I spend a lot of time reading the news, and it seems that everyone is  increasingly getting “slammed” more and more often these days. I hate how the word is being used. It annoys me because when someone says, “[Noun 1] slams [ Noun 2]“, it conjures up imagery of some awesome “pwnage” that has occurred, in which there is no recovery.  For example, “West Coast slammed by snow storm”, you automatically think of a massive snow storm hitting the west coast aggressively. In reality, according to the media, whenever ANYONE criticizes ANYTHING/ANYONE, the media automatically declares they’ve been “slammed”. What are they doing? Are they trying to trick us into reading their mundane articles just because it has the word “slammed” in it? Lets look at how much the usage has gone up this past year.

Its quite shocking really, for it to just spike up so suddenly, but its clearly evident that the media has fallen for that word! Lets look at some headlines where people are getting “slammed”!

‘Fishy’ watchdog review slammed by opposition
N.L. regulator slammed over survival suits
Paris slammed for skin show in Dubai
Cosmetic patient’s aftercare slammed by coroner
Chinese bias’: Aussies slam Olympic judges
Deadline for migrants slammed
Facebook gets slammed by environmentalists
Proposed changes to RAF Act slammed

In some of these articles, merely having an different opinion counts as slamming. I guess since I have criticized the media, this counts as a slamming. Thus, Anton slams the media!

Today at work, I was looking for a cache of an old site, Google gave me some surprising suggestions:

Erin Andrews? I wondered who that was. After hours of long and hard, intensive research, I found out. After I rested, I reflected upon this experience, it hit me like a ton of bricks: did Google manage to teach me something? I decided that since I’m no longer in school, there has to be a way for me to learn new things, so why not let Google Auto-complete teach me?!  Follow me into a this journey of discovery and see what new trinkets of wisdom we can uncover from Google!

155,600,000 results say people is good for me, so its settled: pizza is awesome!

Oh no! Apple is an evil evil company, in fact, they are the devil! No wonder they are the new Microsoft!

Lets see what Google has to say about girlfriends.

Girlfriends are annoying? Overrated? Like Bras? This one is just confusing. Maybe Google will tell me something better about boyfriends.

Hrm, I’m beginning to not like this. Boyfriends are not recyclable, nor are they like purses, nor are we mean!

Now I have become more confused. Megan fox is a hot man? So weird. This makes me wonder about what Google thinks about certain races.

Wow, lots of bad things about Chinese people. I wonder if Vietnamese people fare any better.

I see. Lets move onto non-people-related things. Something useful, like finance!

I get some obvious results, like “Finance is not fashion”, which surprisingly got 156,000,000 results. Do that many people confuse finance and fashion? I most admit though, I am curious to see how finance is a conspiracy against the laity.

I wonder what Google has to teach me about Beer.

Wow. Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. That is beautiful. Wow, just wow. I’m flabbergasted! I never expected such beautiful truths to come out of you, Google. To many people, you are just a search engine, just an algorithm running on some turing-complete machine, endlessly searching for answers. But to me, Google is a friend, an ally, my mentor. Who else could teach me such beautiful truths? I no longer need a reason to drink. Thank you Google!

During one of my nightly sessions of rampant web surfing, I accidentally typed in the wrong address! To my horror, I was not given the standard 404 page, but rather something from Bell!

For my non-techy readers, let me explain what is happening. Every website on the internet has an “ip address” that tells your computer where that site lives, that looks like a bunch of numbers, (ie. 128.0.0.1). You don’t have to memorize those numbers, because everytime you type in an address, like http://www.google.com, the computer does a “dns lookup”. Its pretty much like a dictionary, that has a list of every single site, and the ip address that it has.

So what happens if that site isn’t on the list? The dns lookup fails, and sends back a “404″ error to your browser, which then displays the 404 page that you all know and love:

Bell doesn’t do this. What they do, is hijacks the 404, and sends a redirection instead, to their crappy search page. Why? I’m guessing its because they get revenue for doing so. So who are they partnered with? To find out, just dig a little bit into their html, and you see:

Infospace! So what is infospace? They’re just a search engine that combines results from google, yahoo, bing, twitter, ask, etc… into one convenient location. So am I happy about that? Not exactly. I don’t like being told what search engine to use. I like using google. I WANT to use google. I like their results.

If you click on “about this page” there’s actually a convenient page that lets you opt out!

What does that actually do? Absolutely nothing. Bell still hijacks your 404s! Sure, you get the “address not found” page you are used to, but not really, because they’ve redirected you to their page anyways! It really hurt me then and there, being lied to like that. They’re still even loading infospace’s stuff into my browser!

Argh! So how do we fix this? I tried complaining to bell, but that didn’t go too well:

Me: Hi, I’m calling to complain about your 404 redirects.

Tech Support: What’s that?

Me: You know, when you type in an address that doesn’t exist, the dns server sends back a 404 message to your browser. You guys are hijacking this and sending us to your “search” portal page.

Tech Support: DNS? Err…Let me talk to my manager about that.

Me: Okay…

(Five minutes later) Tech Support: We are not really sure what you’re are talking about…

Me: …

I guess DNS server wasn’t on their scripts. So how to resolve this error? One way, would be to actually define your own DNS server. A nice guide exists at OpenDNS if you want to check it out. What it does, is sets up your router to not ask Bell’s DNS server for the ip address, but rather openDNS’s DNS server. So when you get those pesky 404’s, you get a real one, not the one generated by Bell, in a poor attempt to squeeze a few extra dollars out of their customers.

Unfortunately, Rogers is guilty of that too, so changing ISPs won’t work… that is..unless… you switch to teksavvy

A group of ten evil henchmen enter a bank. The evil leader rises up his gun, shoots a round of shots and yells, “Everyone on the ground! This is a robbery!” Frightened, the bank tellers and clients fall to the ground, quivering in fear, not knowing if they will make it out alive.

One by one, the evil henchmen enter the vault and extract their bounty. Hope appears to be lost, when suddenly, out of the blue, the hero flamboyantly falls through the glass ceiling, proclaiming to the world, “Never fear! Your hero is here!”

The evil leader, not wanting to lose his hard-earned treasure, orders the henchmen, “Get him boys!” The henchmen swarm around the hero, ready to beat him to a pulp. They attack him one by one, buts its no use. The evil leader squirms in anguish as the hero tosses the evil henchmen off to the side.

They’re now unconcious. The evil leader, in an act of desperation shoots the leader with his evil ray of doom. “Silly evil leader”, exclaims the hero, as the evil rays of doom bounch harmlessly off his rock-hard chest of goodness and saves the day.

So, what went wrong for the evil leader? The evil henchmen of course! Seriously. They’re being taught the WRONG things at the evil henchment academy!

Seriously,  it happens all the time, in kung-fu movies, super hero movies, power ranger movies, etc…  What is this problem? The henchmen are using a PRIORITY ATTACK QUEUE!

What is a priority attack queue? Basically, the henchmen all want to attack the hero. They wanna attack him badly, but they can’t decide who will go first. So, they assign themselves a priority. Sometimes its the strongest first, sometimes its the weakest first. Whatever. It doesn’t matter, because they always end up fighting the hero one-on-on.

Let us assume that we have a set of ten henchmen, each one will have an x amount of attack they can administer to the hero. The problem is, the hero will usually have a power level greater then or equal to the strongest henchmen. So with that assumption, the hero will be able to easily dispense any of them.

So what algorithm should the evil henchnen be taught at the Evil Henchmen Academy? Please. Its so obvious. They should be implementing an EVIL DIVIDE AND CONQUER algorithm!

The idea behind an evil divide and conquer algorithm, or any sort of algorithm like this, is to divide the problem into little parts, and solve those parts seperatly. After those little parts are solved, they are combined together into the final solution.

So if a henchmen were to encounter a hero, they would divide the hero into the following pieces:

1. Right leg
2. Left leg
3. Right arm
4. Left arm
5. Throat
6. Head
7. Chest
8. Testicles (Its an evil algorithm! Don’t attack surprised!)
9. Buttocks
10. Mouth

So if each henchmen were to focus on solely one of these parts, the hero’s attention would be too divided to even begin to fend off the attack. The henchmen would then beat each of these parts into a bloody pulp, then when the parts are combined into one final solution, you get a hero who is now a huge bloody pulp.

I swear. I should turn to a life of evil. Unfortunately, my evil laugh still needs a bit more work to strike fear into the hearts of my opponents. Until next time, same Anton-ian blog, same Anton-ian domain!

For my male readers who read this blog, this should be a familiar sight to you. You’re out in public, and you gotta go really badly. You have no time for the toilet stalls, so you make a beeline for the urinals. You’re a man. You’ve been equipped with a penis, which makes urinals a fairly easy thing to use.

Normally, the rest is easy. Not for me. According to my dear friend wikipedia, the average male height in Canada, is a grand 5′8! Me? I’m a mere 5′5 man. I’m ABOVE average in Vietnam (5′3), which explains why I tower over my family. But the minute I leave the safe confines of the world, I’m a midget.

So what does this have to do with urinals? Well, since the average male height in Canada is 5′8, I believe they place wall-mounted urinals to adhere to those of this height. If you check out this thread on reddit, they are debating what urinal people prefer: Knee-high or Waist-high.

My answer? Neither. Knee-high comes up to my stomach, waist-high means I have to be on my tippy-toes to even begin to urinate decently.  So that’s one reason why I hate urinals.

But you know what? I’m okay with knee-high ones. With waist-high urinals, a problem occurs. Let me show you a picture to illustrate the point:

As you see, I do not pass the minimal clearance. But notice that protrusion that sticks out? Usually “average” men’s heights allow them to rise above that protrusion, and thus move their bodies closer into the urinal; effectively hiding their junk.  I cannot. Do you see my perdicament?!

I am VERY VULNERABLE to peeping eyes! Now, you must be thinking right now. “But Anton, don’t you remember the number one rule? Keep your eyes on the road!” Yes, I know, but let us use some math to show you something.

The average degree of sight, for the eye, is 60 degrees towards the nose, and 100 degrees towards the ear:

So from the edge of the eye, someone may see something. As you can see, from the corner of your eye, something can be seen. Assuming the average man stands 15 cm from the urinal, and I stand 30 cm from the urinal, then what distance do I have to be, for my “junk” to be seen from the corner of someone’s eye? Let me show you with a graph!

To calculate this, we use similar triangles, with angles of 10, 90, and 80. So to calculate the visibility distance (distance away from the urinal), we use the distance from the next urinal (beside you) as the dependent variable. Thus I get the formula:

Opposite = Adjacent x Tan (10)
Visibility Distance = DistanceFromNextUrinal x Tan(10)

Which means if the distance between urinals were only at least 47 cm apart, then someone standing within 30 cm of the urinal would be exposed!

Gladly, most urinals clear this distance, or it would be a tight squeeze. New urinaters, on the other hand, that’s a whole other story! Maybe I’ll just stick to stalls.

I saw this quote, and it struck me as interesting. Would I be rich or poor? So I decided to find out!

First, we assume a few things. First, I’m living in Canada, so the life expectancy will be 80.4 years. However, I don’t even speak until I’m like 1 or 2. So for our second assumption, we assume that “innocence” is lost at the age of 10. That’s 70 years of potential kindness/horribleness!

So how many times does a person speak a day? According to a study, its pegged around 16,000 words a day. According to Oxford, the average sentence length is 15-20 words. Since it takes a sentence to produce something that is meaningfully “unkind” or kind”, we will assume that in a day, the average person can say 800 kinda or unkind things.

So altogether, that’s 70 years, which is 25550 days. 800 sentences a day, would equate to 20,440,000 sentences spoken in a a lifetime, all of which could be kind or unkind. Now lets calculate this!

You gain $0.10 for every kind word. You lose $0.05 for every unkind word. So if you were a person who only spoke kinda words, you’d make, $2,044,000! Wow, I’d be a millionaire! That’s an $80/day cash flow. Not bad eh?

If you were a person who only said mean things to people, you’d be in debt with -$1,022,000. A million dollars! Most people don’t have this kinda cash, you’d have to pay $40/day to keep up with this kinda lifestyle!

What if you were neutral? So every kind word was immediately followed by an unkind word? You’d make $1,022,000 from the good words. You’d lose $511,000 for the bad words, leaving us with a net of only $511,000!

Lets graph this data, to see how many kinda words per day we would need to break even.

Wow, look at that data! What this means, is that you can figure out how rich you’d be given a percentage of good words:

Net Sum(over 70 years) = 3,066,000 * percentage of good words – $1,022,000

So to break even, you would have to only have kind words 33.3% of the time, with unkind words consisting 66.7% the rest of your speech.

To FINALLY answer the question, I consider being “rich” as being a millionaire, so lets see how many kind words we need to net $1,000,000!

$1,000,000 = 3,066,000x – $1,022,000
$2,022,000 = 3,066,000x
x = 65.9%

So there you have it, your vocabulary must be 65.9% kind words, if you wish to be rich! I guess it does pay to be a nice guy.

I love driving. But too often, the experience is deterred by some horrible driver, who’s licensed credentials I horribly doubt. Here’s a list of some things that annoy me:

• Drivers who change lanes without checking their blindspots
• Drivers merging into fast highways at ridiculously slow speeds
• Drivers not keeping with traffic speed (driving too slow)
• Tailgaters/Overly aggressive drivers
• Cellphone drivers (they just drive so slow!)
• People who forget to turn off their signals (are they bad drivers who have problems changing lanes? Or did they forget? Do I pass them or not?)
• People who don’t know how all-way stop signs work
• etc…

I could go on. The point is, some people have pretty bad habits that really makes it annoying or even dangerous to drivers around them. So how do some of these habits develop? I have a few theories.

1. Crappy drivers who go to easy locations
   According to this Toronto Star article about “Would-be drivers shopping for easy road tests“. The article drives in a good point, “They pass their test. Now they come back to Toronto after being tested in Aurora. They’re immediately eligible for the 401. Even jumping onto the 400 heading south on your way home from the test in Aurora – that’s not a parallel thing. That’s very different.”

   So they get their license, and with the testing sheet, the examiner will provide a list of issues the driver should work on to get better. That brings the second theory:

2. People don’t try to improve their skills after getting their G.
   They get an easy license then celebrate! Unfortunately, this will probably be the peak of their driving skills. Pressure’s off, allowing these “hard-earned” skills to deteriorate over time.

   Not everyone is like this. A lot of people can be good drivers if they choose to, they just don’t try and evolve these shortcuts… the bad habits over time. I mean, some of the shortcuts are good and work (common, right lane all the time? That would be hell in terms of traffic if everyone drove like this!) But more often then not, its simply not safe.

So how can we fix this? First, lets look at some statistics from the Ontario Road Safety Annual Report:

• Number of collisions in 2006: 216,247
• Number of collisions per day: 592
• Number of collisions per hour: 24

So with 8,016,875 cars on the road in Ontario, 2.7% of them were in accidents aka it’s a 2.7% fail rate. Compared to products, the rate is pretty low.

Products failing isn’t going to kill you (most of the time). Lets look at the death rate in Canada, which currently stands at 7.4 per 1000 people (0.74%), so if there’s 8 million people, 59,200 will die. Its quite ironic, that the death rate is lower then the aforementioned “fail rate”.

So how do we reduce the “fail rate”? My proposal is treat everyone like old people. “Senior citizens” are required to renew their license every two years, along with a vision test, written test, and a group driving session. The point of this is to determine when they’re not elligible to drive any longer. This would be great for people, because people usually get their licenses at the age of 20 (estimate), and if they don’t have to be retested until they’re 80? That’s 60 years of detoriating skills!

I don’t think people need to be tested every 2 years, but at least 5 years. I really think that if 5 years after getting your license, your skills still havn’t improved to a reasonable point, then you really shouldn’t be driving at all. Driving is not only a privilege, but a responsibility. So by failing your “responsibility” to drive safely, then you shouldn’t be permitted to drive anyways.

In Ontario, licenses are taken away for racing, but did you know, that “the evidence shows that the risk of having a crash is increased both for vehicles traveling slower than the average speed, and for those traveling above the average speed [source].” So all these slow and bad drivers, not keeping with the speed limit, they’re actually all causing hazards on the road! They should be held responsible too.

The 5 years license renewal would generate money for the government, as long as help insurance companies with their rates. The insurnace guys could use stats, such as number of times you failed your renewal attempts, to judge how good a driver you are, and allowing them to charge higher rates for people who fail more often (thus encouraging them to actually improve their skills).

Unfortunately, systems will never catch all the bad apples. There will always be cheaters. You know, drivers who dress up for the occasion, then afterwards strip it all away.

I went camping this weekend, up in Collingwood, at the Craigleith Provincial Park. Its a beautiful campground right at the shores of the Georgian Bay. What’s unique about this shore, is that the shore is made up of fractured pieces of shale, which in itself, harbors the fossilized remains of thousands of trilobites.

On Saturday, my friends Alex, Farah, Nia, Theresa, and myself decided to go canoeing. We had attended to go on the bay itself, but the winds were strong that day, causing whitecaps to appear (when the wind whips the tops of the waves faster then the wave energy can travel through the water, causing the waves to break and making it dangerous for smaller boats). So it was suggested that we canoe down the Beaver River. Supposedly, the waters were calm and it was a novice course, so it shouldn’t of been a problem. As you are going to see, that was far from the case.

The plan was to go from Epping to Heathcote, have a short break, then travel from Heathcote to Slabtown, so we rented two canoes. Farah and Alex in one boat, Theresa, Nia and myself in the other. We decided upon that configuration because Alex, Theresa, and Nia were beginners. Farah and myself had no canoeing experience either, but we have been dragonboating for 3 years now, so we thought the knowledge would transfer over.

The canoe ride from Epping to Heathcote was very smooth. The river was nice and slow, which was great because it gave us time to figure out how to navigate and steer the canoes. Sure, we crashed into the shore a few times, a few of us got hit in the head by a tree, but overall it was a smooth ride. The river was beautiful, and there were no signs of cars, houses, or even human intervention for miles and miles around. The feeling of isolation coupled with our gorgeous surroundings brought upon a sense of great peace and perhaps even euphoria at times. We reached Heathcote fine.

Nia had been sitting in the canoe the entire time, just relaxing, while Theresa and I paddled. She wanted to try paddling, so we decided to switch the seats. I think this was our first mistake. The boats were now Alex and Theresa, and Farah, Nia and Myself. So off we set to Slabtown. It started off smooth. My boat took the lead, as Nia became more confident with paddling. We went around a sharp river bend and saw the water was beginning to flow faster. It was our first rapids. We braced ourselves, but before we could go through, we heard a yell from behind! I quickly turn my head around, and see Theresa and Alex’s boat dangerously dipping far to the right. A few more yells then silence. We started screaming the names but we heard no reply. We were scared, we suspected they had fallen in, but couldn’t see them, because we were around the corner. So we quickly turned our boat around and started to paddle backwards, but were were caught in the rapids! We started paddling hard, and even switched Nia out. But me and Farah just couldn’t fight the rapids. We cried their names a few more times. No answer. So we quickly pulled to the river bank, and I climbed up and ran around to see what was happening.

Thankfully, they were safe. They had capsized, but were okay. The water was shallow, so they were able to pull the boat up to the river bank. The only casualty? Nia’s cellphone. Relieved, I ran back to my boat, and told everyone the good news. I climbed back in the boat, and we waited for them to join up with us again. After a few minutes, we saw them again, and they were about to go through the rapids. They were going too fast though, and not steering hard enough, so they crashed hard into the sloping river bank, causing the boat to fly up a bit and toss them back into the water! This one was actually hilarious, because the river bank was quite muddy, and so, while pulling the boat up, Theresa slipped a couple of times, while Alex played in the river. No one was hurt.

We bailed out the boat, and we were on our way. We thought the worse was over. Alex and Theresa were soaking wet, our boat was completely dry. Life was good. That was until we saw a suspicious looking wire running across the river. The wire was right at our heads, so if we didn’t duck, we’d get hit by it. Also, there was a yellow sign on the wire. From far away, it looked like a black bird resting on a wire, so we thought it said something like, “birds like to play on this wire”, so we decided to paddle a bit closer to see what it said. Here’s what I saw:

Yes. Someone put electric wire across the river! We had gotten too close, and were going to hit it. I yelled out, “ELECTRIC WIRE!”, and frantically tried to paddle backwards to avoid touching it, but I couldn’t paddle fast enough. Just as Farah and Nia were about to touch it, they both jumped out of the boat, and it flipped over, throwing me into the water! I re-submerged and quickly grabbed the boat, to prevent it from floating away. Lucky for Alex and Theresa, they were waiting off to the side, so they disembarked their boat, and walked it under the wire. Unfortunately for Nia, she lost her sandals when the boat flipped over, and had to walk on the sharp rocks with her bare feet! Theresa and I felt incredible guilty now, because when the boat flipped over, most of the contents of our boat was lost into the river, polluting the once spotless water. It was at this point, that we decided to go back to our original configuration. Alex and Farah, Theresa, Nia and myself.

We set off again, a bit shaken from this “near-death” experience. Theresa and I would try to find any piece of garbage we could and throw it into the boat. We spotted a huge pine tree that had fallen down and our bag of chips had been caught in it. We heroically planned to grab the bag, to clean up a bit. Our intentions were good, but our planning was flawed. We thought that if we paddle right into the tree, we could grab a branch, pull ourselves to the garbage, grab it, then pull away. In reality, we crashed into the tree, knocking Theresa under the tree (but still in the canoe), since the water was quite strong at this point. The current was so strong, that we had to push off, or risk capsizing again. So yes. We failed.

Disappointed, we continued our journey. The water started getting stronger and stronger. The rapids got faster and faster. Eppings started to appear. Before I went on this canoe trip, I had no idea what an “epping” meant. Then I got home and googled it. An “epping”, is somewhat of a small vortex in the water. We really should of read that pamphlet more carefully. Our boat traveled swiftly down the river, trying to catch up with Farah and Alex’s boat, which was now far ahead.

Faster and faster we went. We headed around a river bend, only to see another huge pine tree that had fallen down to the right! We tried to steer hard to the left, to avoid it, and for a while, it looked like we were going to make it. But we couldn’t steer fast enough, the current was pushing us too quickly. The pine branches loomed before us, and we braced ourselves as we crashed into another tree. Theresa was knocked over. Nia was knocked over. I was knocked over. By the time the branch hit me, the boat was already leaning far to the left, causing us to capsize once more!

We lost everything again! Suddenly, I noticed that we only had one paddle, I cried out to Theresa, “your paddle is floating away!” Theresa frantically tried to run after it, but there was too much water, so she tried to swim after, but the water was too shallow! So we yelled to Farah’s boat, “The paddle! Grab the paddle!”, they too were too far to get it, so Alex jumped out of his boat and successfully got the paddle!

Nia had lost her slippers earlier, and now she was in the water once again, with rocks as sharp as ever, so we had to carry her to the shore, or else she’d cut her feet badly. Alex helped us bail out the boat, and walked back to his boat and we set off on our way again. We paddled for 45 more minutes until we finally reached our final destination. We have never been more relieved to have seen land.

We originally intended to only canoe for 4 hours, but ended up taking 6 hours! However, despite all the problems, we had so much fun. It was a great adventure that left us with a memory that will stay with us for a while.

In conclusion. This is a geek blog, and nothing has been very geeky yet. I could calculate our speed going around the corners, the distance, velocity, etc… but that would be too troublesome. So I am going to leave you with statistics!

Capsizing Statistics

This is how many times each person capsized:

Farah: 1
Alex: 2
Anton: 2
Nia: 2
Theresa: 3

Since the boats capsized 4 times, here’s the percentage of times each person capsized:

Farah: 25%
Alex: 50%
Anton: 50%
Nia: 50%
Theresa: 75%

Interestingly enough, Theresa was in the boat for every “human-caused” capsize. Does this mean she is bad luck? I am tempted to say yes, but the sample size is not large enough to warrant a conclusion. Perhaps next year, if we go on another canoeing adventure, I will be able to tell you. Until then, I want to say that camping is awesome!

I’ve been job hunting, so that means sending out tons of resumes and cover letters, so imagine my surprise, when a family friend calls me up, and asks me,

Do you want to come to an event hosted by World Financial Group? There’s a good possibility that you can get a job!

My girlfriend needed a job too, so I asked the friend,

My girlfriend is a business graduate, do you think she can send in her resume too?

They answered,

She can come along! Bring lots of friends, the more the better!

That’s weird. Wouldn’t it be AMAZING if Microsoft or Google let friends bring other friends in for interviews? But I was curious, so I decided to give it a try.

I went to the event, and after a few minutes, I realized it was a scam, in the likes of Amway, Primerica, etc… Here’s the gist of their operation:

• Operate by yourself as your own “small business”
• Bug your friends and family to buy your products (mortgages, life insurance, securities, etc…)
• Recruit other people to become agents and open their own “small business” under you
• Gain “passive income” (kinda like a commission) from the people you’ve recruited
• Teach the agents you’ve recruited, to repeat what you’ve done.

The idea is, by doing this, you become rich fast, gaining yourself financial freedom through the passive income system. During their presentation, they stated that they wish to gain 1 million agents by the year 2010. They also have plaques all over their office, stating things in the like of “Recruit 3 agents a month for some reward!” These two facts is the reason why it will fail. Its all about the height of the tree!

Assume there is a tree with 1 node. That 1 node has 1 million children (based on the 2010 projections). Each of those children MUST recruit 3 agents. That means 3 million new agents must be found. Each of those 3 million new agents must recruit 3 more agents, meaning 9 million new agents must be found. Continue this for a bit, and by the 10th level, you must recruit 6.5 billion agents! That’s the population of the world. (America only has a population of around 303 million, so technically it would of failed by the 6th/7th level). Here’s a diagram to illustrate the concept:

The thing that bugs me the most, is that they require each agent to make a contact list of 25 people, which is basically a list of 25 people that trust your opinion, whom you will bug to buy one of your products. Sure, this concept could probably work in the short term (but then you wouldn’t get a perfect pyramid), but you end up alienating a lot of people this way.

This is the 3rd time someone’s tried to get me to join a pyramid scheme. First was Quixtar, second was Forever Living, now there’s World Financial Group. It sickens me, how they all give the same talk, with the same loud crappy techno music booming in the background as you mingle with the agents.

If that isn’t enough to convince you of the scam, here’s what really hit it home for me. I did not see a single BMV or Mercedes-Benz in the parking lot.

The people at these places, always bash their jobs, trying to sell a dream of working for nobody but yourself, getting rich quick, as if working in an office is the worst thing in the world. I guess that’s why they can never convince me. I’m too much of a nerd. I truly enjoy programming, and the idea of becoming a salesman just isn’t an appealing thought to me at all.

On a side note, I went ahead and fixed World Financial Group’s wikipedia page for them. They cited all these industry partners and merely referenced themselves as the source. A violation of Wikipedia’s “self publication” policy. Its like telling your friends you know Barack Obama personally, and when they ask you, “how do I know this is true?”, you reply, “because I said so.”

This is a guide that no human being has seen before. It is a powerful guide that I have followed for many years, one that I have developed to help guide my actions. This is my guide to dating. The problem with a lot of guys, is that they are clueless with girls. They do certain things that boggle the mind, and are surprised when they get rejected!

The problem with dating, is that there is just so much uncertainty, its not a function, where if you are guranteed an exact answer, when you solve for x. Although there’s no exact answer, there’s still numbers to be manipulated, and if you do it well enough, you get the girl.

Lets suppose there exists a girl x who is a complete stranger. The probablity of you and her being in a relationship at that point in time can be defined as p(x,t), a function of girl and time. Since she’s a stranger who you don’t know (t = 0), the probability is actually pretty low, like around 0%-10%. The trick is to raise this probability, through various events and interations, until you get to around 50%-99% (you are never certain), at which point you guys become a couple (p(x,t) = 100%). A few rules:

1. As time increases, probability decreases.
2. Probability will increase/decrease depending on the action/event.

Let me illustrate the concept for you:

So think of it almost like a reward system. Events occur, in which you have the opportunity to raise your “relationship probability”. The reason for this, is because you want the girls to feel a certain way about. Its all about the chase guys. If you apply this model to real-life scenarios, it actually makes sense:

Guy Confesses to Girl His Feelings Out of the Blue
In this situation, the guy is practically a stranger to a girl, so when he professes his feelings to her, the probability of a relationship will be relatively low.  I see this happening all the time. Hurts me everytime, watching as the guy’s heart gets wrenched in a symphony of rejection.

Guy Picks Up Girl in a Club
They start off as strangers, but rapid escalation occurs. Starts off with the “conversation phase”, and they’re already hanging out, so if the conversation is successful, the probability is already relatively higher, around 45%-50%. Then as the night progresses, they get close and closer, until the probability is around 50%-55%. I guess at this point, it will depend on the morality of the girl and her level of drunkenness. So at the end of the night, she decides to give him a shot. Personally, I do not like this method, because of the escalation factor. You don’t really “know” the girl.

Guy Dates Girl Who Has Feelings For Someone Else
The probability can apply to the competition too. Unfortunately, the competition’s probability is usually higher then yours. That’s why you must raise your own probability to be higher then the competition.

Guy is Stuck in the Friend Zone
So you’re not strangers, you’re friends. But you’re not able to make it mean something more. The unfortunate thing about the friend-zone, is that the first rule of my concept applies: As time increases, the probability decreases. So the longer you stay just “friends”, the more she thinks of you as a friend, which decreases your chances.

Guy Flirts A LOT
Through flirting, feelings may develop. This is the case, where you raise the probability rate ABOVE 50%, and higher, so that when you ask a girl out on a date, you get to start off higher (65%-70%?), which dramatically increases the probability of relationship.

Guy Breaks Free of the Friend Zone
Although your chances decrease by staying in the friend zone for a long time, as the theory states, you can improve your probability through events and actions. To get out of the friend zone, you must make your intention known (but perhaps not too blunt, or risk a big drop off). Hang out. Talk. Be an awesome guy. Treat it almost like a “beta phase” of a product, where you are the product. Show her what kind of boyfriend you can be, and through these interactions, your probability of success will increase.

Guy Follows Anton’s Guide and Asks Her Out
You will ALWAYS stay in the fail zone, until you make that move and ask her out. At which point, you are automatically at 50%. If you ask a girl out, and she says yes, chances are she’s interested. Not fully interested, mind you, which is why the probability is only slightly over 50%, but at least its a start right?

It seems simple right? Events that increase your probability. But its this kinda mentality that’s helped me a great deal. The asking out part, was always scary for me, because I didn’t want a rejection. So I’d try to raise my probability by doing sweet things for the girl, and then when I got to around 75% certaintity, I’d make my move.

The system is not perfect. Each action you do does not gurantee an increase in probability, because there’s many many other troublesome factors that presents itself:

• Personality
• Hygiene
• Social Class
• Society
• Compatibility
• Girl has boyfriend
• Not the right girl

Some of the factors, you can control, but more often then not you can’t. But if rejection strikes, just get up and try again. You would of leveled up through all the experience you’ve gained, which will help you next time.