hogmartin posted:

I've sat jury duty in two cases and not once was I sworn in, and pretty much we were generally encouraged not to say a drat thing (aside from answering selection questions). Just sit in the box and listen to both sides. Are there jurisdictions where jurors are sworn in on a bible?

Ytlaya posted:

Do jury members even have to do that? I was on a jury for an attempted murder case and never had to be sworn in. And why would I have had to, since it's not like the jury is testifying?

Fathis Munk posted:

Zamboni_Rodeo posted:

And nobody applauded.

Ytlaya posted:

Do jury members even have to do that? I was on a jury for an attempted murder case and never had to be sworn in. And why would I have had to, since it's not like the jury is testifying?

Aerox posted:

No, the jury is sworn in all at once verbally by all simultaneously raising their hand because no one has time to administer 14 separate individual oaths on a bible.

sweeperbravo posted:

b-b-but my pearl clutching religious lady who's prone to fainting????!??!?

Fathis Munk posted:

goose willis posted:

Catberry posted:

made the rounds

yeah I eat rear end posted:

The woke baby/toddler stories are like the lowest of the low effort stdh's people make up. If you have any recent moms on facebook you'll see that kind of poo poo all the time. It's the next step in obnoxious facebook posting-about-your-kid - first phase is all poop talk and whining about not getting enough sleep, then once they can talk it's their time to show off how well they raised little Kaydyn or Brianthoni so they make up stories like that.

The worst example on my feed is a herbalife mom and every week or so there's another post about her "Herbababy" and how sweet she was to a (poor/black/homeless...pick one or any combination) person and how everyone started crying and her Faith In Humanity has been restored etc, always some story where she just doesn't "get" racism or sexism and laments about the state of society these days. By the way, our doctor said she was by far the healthiest child he's seen in years. Ask me to find out how! #herbalife #herbababy #hashtags.

Rahonavis posted:

From pages ago but what in the world is Herbalife?

Rahonavis posted:

From pages ago but what in the world is Herbalife?

https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/67ns0e/tifu_by_going_to_a_dive_bar/ posted:

TIFU by thinking things were getting kinky
This happened about a month ago…
I was out at this dive/pool bar close to where I live with friends. Night was going well, drinks were flowing, and I ended up being in the position to take this girl home. Now, I didn’t want to take her back to mine because she wasn’t really from the top drawer and I knew I would be dealing with other things such as stressing about how she would get home. Call it anxiety but I pushed to go to hers. She said that we couldn’t either.
Then I get this idea of booking into one of those sleazy hotels in the area for a few hours, with my friend coming to fetch me after an hour. To which she agreed. I left my phone and all my valuables with my friend, he agreed to come get me in an hour, and off we went. I only had cash on me.
You may be asking why…
Well, there were red flags and things certainly seemed off but I wasn’t thinking with my real brain.
We get to the hotel, things are getting a bit hot and to my surprise she pulls out handcuffs. I just thought she was being kinky so I went with it. They were fluffy and pink, not standard police issue handcuffs so all I thought was that I had hit the jackpot, sorta, and would have a story to tell.
She gets on top of me and handcuffs my one hand to the bed and then before I know it she gets off, takes the money I had left and all of my clothes and leaves.
So there I am pretty flabbergasted to say the least thinking wtf just happened and now I’m stressing about how the gently caress I am going to get out of this situation. According to my friend he arrived after an hour, asked the receptionist if he had seen us come in and he says yes but only the woman left. He must have been thinking I’ve been murdered and had my organs harvested because he manages to get access to my room only to find me there stark naked handcuffed to the bed.
The handcuffs are actually quite flimsy and we manage to break them without destroying the bed. He offers me his shirt to cover what dignity I had left and we leave. I didn’t even look up to see the receptionist’s face because I was still in a state of shock, slightly impressed at how easily she pulled the whole con off throughout the entire night.
gently caress knows what would have happened if she came back to mine.
TL;DR: Don’t pick up suspiciously flirty ladies in dive bars

life is killing me posted:

Without looking it up, I believe it's an herbal supplement in the vein of either pills or shakes/smoothies, and is, I think, customer sold, sort of like Mary Kay or those stupid energy bracelets from a few years back that claimed to balance your magnetic field and make you stronger and healthier. I'm sure herbalife claims the same, which puts it into STDH territory by itself, apart from the fact that other poster mentioned it in the STDH thread.

e: As with most things that are "customer sold," it just means that those "businesses" lack a product they can stand behind enough to actually sell it themselves, so must resort to getting their customers to do the work for them so it's harder to prove their product is full of poo poo

flosofl posted:

It's the company that Billionaire Bill Ackerman is trying to drive into the ground.

It's a real weird story, he has 9% of his company in a long term short position on direct shares. He's taken out full pages ads building the case on how they are a pyramid scheme. He got the FTC to investigate which resulted in a $200M fine in restitution to all the low-level "earners" Herbalife has scammed.(still only amounts to 10% of what these people lost). He's made a documentary about how they use high pressure techniques to target the Hispanic population, knowing they usually are reluctant to engage with the legal system to redress grievances. He feuded in public with Carl Ichann (who is a bullish supporter of Herbalife).

But then again, he stands to make an enormous amount of money if he destroys Herbalife. While he's said any personal profit will be donated to a victim's charity, his firms customers will still make out like bandits. He's now got a bunch of investigations going on around his activity when a shareholder lawsuit failed to prove Herbalife was a pyramid scheme. He supported Bloomberg's run for the Presidency, but after Trump was elected he felt confident in Trump's ability.

Some people swear he's an altruist who is morally offended that Herbalife exists, while others just say he's manipulating public opinion to drive the stock into the basement. As most things in real-life, it's probably mix of the two and even Ackerman probably can't say where one ends and the other begins.

life is killing me posted:

My question is, how is it that hard to prove it's a pyramid scheme?

They survive off getting their customers to hock their poo poo so all they have to do is make an ineffective product that preys on people who think non-FDA-approved supplements actually do anything. But the real believers are the ones selling it, so they can go out and convince their mother that all she has to do to stay healthy is take Herbalife every day or drink a shake with no nutritional value or wear a bracelet. At the end of the day they are all just things that can't be accurately demonstrated, so they "work" because people believe, or want to believe they do.

Their whole shtick is based on the premise of, "we can't prove it works, but you can't prove it doesn't, sell our poo poo so we don't have to on the promise of a few bucks."

But the product doing or not doing what they claim is irrelevant to pyramid schemes. It's all just them getting their customers to be their underpaid, unofficial employees like all MLM.

The only difference between that poo poo and things like Mary Kay or Cabi (my wife is incredibly into Cabi) is that the latter offer incentives on their products based on what they sell. You can get a bunch of middle-aged women into a Mary Kay party, and you can get a bunch of women into a Cabi party. You can see makeup and you can see clothes. Herbalife and their ilk can't prove poo poo, but somehow they survive on a demographic of bored housewives who treat the products like a religion and defend them to the death.

E: the only good thing about Cabi and Mary Kay aside from making my wife look and feel pretty and happy, is the fact that when she hosts parties I get kicked out of the house for a few hours

Samizdata posted:

Yeah, but I think the scammiest part is, as I have read it, is that you really make little or no money from actual sales. From what I have read (And remember from my ex-wife's time in Mary Kay, IRRC) you only REALLY make the money with your "downline" or the people you recruit into the company, and, in some companies, manage supplying to. And your "upline" makes their money of you and yours and so on and so on...

yeah I eat rear end posted:

Wasn't that reddit thing basically a Seinfeld episode?

Zipperelli. posted:

So, if it's widely known what MLMs are, and how much of a scam they are, why do people still buy into that garbage?

I've seen otherwise intelligent people totally ruined by Advocare and ItWorks!, and it's frustrating, because I tell them right to their face that they're an idiot, but they all swore they'd be driving around in a Benz, making thousands of dollars a week, "just wait and see!"

So why do people still fall for these scams?

Zipperelli. posted:

So, if it's widely known what MLMs are, and how much of a scam they are, why do people still buy into that garbage?

I've seen otherwise intelligent people totally ruined by Advocare and ItWorks!, and it's frustrating, because I tell them right to their face that they're an idiot, but they all swore they'd be driving around in a Benz, making thousands of dollars a week, "just wait and see!"

So why do people still fall for these scams?

Zipperelli. posted:

I mean, I've shown someone in black and white how Advocare is a scam, and instead of saying "oh poo poo" and cutting their losses, they just dig their heels in deeper about how much money they can potentially make.

SunkCostFallacy.txt I guess

Verisimilidude posted:

life is killing me posted:

Not only did I not react like a normal person by waking up to a sound, but I'm also so tired I said a whole sentence

Zipperelli. posted:

I mean, I've shown someone in black and white how Advocare is a scam, and instead of saying "oh poo poo" and cutting their losses, they just dig their heels in deeper about how much money they can potentially make.

SunkCostFallacy.txt I guess