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Victories Without Cripto
#5: Ghostly Pyramid Scheme
Phantom Cat here. Despite people's urges to get me to move out, Belfast, Northern Ireland is my home, and always will be my home. Yet I get plenty of calls and letters a day, telling me to leave, because the IRA is still up to no good. Remember, they want a unified Ireland but for the entirely wrong reasons. They want to rule over it as tyrannical dictators, and the public is sick of their attacks. We thought that the Troubles had ended in the late 1990s when a peace treaty was signed, but the next decade saw a new wave of terrorists tear up that peace treaty and start the Troubles all over again. (Others argue that the Troubles haven't really started, and that the new breed of terrorists led by General Madden are trying to start it up again. That's the argument I usually go for.)
But this particular case had nothing to do with the IRA. Instead, it would sadly involve my corrupt neighbor, and no, he wasn't hypnotized, because Bendraqi doesn't do that anymore. He just wants to conquer the world with robots now. I wouldn't be surprised if he tries to go after my neighbor and kill him, because my neighbor stole one of Bendraqi's old tricks to make a pyramid scheme work. At least he thought he was concocting a pyramid scheme, because he didn't understand the definition of the actual term.
For those who don't know what the term actually means, a pyramid scheme is a business model that recruits members via a promise of payments or services for enrolling others into the scheme, rather than supplying investments or sale of products or services. As recruiting multiplies, recruiting becomes quickly impossible, and most members are unable to profit; as such, pyramid schemes are unsustainable and often illegal.
Pyramid schemes have existed for at least a century in different guises. Some multi-level marketing plans have been classified as pyramid schemes.
Pyramid schemes don't work because the world's population is finite, and the number of levels becomes impossible to sustain. For instance, if the scheme has a branching factor of six, then here is how the scheme would work, but as you can see, it is impossible to sustain:
Level 1: 6^1 = 6
Level 2: 6^2 = 36
Level 3: 6^3 = 216
Level 4: 6^4 = 1,296
Level 5: 6^5 = 7,776
Level 6: 6^6 = 46,656
Level 7: 6^7 = 279,936
Level 8: 6^8 = 1,679,616
Level 9: 6^9 = 10,077,696
Level 10: 6^10 = 60,466,176
Level 11: 6^11 = 362,797,056
Level 12: 6^12 = 2,176,782,336
Level 13: 6^13 = 13,060,694,016
By the time you get to Level 13, the scheme has failed, because the Earth doesn't have 13 billion people living on it. It's only got somewhere between six and nine billion, I believe. So you don't have enough people to pay to keep your promise, or the money to keep the promise. They're scams for the most part. Why? In a pyramid scheme, people in the upper layers typically profit while people in the lower layers typically lose money. Since at any given time, most of the members in the scheme are at the bottom, most participants in a pyramid scheme will not make any money. In particular, when the scheme collapses, most members will be in the bottom layers and thus will not have any opportunity to profit from the scheme, yet they will have paid to join the scheme. Therefore, a pyramid scheme is characterized by a few people (including the creators of the scheme) making large amounts of money, while most who join the scheme lose money. For this reason, they are considered scams.
So what makes my neighbor corrupt? Well, it's a fact that while Bendraqi doesn't use hypnosis anymore, he has forgotten the people he has hypnotized, and whether or not the spell has worn off, so anybody unfortunate enough to suffer from it even to this day will know it has left them for good when they suffer a splitting headache that stays for a while. Plus, Bendraqi hypnotized people without paying attention, so it caught him off guard to see that my neighbor was doing this. (His memory was also wiped clean when he came back from the dead, so anything he knows know has to do with him having a smarter IQ and building better robots, one of which acts as his main control center.) He also forgot where he kept his various hideouts, so there's another element.
One hideout Bendraqi forgot where he put it that went unnoticed for so many years was directly underneath my neighbor's house. He had been digging in his yard to plant a new garden, but his shovel hit a trapdoor, and that's when the hypnosis kicked in, so his brain sparked and he dug faster until the trapdoor was revealed in full. Then he opened the door and ran down the stairs towards the base, where he found all kinds of gadgets Bendraqi used to use in his old heyday when he was the stupidest villain that ever lived, but also the deadliest. Within minutes, he was projecting holograms of pyramids, leading the public to spread rumors that he actually stole them from Egypt. It was one of the few cases I've seen where a villain thwarted another villain's plots, because the IRA was planning another strike. "We can't strike with all these pyramids in the way," one of them proclaimed. "We have to call it off." And so they did. But since they did nothing, they weren't arrested.
Bendraqi, meanwhile, was bringing his robots around to complete the triangle, because he originally had planned to stomp on the IRA's property (though he didn't have the heart to kill him). But when he saw the holograms of the pyramids, he exclaimed, "My hologram projector! Hey! I wondered what happened to that!" Since his memory of hypnosis was wiped clean, however, he instead concluded, "So that idiot stole it, did he? I'll show him!" That's when the all out assault began, and another neighbor used the app to contact me.
"What's going on?" I replied, although I did take a peek outside.
"I think Bendraqi's back, and he's attacking your neighbor. What did your neighbor do to him?"
"No idea, but I'm going to find out." I had donned by my battle uniform and flew up to the skies. I noticed the pyramid holograms and said to myself, "Well, that brings a whole new meaning to the term 'pyramid scheme.' I'd better investigate." I did so, but couldn't do it without turning invisible. When I'm invisible, ammo can go through me without hurting me, but if you can see him, I'm liable to get shot as much as the next cat. I thus had to turn invisible to let Bendraqi's beams go through me, and I wasted no time in creating my diversions so that it would distract both sides. (My neighbor was shooting back at Bendraqi with a machine gun he once stole from Switzerland; true story.)
I wasn't able to do anything effective except trip Bendraqi's robots with the help of the other neighbor who contacted me, who was an expert in setting up booby traps. The traps all did their job, but since the CNG effects had recently given me super strength at random intervals (so I don't have it all the time except for when I really need it, such as it was the case here), I was able to move Bendraqi's robots so that when they suffered their crash landing, it didn't damage any buildings or cars, or harm any innocent lives.
Bendraqi leaped out from the controller robot to confront my corrupt neighbor. "THIEF!" he screamed. "WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING STEALING MY STUFF?"
"I didn't steal it, master," my neighbor replied, still suffering from hypnosis. "I was merely serving you. And yet you turn against me!"
"Rubbish!" Bendraqi grumbled. "I didn't employ you for anything!"
The argument went back and forth, and when the police arrived, they asked me, "What is he talking about?"
"Do you remember when Bendraqi used to hypnotize people?" I asked.
"Yes. Why?"
"I got a strange feeling my neighbor is still hypnotized from all those years ago. The length varies depending on how close you are to the heartless threshold, and Bendraqi once led armies of heartless before he killed himself the first time."
"He's still going to jail, but to ensure this doesn't happen again, the jail he'll go to will serve him that Hip Solution drink."
"Good idea."
The two feuding villains eventually ran out of breath, and there was nothing left to do but surrender. I notified Super C, who in turned notified the forces his dad leads, the C.I.D.F. (Caticonian Intergalatic Defense Force). All Caticonians have the same powers as Super C, so they were the ones to call since they could easily remove the robots and sell them for scrap metal, which they did. As promised, though, once my corrupt neighbor was in jail, he had a Hip Solution drink to drink in order to cure the hypnosis. As a result, he thought he was in jail for other crimes he was guilty of, including 2 years of not paying alimony to his ex-wife, who divorced him when she discovered he had been unfaithful to her, and was trying to use her for her own gain. The C.I.D.F. also found ways to destroy that underground base, and since the house was about to be foreclosed anyway, the authorites gave them permission to demo it.
By the time it was all clear again, my other neighbor and I found a M3 to eat lunch at, where we continued to discuss the threats that Bendraqi provided, and the possibility there could still be those extremely rare cases of more hypnosis that still hadn't worn yet, so if any of you think there is hypnosis still around, don't hesitate to contact us with the G-52 app, okay?
Thanks, folks. That's my victory without Cripto.
THE END
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Victories Without Cripto
#5: Ghostly Pyramid Scheme
Phantom Cat here. Despite people's urges to get me to move out, Belfast, Northern Ireland is my home, and always will be my home. Yet I get plenty of calls and letters a day, telling me to leave, because the IRA is still up to no good. Remember, they want a unified Ireland but for the entirely wrong reasons. They want to rule over it as tyrannical dictators, and the public is sick of their attacks. We thought that the Troubles had ended in the late 1990s when a peace treaty was signed, but the next decade saw a new wave of terrorists tear up that peace treaty and start the Troubles all over again. (Others argue that the Troubles haven't really started, and that the new breed of terrorists led by General Madden are trying to start it up again. That's the argument I usually go for.)
But this particular case had nothing to do with the IRA. Instead, it would sadly involve my corrupt neighbor, and no, he wasn't hypnotized, because Bendraqi doesn't do that anymore. He just wants to conquer the world with robots now. I wouldn't be surprised if he tries to go after my neighbor and kill him, because my neighbor stole one of Bendraqi's old tricks to make a pyramid scheme work. At least he thought he was concocting a pyramid scheme, because he didn't understand the definition of the actual term.
For those who don't know what the term actually means, a pyramid scheme is a business model that recruits members via a promise of payments or services for enrolling others into the scheme, rather than supplying investments or sale of products or services. As recruiting multiplies, recruiting becomes quickly impossible, and most members are unable to profit; as such, pyramid schemes are unsustainable and often illegal.
Pyramid schemes have existed for at least a century in different guises. Some multi-level marketing plans have been classified as pyramid schemes.
Pyramid schemes don't work because the world's population is finite, and the number of levels becomes impossible to sustain. For instance, if the scheme has a branching factor of six, then here is how the scheme would work, but as you can see, it is impossible to sustain:
Level 1: 6^1 = 6
Level 2: 6^2 = 36
Level 3: 6^3 = 216
Level 4: 6^4 = 1,296
Level 5: 6^5 = 7,776
Level 6: 6^6 = 46,656
Level 7: 6^7 = 279,936
Level 8: 6^8 = 1,679,616
Level 9: 6^9 = 10,077,696
Level 10: 6^10 = 60,466,176
Level 11: 6^11 = 362,797,056
Level 12: 6^12 = 2,176,782,336
Level 13: 6^13 = 13,060,694,016
By the time you get to Level 13, the scheme has failed, because the Earth doesn't have 13 billion people living on it. It's only got somewhere between six and nine billion, I believe. So you don't have enough people to pay to keep your promise, or the money to keep the promise. They're scams for the most part. Why? In a pyramid scheme, people in the upper layers typically profit while people in the lower layers typically lose money. Since at any given time, most of the members in the scheme are at the bottom, most participants in a pyramid scheme will not make any money. In particular, when the scheme collapses, most members will be in the bottom layers and thus will not have any opportunity to profit from the scheme, yet they will have paid to join the scheme. Therefore, a pyramid scheme is characterized by a few people (including the creators of the scheme) making large amounts of money, while most who join the scheme lose money. For this reason, they are considered scams.
So what makes my neighbor corrupt? Well, it's a fact that while Bendraqi doesn't use hypnosis anymore, he has forgotten the people he has hypnotized, and whether or not the spell has worn off, so anybody unfortunate enough to suffer from it even to this day will know it has left them for good when they suffer a splitting headache that stays for a while. Plus, Bendraqi hypnotized people without paying attention, so it caught him off guard to see that my neighbor was doing this. (His memory was also wiped clean when he came back from the dead, so anything he knows know has to do with him having a smarter IQ and building better robots, one of which acts as his main control center.) He also forgot where he kept his various hideouts, so there's another element.
One hideout Bendraqi forgot where he put it that went unnoticed for so many years was directly underneath my neighbor's house. He had been digging in his yard to plant a new garden, but his shovel hit a trapdoor, and that's when the hypnosis kicked in, so his brain sparked and he dug faster until the trapdoor was revealed in full. Then he opened the door and ran down the stairs towards the base, where he found all kinds of gadgets Bendraqi used to use in his old heyday when he was the stupidest villain that ever lived, but also the deadliest. Within minutes, he was projecting holograms of pyramids, leading the public to spread rumors that he actually stole them from Egypt. It was one of the few cases I've seen where a villain thwarted another villain's plots, because the IRA was planning another strike. "We can't strike with all these pyramids in the way," one of them proclaimed. "We have to call it off." And so they did. But since they did nothing, they weren't arrested.
Bendraqi, meanwhile, was bringing his robots around to complete the triangle, because he originally had planned to stomp on the IRA's property (though he didn't have the heart to kill him). But when he saw the holograms of the pyramids, he exclaimed, "My hologram projector! Hey! I wondered what happened to that!" Since his memory of hypnosis was wiped clean, however, he instead concluded, "So that idiot stole it, did he? I'll show him!" That's when the all out assault began, and another neighbor used the app to contact me.
"What's going on?" I replied, although I did take a peek outside.
"I think Bendraqi's back, and he's attacking your neighbor. What did your neighbor do to him?"
"No idea, but I'm going to find out." I had donned by my battle uniform and flew up to the skies. I noticed the pyramid holograms and said to myself, "Well, that brings a whole new meaning to the term 'pyramid scheme.' I'd better investigate." I did so, but couldn't do it without turning invisible. When I'm invisible, ammo can go through me without hurting me, but if you can see him, I'm liable to get shot as much as the next cat. I thus had to turn invisible to let Bendraqi's beams go through me, and I wasted no time in creating my diversions so that it would distract both sides. (My neighbor was shooting back at Bendraqi with a machine gun he once stole from Switzerland; true story.)
I wasn't able to do anything effective except trip Bendraqi's robots with the help of the other neighbor who contacted me, who was an expert in setting up booby traps. The traps all did their job, but since the CNG effects had recently given me super strength at random intervals (so I don't have it all the time except for when I really need it, such as it was the case here), I was able to move Bendraqi's robots so that when they suffered their crash landing, it didn't damage any buildings or cars, or harm any innocent lives.
Bendraqi leaped out from the controller robot to confront my corrupt neighbor. "THIEF!" he screamed. "WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING STEALING MY STUFF?"
"I didn't steal it, master," my neighbor replied, still suffering from hypnosis. "I was merely serving you. And yet you turn against me!"
"Rubbish!" Bendraqi grumbled. "I didn't employ you for anything!"
The argument went back and forth, and when the police arrived, they asked me, "What is he talking about?"
"Do you remember when Bendraqi used to hypnotize people?" I asked.
"Yes. Why?"
"I got a strange feeling my neighbor is still hypnotized from all those years ago. The length varies depending on how close you are to the heartless threshold, and Bendraqi once led armies of heartless before he killed himself the first time."
"He's still going to jail, but to ensure this doesn't happen again, the jail he'll go to will serve him that Hip Solution drink."
"Good idea."
The two feuding villains eventually ran out of breath, and there was nothing left to do but surrender. I notified Super C, who in turned notified the forces his dad leads, the C.I.D.F. (Caticonian Intergalatic Defense Force). All Caticonians have the same powers as Super C, so they were the ones to call since they could easily remove the robots and sell them for scrap metal, which they did. As promised, though, once my corrupt neighbor was in jail, he had a Hip Solution drink to drink in order to cure the hypnosis. As a result, he thought he was in jail for other crimes he was guilty of, including 2 years of not paying alimony to his ex-wife, who divorced him when she discovered he had been unfaithful to her, and was trying to use her for her own gain. The C.I.D.F. also found ways to destroy that underground base, and since the house was about to be foreclosed anyway, the authorites gave them permission to demo it.
By the time it was all clear again, my other neighbor and I found a M3 to eat lunch at, where we continued to discuss the threats that Bendraqi provided, and the possibility there could still be those extremely rare cases of more hypnosis that still hadn't worn yet, so if any of you think there is hypnosis still around, don't hesitate to contact us with the G-52 app, okay?
Thanks, folks. That's my victory without Cripto.
THE END
Victories Without Cripto (#5): Ghostly Pyramid Scheme
This new series will showcase either solo or team battles the G-52s have embarked, without the help of their secret and way too powerful weapon, Cripto. This is in response to the haters all stating Cripto is too powerful, and should have ended all the terrorism, once and for all, a long time ago. But he didn't, because evil cannot be so easily overcome, and because it would upset the balance of order in this world.
Here, Phantom Cat deals with both Bendraqi and his corrupt neighbor whom Bendraqi hypnotized years ago. His neighbor steals Bendraqi's old equipment to concoct what he thinks is a pyramid scheme, because he doesn't know the real meaning of the term.
Here, Phantom Cat deals with both Bendraqi and his corrupt neighbor whom Bendraqi hypnotized years ago. His neighbor steals Bendraqi's old equipment to concoct what he thinks is a pyramid scheme, because he doesn't know the real meaning of the term.
Category Story / All
Species Unspecified / Any
Gender Any
Size 120 x 80px
Listed in Folders
Blue: Try Pyramid scheme levels 14 and 15. These are some outrageous numbers!
6^14 = 78,364,164,096
6^15 = 470,184,984,576
Can this possible go any higher than that, Phantom Cat? I'll leave that up to you to decide. If they actually allow such higher numbers than 13. Considering some cultures see 13 as an unlucky number regards to superstition.
6^14 = 78,364,164,096
6^15 = 470,184,984,576
Can this possible go any higher than that, Phantom Cat? I'll leave that up to you to decide. If they actually allow such higher numbers than 13. Considering some cultures see 13 as an unlucky number regards to superstition.
Phantom Cat: It could go higher, I believe, but the point is the world doesn't have enough people to meet any kind of scheme like this.
Mr. Letterman: Pyramid schemes are why companies use the internet to sell their products directly than to hire people for this. It is also why people are turning to e-commerce instead of this. All what people need is a computer, laptop, or tablet, a smartphone, the internet, a 3D printer or a factory with similar technologies to a 3D printer, and they're all set.
Chuong: I always thought multi-level marketing is dead and so are pyramid schemes. I guess I was wrong in my future predictions.
Chuong: I always thought multi-level marketing is dead and so are pyramid schemes. I guess I was wrong in my future predictions.
Phantom Cat: No, it's as alive as it always has been, even if it is dropping from the world of e-commerce.
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