But overall, I don't think recycling is a grift. At best it is collective wishful thinking. And it could still kinda work out.
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But the important point is that when you switch the justification from "it works" to "it installs values/creates awareness" you're suddenly changing the economic and effort logic. Actual solutions are worth much more than "creating awareness" about a problem.
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If you've installed a lucrative and profitable habit that an org is used to doing, stopping it is both hard and counterproductive to the grifting motive. Why not charge "solution" rates for "awareness" palliatives if the suckers will continue to pay?
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By contrast, scams, frauds, long cons... when they are exposed, they become untenable. Buying back into the narrative on alternative premises is impossible. The lie is just too big and blatant.
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Almost all business consulting offerings structured as domain-independent process training and workshops are almost-grifts. Almost because they cut to the chase and pitch "awareness" and "values" level value propositions from the start, never even pretending to solve the problem.
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Another clear "tell" of a grift: there are no learnable skills that are unique to the grift itself. For example: lean six sigma is a grift because the skilled content is just standard textbook statistics, industrial engineering etc. The meta-stuff is all theatrical bullshit.
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Another clear tell: the grift feeds on what I call "learning curve arbitrage" -- it relies on a steady supply of n00bs who don't yet know enough to know what doesn't work, and can be conned into idealistic and energetic belief and performance of theater.
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If you as grifter, can find a particularly idealistic, sincere, energetic, and charismatic young ingenue (not necessarily female) to use as figurehead (*cough* Greta *cough* Joan of Arc *cough*) a LOT of grifter reputations can be laundered by BIRGing a genuine idealist.
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The presence of such ingenues within a movement is a very clear tell. Snowden, Damore, Greta, etc. etc. It's almost a sign of arrival for a larger grift, at cottage-industry scale (the unicorn scale for grift startups) when they find themselves a charismatic innocent to work with
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