3 ms·

> There's no payoff for a pyramid scheme. They just pile money somewhere, without actually doing anything with it. Agreed, the stock market is not a pyramid s

> There's no payoff for a pyramid scheme. They just pile money somewhere, without actually doing anything with it. Agreed, the stock market is not a pyramid scheme. I only used pyramid scheme as an example for a scammer’s rhetoric. However it still looks like a scam to me (albeit not as bad of a scam as the average pyramid scheme is). Having worked for a company which increased in share prices exponentially while I worked there on minimum wage, I cannot agree with the statement that the shareholder/worker relationship made “everyone who participated richer”. The average worker certainly didn’t. The only people that got richer were the shareholders (and perhaps some contractors). I experienced this exponential growth as a scam. The value of my work was being extracted into rich people’s pockets. See the stock market might look to an outsider as an arrangement where everyone benefits, but to a worker it always looks like a scam. Especially when you consider an alternate arrangement where the shareholder returns control of the profits of the company back to the workers after they’ve made up the money they gave originally to the business plus some fees and interest. The very fact that the shareholders keep control even after they’ve made their fare share of the profits, multiple times over, is what makes this look like a scam in the eyes of the workers.

dragontamer 6y ago
Exponential growth is promised to investors, to entice investors into giving money to a company. Sometimes, shares and options are offered to workers (very common in SV), but honestly I'd probably take the cash most of the time. The promise of future money is best left for rich folk who can afford to lose that pile of money. For workers like me (and probably you), the cash deal is better. If you disagree, feel free to work for a myriad of startups who are offering stock instead of cash. But yeah, its an option. Not an option I'd personally bet on... but if you really wanted to be rewarded in shares instead of money, the opportunity for that is all over the place.

dragontamer 6y ago

Exponential growth is promised to investors, to entice investors into giving money to a company. Sometimes, shares and options are offered to workers (very common in SV), but honestly I'd probably take the cash most of the time. The promise of future money is best left for rich folk who can afford to lose that pile of money. For workers like me (and probably you), the cash deal is better. If you disagree, feel free to work for a myriad of startups who are offering stock instead of cash. But yeah, its an option. Not an option I'd personally bet on... but if you really wanted to be rewarded in shares instead of money, the opportunity for that is all over the place.