
Who Do You Trust? - jordanmessina
http://www.bhorowitz.com/who_do_you_trust
======
nlh
This is a somewhat random note on the subject, but after reading one of the
threads yesterday on Stripe, I found myself reading through their list of
prohibited businesses/services (it's an interesting read if you're curious
about high-fraud/sketchy business models).

And sure enough:

54) human hair, fake hair or hair-extensions

which says a lot about the industry.

(Note in looking this up just now, I found its only in the UK prohibited
businesses, not the US list, which is also somewhat interesting)

~~~
billybofh
That might be due to restrictions on things regular companies/people can post
in the UK. I used to work for $big_parcel_company and the list of things you
weren't allowed to send was... interesting. Some made sense (bodily fluids for
instance) some just seemed like old hangups (which possibly accounts for the
hair in this case).

~~~
GauntletWizard
Hair is a fairly dangerous product; Lice, fleas, ticks, and other nasties that
can spread disease like to nest in it. It's technically a body part, and I
only say technically for the sake of argument; It is a body part. Most people
are grossed out by fingernail clippings, which are pretty much the same thing
(Primarily keratin).

Hair (and probably fingernails, were there a market for them) is relatively
easy to clean compared to other body parts, but it is still a potential
biohazard. Having regulations and restrictions around it makes sense - And I'm
a die-hard libertarian saying this.

~~~
Zigurd
Presumably animal fur isn't prohibited. You can catch nasty things from fur
and hides, and some tanning processes are nasty, too.

------
quadrangle
What a totally bizarre posting. Capitalism is the best system except for these
fundamental facts about how f'ed up it is?

And on a post about the craziness and bad experience in a wasteful business
area that shouldn't exist? The entire concept of African American women buying
Indian hair is just a continuing piece of systematic racism taken to its
fullest by the victims themselves. This entire system from the hairdressers
lacking capital for inventory to the women buying the hair is all disgusting
waste.

The whole "this garbage (capitalism like this) is the best possible option" is
pathetic learned helplessness.

~~~
mistermann
This comment is interesting to me because as much as I try, I have absolutely
no idea who you are mad at in this scenario.

~~~
quadrangle
That's an interesting reply. Just because a situation is f'ed up doesn't
necessarily mean there's a clear evil entity responsible. To push it to that
would be scapegoating.

We can find a source for this particular topic though: the long disgraceful
history of racism that leads people to think that Indian hair (being straight
like lots of European hair) is more beautiful than curly African hair.

There are so many problems, socially, economically, etc. with this situation;
and I'm annoyed at anyone who describes the situation as something _other_
than messed up. It's messed up that many black women think their natural hair
isn't attractive enough; it's messed up that many black men think black
women's natural hair isn't attractive enough; it's messed up that capitalists
figure out how to continue promoting those views and profiting off of this;
it's messed up that there's still enough economic inequity that black
hairstylists work on tight margins and credit… and it's messed up that the
jerks who wrote this article are brainwashed into thinking this sort of
capitalism is the best economic system we could ever have. It's also messed up
that they think it's reasonable to publish something that says effectively "X
is the best we can have, except that it is horrible" without any sense of
irony or other nuance.

------
disordr
In the Orthodox Jewish world, many women wear sheitels, essentially wigs
sourced from human hair. The entire buying experience is very different from
what Ben describes in his blog. The women who sell the sheitels provide the
whole experience, from picking out the hair type/color/length, etc, to making
sure it fits well and that the customer is satisfied. Granted this is a much
smaller and niche market, and the products (sheitels) themselves can easily
sell for $1,000-$2,000+. (source, my wife regularly wears a Sheitel in
accordance with Halacha).

~~~
littletimmy
God: I thought I told you to cover your hair!

Woman: Ha! These are not my hair. I covered my hair with someone else's hair.
So technically, I'm in the clear.

God: Wow! Totally did not see that loophole.

~~~
abdulhaq
Maybe Jewish women started being accused of 'making a political statement' and
being harrassed in the street because they covered their hair, so they had to
make a compromise.

~~~
kelvin0
Is that like when Enron started being accused of inflated revenues and
'cooking the books' ... they also had to find a compromise and shred away the
evidence! What type of non sensical argument is this?

------
sremani
A good starting point for this article is the movie "Good Hair" by Chris Rock.
But rest assured, there is already a lot consolidation that already happened
for Temple Hair in India. The raw material for this is, faith of Hindus (Hindu
Women to be specific - since they have the long hair), that giving away hair
as a form of surrender to God. Any guess, how long that will last?

edit: changed movie name [Bad Hair]

~~~
sumedh
> Any guess, how long that will last?

Maybe once India becomes a developed country and quality of life will increase
for ordinary Indians then they will stop trying to please god.

------
guelo
Sounds like vc money has found another industry to come into and kill
thousands of mom and pop businesses. As this process continues, massive
investments to take over every industry by using efficiencies of scale, will
there be any room left for the lower class entrepreneurs?

~~~
spectrum1234
Why are mom and pop businesses better than those who buy or sell/cut hair?
Shame on you for objectively deciding one group of people is better than
another.

~~~
rosser
Really? "Shame on you"?

------
chiph
I bought a wig for Comic Con last year[0], and it was an interesting
experience. The local shop carries 3 grades, with an option to spend even
more.

The entry level is polyester, with colors not normally found in nature. The
mid-grade polyester (what I got) normally sells in the $180-230 range. Natural
hair starts at $400, and obviously looks the most realistic.

Most of the hair is sourced from outside the US, from India and Asia. So the
colors are usually very dark. They will bleach it to produce lighter shades,
but if you need/want true Blonde, you'll have to buy either a bleached darker
shade and hope for a good match, or spend significantly more for northern-
European sourced hair.

Hair length is an issue - waiting for your hair to grow long before selling it
obviously takes a while, so it sells for a premium.

And now I know a lot more than I ever thought I would about aftermarket hair
supply. :)

[0] I went as Lucius Malfoy (Draco Malfoy's father) from Harry Potter:
[http://nebula.wsimg.com/773ae27d6ab68c28500b6986588b0da2?Acc...](http://nebula.wsimg.com/773ae27d6ab68c28500b6986588b0da2?AccessKeyId=148434A7A621E0442192&disposition=0&alloworigin=1)

------
oneiric
"Mayvenn will send you a check for your earned commissions every month. You
can do anything you want with it – pay rent, pay for your car or buy those
shoes you wanted!"

From Mayvenn's site. Does this seem insulting to anyone else?

~~~
Frompo
In an initial reading it strongly implies Mayvenn thinks its customers don't
know that checks can be redeemed for normal money. There is also a bit of a
scale jump from "pay your rent, your car" to "your shoes". But I guess it is
implied its $200 shoes.

Since this indeed seem like a pretty insulting way to address a business
owner, maybe a more reasonable explanation is that Mayvenn earlier paid
commissions in store credits and not actual money? An alternative would be
that they pay in some sketchy way that can eventually be turned into normal
money. Both alternatives would create a need to reassure prospective clients
that they will indeed get real money at the end of the day.

~~~
cbhl
If the hairdressers in the target market tend to have cash flow problems, it
wouldn't be too surprising for them to not have bank accounts / be
unaccustomed to handling checks. Even in America.

------
yincrash
Why complain about the supply chain if the problem that's being fixed is only
the customer experience?

~~~
methehack
I noticed that too. I think it's the rhetorical hook but also the context. The
supply chain is a pretty good story and makes an interesting story out of what
would otherwise be "just" mobile e-commerce sites for hairdressers. Fair
enough. Arguably, fixing the supply chain to make it more efficient may
involve a series of dis-intermediation steps, of which this could be the
first. Perhaps the hairdressers will go directly to India or China -- or
perhaps Mayvenn will do that on their behalf (taking just a little bit for the
effort). Guesses. All guesses.

~~~
ochoseis
What I'm wondering is if this model would work for other things besides hair,
where the retail outlet is constrained on the ability to hold inventory. Maybe
mechanics shops?

~~~
dceddia
I know someone who runs an auto parts store -- their primary business is
selling to mechanics. They have delivery trucks that are out all day dropping
off parts to the local mechanics that called in saying "I need an alternator
for a 99 Civic." So the auto parts store is effectively serving as the
"warehouse" from which the shops buy their inventory as needed.

------
jgrahamc

        I’m into distribution, I’m like Atlantic
        I got them mutherf**ers flying across the Atlantic
    

What is the meaning of this quote? I read the linked rapgenius which explains
it but it seems pretty weak as an illustrative quote for the linked article.

~~~
navait
It's referring to the supply chain of illegal drugs. Heroin comes in from SE
asia, flown in to the US. Similar to the hair market before, it's a bad
system, with no way to do quality control of the product.

~~~
w1ntermute
More specifically, Rick Ross (aka Freeway Rick) was a notorious LA drug dealer
in the 80s. Now he's selling hair:

[http://www.lamag.com/features/freeway-rick-is-
dreaming/](http://www.lamag.com/features/freeway-rick-is-dreaming/)

[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/05/188908281/freew...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/05/188908281/freeway-
rick-ross-new-business)

~~~
arca_vorago
Don't forget that Gary Webb broke the story about the CIA running the drugs to
Rick Ross and other inner city areas, and ended up committing suicide (or
according to some being suicided.)

The British and Dutch started it with the opium wars and now America took a
page from their book and does it too. This is the real issue behind the war on
drugs. They create a black market and then own that market, makes for tons of
money that's unaccountable to congress (eg perfect for black budget ops).

Opium production in Afghanistan was almost nil before we invaded, and now
Afghan heroin is getting shipped straight to America and business is booming!
Similar things happened in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

~~~
mindslight
I hadn't connected the recent popularity of heroin with the decade-ago
colonization of Afghanistan. But of course, that's the time it takes to setup
mass cultivation, informal supply lines, domestic distribution networks, and
finally, social popularity.

Gosh, this shit really does camouflage over human-imperceptible timescales.

~~~
arca_vorago
The kind of entities that participate think in longer timescales than most,
which is a key advantage for plausible deniability. Strategically effective,
I'll give em that.

------
caseysoftware
One of my coworkers just pointed me to Chris Rock's documentary called "Good
Hair" \-
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m-4qxz08So](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m-4qxz08So)

Wow.

~~~
quadrangle
I think the previous documentary put out just prior to that is actually deeper
and better, see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Nappy_Roots:_A_Journey_Thro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Nappy_Roots:_A_Journey_Through_Black_Hair-
itage)

------
sswaner
Marc Andreesen made a comment on a recent a16z podcast that they were
interested in the challenges of global remittances. This seems like a related
interest: How can we use technology to provide credit, transfer and remittance
services to a user base that may be exclusively using mobile phones and/or in
emerging markets with limited internet access? There are likely a number of
industries where this pattern can be repeated.

~~~
basseq
This is a big thing in emerging markets—in some countries, even the people who
don't have food, power, or water infrastructure have cheap Chinese smartphone
and ubiquitous 3G/LTE data. In there market's in particular, there's a pending
shift for small businesses to move away from cash and to electronic payments,
which opens up a whole 'nother world in terms of relationships with financial
institutions, access to credit, etc.

~~~
stephengillie
On the other side of that _whole 'nother world_ is a blockchain waiting to
replace all of those relationships.

~~~
basseq
Not really. The underlying currency—be it bitcoin, USD, yen, rand, or
rupees—still requires lenders, payment systems, institutional agreements, and
general technical enablement. At that point it's all 1s and 0s anyway.

------
egwynn
“whom”

~~~
kyllo
I thought whom follows a preposition: To whom is the message addressed?

~~~
jjtheblunt
The pronoun is in dative case, or even if objective case, the test works of
"whom" because "I trust her/him" and not "I trust he/she".

~~~
egwynn
Just FWIW, it is not in the dative case. The dative case is only for indirect
objects (which follow pronouns), or direct objects specifically related to the
act of giving. Trusting is not giving, and there is no prepositional phrase in
this sentence, and so the pronoun is a direct object. But yes, it still passes
the test for whether it's objective or subjective.

------
nbhartiya
Hey this is Neeharika from Sonar. We spoke with Taylor Wang, COO of Mayvenn
yesterday and wanted to share a post on how Mayvenn's thinks about community
and SMS: [http://blog.sendsonar.com/2015/06/19/how-mayvenn-grew-its-
co...](http://blog.sendsonar.com/2015/06/19/how-mayvenn-grew-its-community-
using-sms)

------
sneak
What the fuck is with motherfuckers misspelling words like "fuck" and
"motherfucker"?

It's rude to misquote something. The rapper known as Rick Ross didn't say
"mutherf ASTERISK ASTERISK ers", he said "motherfuckers". It's right there in
the song if you hit play.

Why does he edit the text of the song but not the audio?

What the fuck is wrong with Americans thinking that some words are "bad" and
should thus always be misspelled?

If they're bad, stop using them. If you're going to use them, spell them
right. Spelling it "mutherf ASTERISK ASTERISK ers" doesn't keep my brain from
thinking "fuck".

PS: HN's markdown doesn't let one escape an asterisk to get a literal
asterisk.

------
politician
I can't help but see parallels between Mayvenn and Uber. Will the next we hear
about Mayvenn be its investments in lab-grown hair the way that Uber is
heavily investing in driverless vehicles?

~~~
rndn
It also seems clumsy how they appear to mention that a venture capitalist can
earn disproportionally more than a hair stylist and that they unfortunately
can only improve that by a little amount. The truth is, of course, that they
have mainly invested into Mayvenn because it's a $5B/year market and yet
another gap between massively occurring human interactions into which you can
squeeze a money-milking machine (cf. Facebook, AirBnB, Ebay …). I can't wait
to see these services being distributed, open source and based on the
blockchain.

~~~
politician
I'm not sure I understand your argument that open-source or the blockchain
adds significant value.

If you take the article at its word, the state of the art is a distributed
collection of small-time suppliers offering goods for sale without refunds for
installation by third-party integrators -- the consumer's stylist.

Mayvenn improves the distribution story by integrating the stylist into the
supply chain while providing customer service and inventory at zero risk to
the stylists who can't afford to carry inventory themselves.

Could you elaborate?

~~~
rndn
I was more generally speaking. In this case, I think some sort of regulation
would be necessary to improve the situation.

------
thetruthseeker1
Indian women sell hair to Chinese, who productizie it and sell to Koreans, who
further refine it and eventually sell it African American women == worst
experience? I think this sentence is soaked in prejudice.

Most global supply chains, some for super luxurious products have these three
countries involved... I dont know how that automagically qualifies for a
horrible experience

------
bsder
So, basically African-American owned beauty salons can't get credit even
though they are clearly good for it since this business can happily carry out
arbitrage against it.

Um, that's a pretty ringing _indictment_ of capitalism, not an endorsement.

------
aswanson
It's interesting that the yiddish word for expert is spelled similar to maven,
which is also means expert in English.

~~~
mbil
The English word 'maven' has Yiddish origin.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Yiddi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Yiddish_origin)

------
deedorgreed
hairbitrage

~~~
sp332
Barbitrage

------
jjtheblunt
WhoM do you trust? Not "who" do you trust.

------
_jomo
> _A nurse, whose dedication to her craft saves lives and brings hope to the
> hopeless, will make a fraction of what a crappy banker, who brings misery to
> everyone she encounters, earns._

A part oft this problem is that the health system is also an economic system.
It shouldn't be, but they're trying to make and save money in every aspect.

There are few things that I wish were more strictly regulated by the state.
Health care, with health as the primary goal, is one of these things.

