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Hello pal,
I've recently discovered a whole new world of flexing, fronting, and hustling on Instagram. Gone are the days of the Nigerian Prince emails with pleas for help and promises of big payoffs in return. Today, folks are posing in front of cars and planes they don't own and trying to pass off rented houses and estates as their own in an attempt to sell you an online course about how you, too, can become a drop-shipping millionaire.
This new generation of scammers uses a grotesque level of luxury and brand-dropping as the basis of their pitch and credibility. Some have a course, a business plan, but some just use their scam for the sole purpose of fake internet cred, hoping that if they fake it, eventually they’ll make it.
It seems like this particular type of scammer is conflating the corrupted idea that money equals self-worth, with consumption equaling self-worth. Like lots of people, it's not about what they keep; it’s about what people think they can spend. It triggers a version of keeping up with the Joneses, but it's a distorted, late-capitalist flavor where people can consume images of people consuming.
Your finance friend,
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1.🤓 My Friend Borrowed Money But Won’t Pay Me Back. What Do I Do? (Paco for Refinery29) Why it can feel so nerve-wracking to ask a friend to pay you back. Why does it feel so stressful? Have you ever forgiven a debt your friend owed you — and kept your friendship? 🤓
2. 🍑 The $5,000 quest for the perfect butt (Vox) How the Brazilian butt lift, one of the world’s most dangerous plastic surgery procedures, went mainstream.
3.🚰 What the Rich Don't Want to Admit About the Poor (The New York Times) "One man’s misery is another man’s quick and affordable at-home lunch delivery. It is a fact that when we pay workers less and don’t have social insurance programs that, say, cover Uber and Lyft drivers, we are able to consume goods and services at lower prices."
4. 🤓 A bookkeeping thing: The Bookkeeping Trinity (HYG Original) Know your options. 🤓5. 🦊 He Thought He Could Outfox the Gig Economy. He Was Wrong (Wired) Jeffrey Fang was a ride-hailing legend, a top earner with relentless hustle. Then his minivan was carjacked—with his kids in the back seat.6. ✈️ Instagram Has Become SkyMall. The ads are a nonstop slurry of surreal products and I love it. (Debugger) “It’s pretty clear that Instagram ads are a breeding-ground for the legions of dropshippers who are trying to find some sort of tech thingmabob that they can sell four million of a week so they can ‘put their income on autopilot’, as per The Four Hour Workweek.”7. 🎩 I Was Taught From a Young Age to Protect My Dynastic Wealth (The Atlantic) “If your comfort requires that society be structured so that a decent percentage of your fellow citizens live in a constant state of terror about whether they’ll get health care in an emergency, or whether they can keep a roof over their family’s heads, or whether they will simply have enough to eat, perhaps the problem does not rest with those people, but with you and what you think of as necessary, proper, and acceptable.”8. 🐷 Lord of the Roths: How Tech Mogul Peter Thiel Turned a Retirement Account for the Middle Class Into a $5 Billion Tax-Free Piggy Bank (ProPublica) "Roth IRAs were intended to help average working Americans save, but IRS records show Thiel and other ultrawealthy investors have used them to amass vast untaxed fortunes."
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