opportunity call” or otherwise pitches this “opportunity” to you, and it’s just a whole bunch of love-bombing and motivational speaking, RUN
if you cannot “rank up” in the company without recruiting more people to your team (aka downline), RUN
if you already joined one, cut your losses and quit now. seriously
if your friends/family join them, do not buy from them, even if it’s just to support them… buying from people who join MLMs gives them false confidence that they will succeed, and it keeps them in longer, and ultimately they will lose more money, and probably damage a lot of their relationships along the way
99% of people either make no money, or worse, LOSE money, in multilevel marketing. They’re scams and commercial cults and the “recession proof industry” marketing campaigns are already well underway, especially in MLMs that are currently on the brink of collapse (like Monat)
don’t be fooled. there is no opportunity. it’s not a job. it’s a scam
(also, watch out for their alternate names… network marketing and social selling are just synonyms for multilevel marketing.)
Eta: if you’re not sure if a company is an MLM, Google it. There’s an entire database online for this. Search “is [X] an mlm” and if it is, you’ll find a wealth of information about how their scams work.
thank you for coming to my ted talk
Know who you are dealing with. If they won’t give you a straight answer, you can’t trust them.
If a stranger DMs you asking you to be a partner and wants you to represent their brand, to be their partner or collaborator, don’t be flattered. If you don’t know or use their product, why are they asking you?
Are you a social media influencer with tens of thousands of followers? If you are, are you willing to throw it all away by risking your hard earned reputation promoting a scam? At the very least a reputable company will offer you a contract and pay you in money, not empty promises or free samples.
Do you have 50 or even hundreds of people in your contact list? Maybe even a few thousand you’ve attracted with your wit, creativity or humour? Don’t sacrifice your reputation with family, friends and contacts promoting a scam.
It’s one thing to tell your friends about a good product you like, and another to be suckered into shilling for fly by night matchstick men, helping them take advantage of people who trust you.
Sometimes a company you deal with, or one selling things you are already posting about, will approach you and offer samples they want you to test and review for your social network. This is not the same thing as a scam, but if you agree you’ll find yourself working hard for those “free” samples. If it takes you hours to write a review of a ten dollar product, are you really ahead of the game? Maybe, maybe not. Only you can decide.
Unlike the Nigerian Scams that try to con people out of money by dangling a large mysterious financial windfall that the grifter will send after you give them a wad of cash, a “Phishing” attack uses bait to hook people, so they can get your personal information for Identity Fraud.
One things you can do to protect yourself when getting email that looks legitimate but that asks you to do something you shouldn’t ~ like giving personal information to a stranger ~ is to hover your cursor over the link you are supposed to click. If the text of the link is different than the actual link, don’t do it.
Phishing attacks pretend to come from someone we trust. In Canada we pay our taxes to the Canada Revenue Service, so when a Canadian gets an email from them we pay attention. Thiis is a phishing email I received that pretends to be from CRA:
*Claim Your Tax Refund Online*
We identified an error in the calculation of your tax from the last payment, amounting to $ 146.00. In order for us to return the excess payment, you need to create a Tax Gateway account after which the funds will be credited to your specified bank account.
Please click “Get Started” below to claim your refund:
Get Started <http://www.cunningruse.com/.tax/>
We are here to ensure the correct tax is paid at the right time, whether this relates to payment of taxes received by the department or entitlement to benefits paid.
An email from the Canada Revenue Agency is likely to make us a little nervous, because most of us will wonder what we have done wrong on our tax return. But when we read this, we discover it isn’t anything terrible, but an error in our favor which brings welcome relief. The amount owing isn’t big enough to look fishy, just a small correction.
The crooks who sent this hope our little bit of fear followed by relief will cloud our judgement, so we will click on the link that will take us to a place where they can extract our personal information. After all, we will be giving the information to the government.
The “Get Started” link actually will send you to a different web page… which hovering reveals leads to www Cunning Ruse dot com.
If your bank, or the government, or any reputable retailer wants your personal information, they will not ask for it through email, because email is not safe, private or secure. Anyone who asks for your personal information in unencrypted email is either foolish or a setting you up for a scam.
ALT
