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Good. I hope he is successful in taking them down. I know too many people who've wasted $$ falling prey to these MLM scams.

I know an emergency room physician who stopped working as an MD to sell Arbonne products (another MLM like herbalife that sells makeup and diet shakes) after getting roped into it by a nurse we worked with. Now she is in the nurse's "downline." Utter waste of an education.




When my wife and I were under severe financial pressure in the early years of our marriage, her father spent several hours subjecting us (well, her in particular) to an intense sales pitch about how much money we'd make selling Melaleuca (https://www.melaleuca.com), a MLM he was involved with.

My wife was insisting we sign his contracts, because it would be so easy to recruit only X people (I think it was 3 or 5, I can't quite remember) where X was the minimum number of recruits needed for you to earn your "passive income" from their sales.

I had to take her aside, and write a short Python program to show that after seven generations of recruitment, the entirety of our country would be selling Melaleuca to each other.

I still bear a grudge against her Dad for targeting us during a very vulnerable time.


> I had to take her aside, and write a short Python program to show that after seven generations of recruitment, the entirety of our country would be selling Melaleuca to each other.

    Layer 1 -> 1 person
    Layer 2 -> 5 people (6 total)
    Layer 3 -> 25 people (31 total)
    ...
    Layer N -> 5 ** (N-1) people ((5 ** N - 1 ) / 4 total)
    ...
    Layer 7 -> 15625 people (19531 total)
Ahoy, Cook Islander! [0]

Solving for the fanout to match the population of my Special Administrative Region [0] in 7 generations :

    (Fanout ** 6 - 1) / (Fanout - 1) = 7298600
    Fanout ~= 23.380354
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...


Note that I actually solved the fanout to reach the whole Hong Kong population for 6 generations, not 7. Oops.


A python program is kind of overkill for this.


It's a very easy Python script to write, and I wanted her to see the numbers get larger and larger.


that really depends on how you're showing the data. if you wanted to make it visual then a python program could be ideal.




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