[mguerville]

My dad went to one when his cancer entered the terminal phase, I think he knew it was bullsh*t but it was a more human « treatment » than everything else he went through so he liked it. I still think it was a charlatan preying on him but I guess no more amoral than crystals moms and essential oils MLMs.

[PaulHoule]

I don't get how anybody gets into essential oil MLMs. I have a $20 ultrasonic diffuser and buy $10 bottles of things like Lavender extract from my food co-op which will last me for years.

Lately I have been stirring the cauldron and getting to know quite a few witchy women and there are a lot of them who make and sell their own essential oil products that are like the MLM products but don't have the upline and all it entails. Still I think "just get a diffuser".

(Some people would disagree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734824)

[oliculipolicula]

I wanted to reply to your Baumol stuff proper but it took too long. I havent stuck the marketing copy so it will have for another time. (Quick and dirty slogan: Baumol is when linearizing the real economy of agents either as N 1<->1 or 1<->N interactions instead of N^2 --- as a high energy physicist would-- goes wrong)

Are those 20ml bottles? Here they can be gotten for cents. Essential oils are a big part of the Indian take on the Shenzhen mom-and-pop microfactories that directly preceded DJI. (& gave us those standard ultrasonic diffusers! ~2USD btw & we love the trade deficit)

I imagine the 5-person Indian oils businesses will be a skeleton for a nonChinese solar(-chem-)punk future..

Concentrated enough to be useful, impure enough to force robustness into the process design from the getgo.. but! far from the Baumol regime, if we don't have these MLMs..

(I meant, that it isn't worthwhile to train a new generation of Jony Ives on bottles or diffusers, but I will be happy to be wrong. Scentology remains a black magic)