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A former waitress at my work was in a 4 year relationship with a guy who was grossing 1-2 thousand ish a month (so net average net would have been $1000 AUD) drop shipping. Instead of expanding his revenue by scamming more people, he was using that money (and some of his day job money) to buy view and comment bots for his YT and Instagram videos on how anyone can be an entrepreneur while plugging his Patreon (or Ko-Fi? Something like that, I sort of zone out when he talked). He also has lifestyle advice, surprsingly. Very early on the Tesla bandwagon in Australia. In the end he was making negative money from the "side gigs" because he would renta Maserati or an Air Bed and Breakfast by the ocean or some dumb shit like that for YT thumbnails and Instagram stories/posts. She estimated he was getting 22k views on average, of which around 20k was botted.

He genuinely thought he was destined to be a slightly less shitty Andrew Tate combined with Jeff Bezos. He was like "nah if I had what Tate has, I wouldn't be so disrespectful to women" owing to being the only son and youngest child overall to a single mother, completely missing the part where a core part of Tate's audience thrives on the hardcore misogyny. He thought if Bezos gave investing and lifestyle advice people would like him more but he's keeping it a secret. Like he didn't understand that Tate was a grifter whilst attempting to launch a career as a diet grifter. He was missing the part where grifters will say things they don't actually mean or don't care about for more money.

It's grifts all the way down.

For every successful dropshipper there are hundreds of failing dropshippers. It’s become a MLL scheme to oversell the success of dropshipping in order to earn more money ‘coaching’ people who get sold on the lie and want to learn how to do it. It’s become another flavour of the trading industry.

These parasites resell cheap items from China at 10x the value and make millions

I mean, that's pretty much all of american retail

To scam an american is to be glorious, scam away

I know exactly how you feel. You look at how little work it is to be a monster who preys on the weak and try to figure out if there's maybe weak monsters to prey on or something less evil.

Then you realize you don't have it in you to scam anyone and go to work the next day

I engage in unethical behavior by effectively scamming people myself. I moralize about it often and don't feel like a great person but at the end of the day all I'm doing is a microcosm of what the worst of the worst people are doing, and the difference it makes for me is being able to live an average and comfortable existence.

FWIW, my scheme is using LLMs to pump out right-wing conspiracy slop for publishing on Amazon. Each book makes cents to dollars but you push enough stuff out (especially about relevant topics) and you get a steady stream of income. I prefer this to materially cheating someone out of a product because the buyer was just going to buy some other slop anyway.

Can these people even be considered proletarians?