You can’t go anywhere on the web without seeing doom-laden ads talking about “The End of Britain” telling you “How to survive the coming financial apocalypse”. I know better than to click on such obvious link-bait, but eventually curiosity got the better of me. So I put the phrase into Google to see what came up. What came up was this lengthy blog post from Another Angry Voice.
And the whole thing turns out to be much as I thought it was. The End of Britain is a lengthy screed written by obvious free-market fundamentalists followed by a sales pitch for a “high-yield” investments that sound suspiciously like some kind of Ponzi scheme. Their version of post-war economic history is full of misuse of statistics, distortions, deliberate omissions and complete lies, but it’s what you’d expect from people who have read too much Ayn Rand and think public spending on welfare is the root of all evil.
And Another Angry Voice does a thorough demolition job on the whole thing.
Which all makes me wonder, why is so much internet advertising for transparently obvious scams? I’m thinking of these “One weird trick” belly-fat and anti-wrinkle treatments, all of which are essentially con tricks. Is separating fools from their money the only really profitable business on the interweb?
I read somewhere about a bit of research that was done to see who in fact falls for such scams — everything from the high-flown financial stuff to the “one weird trick” junk. Turns out the average yearly income of the people who fall for that stuff is over $150,000 a year. Rich and stupid is a great target market.
That surprises me. I’d have thought the people smart enough to earn $150,000 a year would be too smart to fall for those sorts of things.
Unless of course that $150,000 a year job wasn’t gained purely on merit.
Well done Tim in finding “Another Angry Voice”. I agree with almost all he says but I don’t think the Iceland solution is open to the UK. I wonder who he/she is?