Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2010 August 2

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August 2

MLM Network Marketing

Hello and have a nice day,

There is a company which is start to be a well known company and has many people shoping from it. its a MLM Network Marketing Company called: Quest Net, their website is: www.qnet.net

This company give commissions for people who buy products from it and bring customers. (its Network Marketing)

Is this company true? can we trust this company? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.150.25.218 (talk) 05:35, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Hm. You may want to look into information on the company at reliable consumer protection groups or similar, depending on where you live, there is likely an agency like the Better Business Bureau which tracks the quality of businesses. Caveat emptor is always good advice when dealing with any business, but if you want to look into the trustworthiness of a business, you should start with the BBB or equivalent organization for where the business is located. --Jayron32 05:41, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

It appears to be a pyramid scheme. Looie496 (talk) 05:52, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Actually we have an even better article, Multi-level marketing. Looie496 (talk) 06:02, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

QuestNet used to be called 'GoldQuest' and 'GoldNet' - both of which were banned in so many countries that they had to restart the company with a new name. Here is a news report about what QuestNet is doing in Afghanistan.

MLM companies don't make their money from selling product - they make it from recruiting more and more layers of 'associates' who pay to get into the network and who are encouraged to earn more by recruiting associates than they do by selling product. The end-product is generally a flimsey front to avoid them being declared 'pyramid schemes' - which are illegal in most countries. The problem is that when they enter the market, they can recruit fast and make money quickly - but the number of people they can recruit soon saturates and the scheme collapses. If you are high up in the 'chain' in a new market, you can make money - and those are the people whose testimonials you read in their glossy adverts. The more common experience is for someone to get invited into the scheme by a friend or neighbor who is trying to be in a position of earning money from the people he or she recruits. You pay to buy your initial stock of 'product' - and are encouraged to recruit more people to do the actual selling for you - but any people you do manage to recruit are in turn encouraged to work on getting people to work for them rather than actually selling product...and so on down the chain.

Of course, eventually, every sufficiently gullible friend and neighbor is already pulled into the scheme and the only way for anyone to make money is to actually sell product. This is where the problem hits...how do you sell this stuff? It's generally overpriced because the company is supporting a gajillion layers of "management" - every penny of what you spend on your product is shared up the chain through half a dozen to a dozen 'upstream' people. What's worse, who are you going to sell it to? All of your friends and neighbors are either trying to sell the exact same product as you - or are smart enough to know it's a scam and not touch the stuff. So you have to go door-to-door - literally knocking on people's doors trying to sell them stuff. Well, if you'd known at the outset that this is actually the way to make money - you'd have done better to go to some bulk-buy warehouse, buy your product directly from them (without the half-dozen middle-men taking a cut) and take all of the profits yourself. Of course nobody wants to do that because it's a miserable way to make money - but they are all taken in by the idea of recruiting more people to do the work for you so you can just sit back and rake in THEIR earnings. It's a ridiculous concept.

I read somewhere that 95% of the products of MLM companies are eventually used by the down-stream 'associates' and never sold to people outside of the network at all. One survey showed that only 0.1% (one person in a thousand) ever turns a profit from working for an MLM! I strongly encourage you to avoid any and all MLM's...they skate as close to the legal boundaries of being labelled an illegal pyramid scheme as they can...and many of them go beyond that - raking up as much cash as they can before being declared illegal - and starting up again with another new name. SteveBaker (talk) 13:29, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Airey Neave, in which fort/camp was he held?

Dear Sirs, I would like to know what number fort in Thorn, Poland, which was part of Stalag Airey Neave was taken to after his capture in France 1941. He had a high position at the Nuremburg War Crime trials after the WW2. I was captured in Greece and was transported to Fort 15 in Thorn(Torun.)He eventually escaped successfully from Colditz in 1942. I have just read his book "They have their Exits" —Preceding unsigned comment added by 110.175.72.165 (talk) 06:58, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

I have reformatted this question in its own section. If you read the article on Airey Neave it tells you that it was Stalag XX-A. Naturally WP has an article about it! Richard Avery (talk) 07:33, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Describing irregular job in the CV

How do you describe an irregular job pattern in your CV? Like being a private tutor every now and then for three years? If you write 3 years as a private tutor, it seems like a full-time job.--Mr.K. (talk) 16:42, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

"Private tutor (part-time)" would seem sufficient to me. The real trick about CVs is to not be misleading. If you were a private tutor once for 5 minutes 3 years ago, and once for 5 minutes today, you wouldn't want to put the thing on the resume at all, presumably. But if you are trying to indicate that on-and-off you've done it, putting something like "part-time" in parentheses after the job description is probably enough. If they want to know more, they'll ask. --Mr.98 (talk) 17:26, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

"Part-time" suggests you did it every week, but less than 35 hours a week. That's different from lots of temporary jobs. --Tango (talk) 18:00, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Eh, I think it gets the general gist across. I doubt they care whether it was an every-week sort of thing. If it was once or twice, then I would avoid it, but if it's the kind of thing you do for a few months here and there every year, I don't think "part time" would really be all that much of an exaggeration. If they care about details, they'll ask. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:16, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

It depends on the details. If it was a few instances of a few months at a time, then you could just list the periods (eg. "May 2004-August 2004, December 2004-April 2005, July 2005-September 2005"). If it was lots of shorter periods, then you could say something like "(Part-time) Private tutor for various periods totalling 4 months between 2003 and 2006". Remember, a CV doesn't need to be very detailed. It's a summary of your experience and qualification designed to get you an interview. The details come in the interview stage. --Tango (talk) 18:00, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

You probably already have on your CV chronologically ordered information about your education and possibly some previous employment. Consider mentioning your irregular tutoring under a separate heading such as "Other work experience". Cuddlyable3 (talk) 18:05, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

If you were self-employed, as many tutors are, you could simply write "self-employed from year x to now" if it ended or "from year x to year y". —Preceding unsigned comment added by Quest09 (talk • contribs) 18:32, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

That's rather misleading. You don't want to get an interview and then have them realise you haven't been entirely honest and reject you for that even though you would be good at the job. --Tango (talk) 18:59, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Describe it as Casual work? AlmostReadytoFly (talk) 09:19, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Or as "occasional" work. -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 09:55, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Betting on the ponies

Disclaimer 1: If this belongs on the Math desk, please advise. I'm posting here because there's a LOT of smart people here anyway...

Disclaimer 2: websearching for any keywords I can think of so far has returned thousands of hits on How To Bet, or what the various betting terms mean, which is absolutely NOT what I'm after. SO,

Are there any "after-the-fact" statistics on horse racing and betting, that would answer questions like (1) How often does the favorite NOT finish first? or (2) Does betting on an in-the-money jockey or trainer have a statistically significant effect, or is it a red herring?

Also, as I'm still learning about this fine sport, I have a couple other more basic questions: It appears, for instance, that there is a separate pool of dollars for win, place, and show. This implies to me that (3) there's really no correlation between the (displayed) odds of winning vs the (non-displayed) odds of placing or showing -- right?. If true, this might also mean that (4) I should (or should not?) pay attention to the pool dollars when trying to decide whether to enter a place bet (if place$ > show$) or show (if show$ > place$) bet; I currently believe only that a small total dollar amount in the place pool, for example, means that subsequent wagers can impact the odds more easily.

Any serious bettors out there who just KNOW this stuff because they do it so often?

Thanks, DaHorsesMouth (talk) 21:06, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm unaware of any studies - but there are a couple of gross statistics that are worth considering:

1. The people who set the odds are professionals. Any information that you might have, they also have. Any known, effective, statistical techniques will probably be in their arsenal.
2. Bookmakers don't often go out of business. Ergo, they make more money than they lose. Since taxes, employees and building rent have to be paid from their winnings, they must make quite a lot more money than they lose.

SteveBaker (talk) 23:31, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm not really qualified to answer because I'm the exact opposite of your required respondent (for reasons clearly stated by Steve above), but I would support your last-mentioned belief, and would also suspect that the correlation mentioned in (3) is positive but fairly small and thus only a small amount of attention would be appropriate in (4). Perhaps someone else can guide you to published statistics or to some analysis of results. Dbfirs 23:53, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

The bookies don't set the odds based on who they think will win (except for the starting odds). The set the odds based on how people are betting. If the bookie does their job right, then they will pay out almost exactly the same amount regardless of who wins (if the favourite wins, they'll pay lots of small winners, if an outside chance wins, they'll pay a few large winners). Being a good bookie has very little to do with knowing how to predict winners and everything to do with mathematics. If you want to win money on average, you aren't competing with the bookies (they are mathematically guaranteed to profit on every race, you can't change that), you are competing with the other betters. You need to have more/better information (either by better research or better analysis) than your fellow betters. There is nothing more to it than that. --Tango (talk) 00:03, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Enjoy this excellent study, which I think answers some of your questions. It is about the favourite-longshot bias in horse racing, which is an observation that over the decades, bettors consistently undervalue the favorite and overvalue the longshot. You may need to search the citations for the exact data you're looking for. Comet Tuttle (talk) 23:58, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

I don't know about off-track betting, but aren't the odds at the race track a function of how much money is bet on each horse? Like if the pre-race longshoot, Feitlebaum, 20-1, suddenly found lots of bets being placed on him, he wouldn't be a long shot by the time the race started. This, by the way, is one thing that tipped off the experts during the 1919 World Series. The White Sox came in as heavy favorites, but there was so much money placed on the Reds that the odds shifted in their favor. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:16, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Or exactly what Tango said above... --Jayron32 04:07, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

OP's response

There's lots of good information above, and a fair amount of, not misinformation exactly, but misguided information, which I'd like to clarify before this question goes to the archives.

I caused part of the problem: it is generally my habit to compose and wordsmith my questions offline, before logging in and previewing and posting. Somewhere in that process, the very important word parimutuel got dropped, which would have indicated to some of you that I'm in the U.S. and am interested in U.S. practice. (Favorite vs. favourite might also have given that away :-) ).

One thing that came out of Comet Tuttle's excellent reference is that apparently the entire betting scenario in the U.S. is completely different from that in the U.K. (and from Australia as well) -- I had no idea. Thus, Baker's comments, while certainly appropriate in the U.K., are completely inapplicable to my situation. Specifically, for those readers with a U.K. background, in Parimutuel betting one is betting ONLY against other bettors, not professionals.

Then, for anyone who's curious about the answer to question 1, the same excellent paper provides the answer in paragraph 1 of page 1, although only on a "rate of return" basis: betting on the favorite returns -5.5% on average, and that's a heckuvalot better than the other scenarios that were analysed.

Resolved

 – Thanks for everything!

DaHorsesMouth (talk) 02:21, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

I thought the same thing about the "professionals set the odds" statement above... most of those odds should be at equilibrium, and frankly I'd expect the conglomeration of betters to be better than any one "expert." Still, I think the longitudinal study issue is exactly the kind of thing you're interested in. Anybody know of a database of horse races paired with the historic betting odds on those races? Shadowjams (talk) 04:33, 4 August 2010 (UTC)