Articles tagged with "company"

(Some of you may think that stating that a powder must be mixed with water is redundant; in that case you've never heard of dry-scooping)

In 2024, Mark, Katrina, and I went to the Wellington Go Green Expo. We've talked about this event on the podcast before, and back then Mark had commented on the quantity of mushroom-based products. His hypothesis at the time was that this burgeoning industry might be due to the unsuccessful campaign to legalise recreational marijuana use in late 2020 - any company that had hoped to take advantage of the anticipated boom in cannabis sales needed a quick, low-cost pivot. Now, I'm always game to go on the deep dive necessary to prove/disprove other people's pet theories. Mushroom coffees, chocolate, and supplements have escaped the containment of your local health food/organic store, and the encroachment of mushroom crisps/chips into the aisles to mainstream grocery stores has made this topic feel more salient than it has ever been.

We're back to our normal schedule after taking something of a break over Christmas, so those of you who listen to our podcast should see our next episode come out next weekend. Given that we've skipped a couple of episodes there are quite a few articles to talk about, so it might be a long one!

After Bronwyn's article in the last newsletter about cryonics, Katrina and I have decided to get in on the action and write our own articles on related topics to accompany the second part of Bronwyn's series. It's been interesting to learn more about longevity and preservation - both the real science, and the pseudoscience. And thankfully there were a couple of fascinating documentaries I was able to watch to help me flesh out my article, so it wasn't all just reading for me.

The NZ skeptics mailbox recently received a request from a company selling breathalysers in NZ. They wanted us to help them game the system when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, so that they could increase their sales. Given that I wrote about SEO just a few weeks ago, I figured the email exchange might be of interest to our readers. I think the emails tell the story quite well by themselves, so here they are in chronological order:

For those who have been around in skeptical circles for a while, you're probably aware not only of skeptic Brian Dunning and his Skeptoid podcast, but also of his conviction for wire fraud, in a case where he was accused of cookie stuffing. Wikipedia summarises it nicely on Brian Dunning's Wikipedia page:

Recently two different mobile AI devices have been released, and given all the overhyping of AI these days they've fared about as well as you'd expect them to - which is not very well at all.

Those of you who have been skeptically-minded for a while now may remember an Irish company called Steorn who had been promising since the early 2000s that they could make free energy. Back in 2006 they even took out a full page advert in the Economist, which used the Galileo Gambit and said:

Let me preface this article by stating, mustering my best Dr McCoy impression, that I'm a midwife and am certainly not a sports nutritionist, dietician, food scientist, government bureaucrat, etc. I profess total ignorance on this topic, and welcome any of our readers who do have the appropriate expertise to write in or join us on this week's podcast to share their knowledge.

After the legal troubles and tabloid journalism of the 1980s, as I documented in my last article about ZAP, the furor around ZAP died down to barely a whisper. While the group claimed membership in the thousands, it's estimated that true numbers were much lower and, if it is still even running, it is likely limited to just the most hardcore believers these days.

If you have a social media account, you may have found your feed clogged with advertisements for the new ecommerce platform TEMU. The company launched in NZ in March but has only ramped up its promotions in the past week. In particular they use influencers to encourage potential customers to send their friends and family referral links. In return, the referrers are able to earn tokens, chances to enter draws, and play casino games in order to win cash. If that wasn't worrisome enough, the company has already been subject to comparisons to the low-quality products of other ecommerce platforms like WISH and SHEIN. I'm currently on a dogged quest to find out all I can about this company and, while it isn't a pyramid scheme or MLM, its operations are reminiscent of other businesses I've written about. Keep your eye open for an article on TEMU in the near future.

While not quite in lock-step with Drumm, Cogle did work at Go Media at the same time as Drumm is currently employed at Beauty Book as a Business Development Manager and at Jolly Billboards as a National Sales Manager. She is also listed as the director of Ogle Media Limited (formerly called Jolly Media Limited) and Vegucate Limited. Both of these companies were registered in 2020 but the Registrar of Companies has initiated action to remove Vegucate from the companies register and having not received any objection so far, is proceeding with the removal process. Cogle came to New Zealand from the UK 17 years ago with her Kiwi husband to provide a better life for their children

It has been a while since I wrote about an MLM properly and, in some ways, Prüvit is both the best and worst MLM to dip into. The health and wellness claims it makes are of great interest to Skeptics, but despite the social media and YouTube furor that the organisation and its distributors create, Prüvit doesn't have a Wikipedia page. It can take a bit of work to get a sense of its history.

Content warning: This article will include links to Rama Ranson's blogs which include language, themes, or imagery which can be triggering or upsetting.

I spend a lot of time on Youtube and I often opine, as others in the anti-MLM sphere do, that the Youtube algorithm loves to show me ads that are not reflective of my viewing habits. I've seen more than my fair share of business gurus using their outdoor voices to sell me limited time offers for unmissable business opportunities. Maybe it is due to being in the Antipodes, but instead of seeing Grant Cardone or Tony Robbins shilling their seminars, I get an affable kiwi who does her darndest to convince me that I too can make tens of thousands of dollars a month selling on Amazon, with the New Zealand mountains serving big “playground of the rich” vibes.

It has been a while since I edited a newsletter, and what better time than near the end of the year to take on the mantle again.

This past weekend I visited the Go Green Expo, which is a show with the general theme of “green” or being ecologically mindful. Such things are usually a magnet for companies promoting bogus products in addition to those with genuine solutions to becoming “greener”.

Skeptic Steven Novella recently published an interesting open letter to cranks. In it he speaks in a very forthright, honest way about people who email him and pronounce that they have figured out something that overturns science, or have single-handedly solved one of science's many unsolved puzzles. Steven explains in the letter about the importance of peer review, and talks of the arrogance of those who think they're smarter than the combined wisdom of the world's experts. He makes a really good point that the proper route to making your claims public, and ensuring they are properly vetted and tested, is a lot of hard work - and it's this hard work that cranks are keen to bypass, often preferring to instead jump straight to making claims without designing experiments, and publishing books rather than writing scholarly articles.

This week the social media landscape changed. Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter, after a rather interesting historical timeline around the deal:

In Part 1, I hoped to have painted a picture of Dr. Bronner as an Ideas man above all else. Sure, he had the skills necessary to make a decent soap product but it was secondary to his message. His family came a distant third to that same message while operational requirements of running the whole Dr. Bronner's magic soap outfit came fourth.

Newsletter readers and podcast listeners have probably picked up by now that my errand run takes me into stores and up aisles that many skeptics wouldn't tread (unless you are Mark Honeychurch). For every bit of silliness, such as ceremonial cacao and at-home hormonal tests, the local organic shop has also been a reliable stockist of feminine hygiene products and long-lasting cleaning products that, until recently, were unavailable in normie New Zealand supermarkets. One such product that I've always kept under the bathroom sink is a bottle of Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap. If the name doesn't sound familiar, then maybe you know its infamous blue and white label:

It's nice to occasionally be able to talk about nonsense outside of New Zealand. In this case, the Sydney Morning Herald recently printed - and then retracted - an article about a supposed new form of water called hexagonal water, made up of H3O2 molecules.

The Ishango Bone - photo by Joeykentin

So, back to COVID vaccines. This past week has seen a huge amount of activity in anti-vax circles.

But what is it, who's behind it, and does it work? Well, it turns out the answers to the first two questions will help us to figure out the third one.

A recent article on the Ars Technica site details the story of a so-called ethical hacker who was employed by a company to build a pro-Trump fake news empire. (Note, this is the real fake news, as in news that isn't true - compared to the “fake news” that Trump infamously categorised unfavourable coverage of him as.)

Mike Adams is well known to skeptics. For many years he's run the Natural News website, which started out as a source of medical misinformation paired with a shop selling expensive, useless supplements. Some of his sillier posts included using a microscope to take zoomed-in photos of McDonald's chicken nuggets as a way to make them look unappealing.

Most skeptics will be aware of the Steisand Effect - so called because of the unintended consequence of trying to suppress information - which happened to Barbara Streisand back in 2003 when she tried to suppress pictures of her Malibu mansion.

In the good news department, YouTube has de-platformed local misinformant Vinny Eastwood, also joining another local, Damien De Ment, also banned. Vinny Eastwood was king of promoting conspiracy theories, but it seems that various complaints have seen his channel now removed.

TV psychic Maurice Amdur, in the UK, has a video featured on his public Facebook page - Maurice's Psychic World - where he performs a psychic reading of a car salesman while he's picking up a brand new Jaguar XKS convertible, worth eighty thousand pounds:

Honestly, I don't think I could make up something this daft if I tried. Thanks to an astute member of our NZ Skeptics Facebook group, I now know about a New Zealand company - Hippo Health - who are marketing a fascinating sun block for animals.

Research by the American Center for Countering Digital Hate has revealed that almost two-thirds of all misinformation about vaccines being spread on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter arose from just twelve individuals and their associated organisations. And on Facebook they account for 73% of all anti-vax content.

We're written about the Advance NZ political party in the past, and about their conspiracy-theory-driven policies and public statements.

A few weeks back a monolith was discovered, in the desert in the state of Utah in the USA. Since then they've been popping up in various places around the world. The famous monolith from Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey (based on Arthur C. Clarke's novels) would appear to be the inspiration for these.

SleepDrops is a New Zealand based company offering herbal/homeopathic products that are supposed to help you to sleep, although there's absolutely no evidence that they work.

A few weeks ago the Wellington Skeptics made their annual pilgrimage to the Go Green Expo. Billed as a Green Living and Sustainable Lifestyle Show, in reality the majority of stands push nonsense alternative therapies, making illegal medical claims about cherry juice, magnetic bracelets and turmeric shakes and scaring people about the dangers of dirty electricity, blue light, toxins and chemicals. There are also talks with titles such as:

HRV has had to pay out $400k for bad claims it made about its water filters. The interesting thing about this case, in my opinion, is that the fine was given because it was shown that HRV didn't have the evidence for its claims when it made them.

I had a phone call this week from "Spark". I spoke to a couple of Indian gentlemen who explained that my private IP address had been made public, and that this meant that my internet connection was compromised.

Breakfast on 1 recently hosted a physiotherapist advertising the Shakti Mat - a yoga mat covered in plastic circles, with each circle consisting of 20 or more sharp spikes. The mat is supposed to work like a bed of nails, activating acupressure points. I've seen the mat sold at shows such as the Go Green Expo, and have stood on one - the points are really sharp, and without socks it was especially painful.

As we talked about at the end of last year, there's been a real push to sell Kangen Water devices in NZ recently. An article in the Herald recently has detailed Ainsley Brunton's efforts to sell the water in Whanganui to unsuspecting customers. Her water devices are selling for $4,000, with promises that the water can help with cancer, diabetes and other serious diseases. Enagic in Australia is selling the machines to New Zealanders who are passing them on, and Enagic's prices for a machine that does nothing useful to water vary between $2,300 and $6,500.

Companies in the US are selling "raw" water, which means the water has been untreated. At $50 for 9 litres, it seems pretty expensive for something that's likely to leave you sick.

A company is making claims about their soap made out of breast milk.

A couple of years ago I went along to a talk in Wellington about a new device called the QTB (Quantum TrailBlazer), now rebranded as a QSB - Quantum Scalar Box. Back then the device was made from a piece of sewage pipe spray painted black, with several blue LEDs around the top. We were told to believe that the device was emitting "scalar waves" (a pseudo-scientific idea) on the Solfeggio frequencies. I sat there for half an hour while the device went through a range of these frequencies, supposedly healing areas of my life.

Julia Rucklidge from Canterbury University has suggested that processed food may be a cause of a mental illness epidemic.

A woman has made the news today because she has been denied treatment for a medical condition, symphysis pubis dysfunction, related to her pregnancy. Southern Cross Insurance have said that the reason for not paying for treatment is that pregnant women in New Zealand are eligible for free healthcare, and so their policies don't cover pregnancy.

A company which made staff walk barefoot over burning coals in a training exercise has escaped prosecution. Seven sales trainees suffered burns during the "motivational" session run by insurance giant Eagle Star. Two of the workers needed specialist treatment at a burns unit.

In which we look at another easy way to make money from home. No training or prior experience required!

Britain's The Skeptic magazine celebrated its tenth anniversary with a Top-Ten survey of paranormal phenomena of the decade.

At the Skeptics' conference we were treated to one official's view of the status of scientific medicine relative to alternative treatment systems and beliefs. This presentation reinforced many of our fears that modern medicine is truly the victim of its own success. Now that so many of us live to old age, and find that pharmaceuticals and surgery can do little to prevent inevitable decline, we are encouraged to turn to away from "Western orthodoxy" towards "alternative" systems of other, more "spiritual and "holistic cultures".

An Australian-based mining Company is in turmoil after recent revelations by the Australian Skeptics that it paid the magician, Uri Geller, to search for gold.