Franchises Will Disenfranchise You:
Carola Hagenau of Castle Rock, Colorado, was out of work but not out of hope. Her corporate employer eliminated her job during the COVID pandemic and offered to find her something else within the organization. But Hagenau, who was 56 at the time, didn’t welcome a lateral move. “I said, ‘Goodness, I’m of the age where I really feel I can do something great!” she told me with a bubbly confidence that seemed like her permanent attitude.
Both of Hagenau’s kids were electricians and she had been a realtor; she put all that in a blender and started to explore a home remodeling franchise called Bath Tune-Up. The recruiters pitched a fairly complex business as just a matter of finding the right words. “They said, ‘You don’t have to know about construction, you just have to know how to talk to people,’” she told me. “And wow, you’re in Colorado, that’s a prime opportunity! … You’re going to make so much money.’”
Hagenau described her reaction as like a cartoon character with stars in her eyes. She cashed in her 401(k) retirement plan, took out a Small Business Administration loan, hired an assistant, went to Dallas for a training session, and went all-in, hoping to leave a legacy for her children and grandchildren.
Within a few years, her children and grandchildren weren’t speaking to her. “They thought I was nuts, and I was,” she said. “I literally lost my mind.”
Despite a top-five sales position at Bath Tune-Up, with nearly a million dollars in annual revenues and multiple awards, Hagenau never saw a dime in profit. In a federal complaint filed this year, she reported losses of over $550,000, exhausted retirement savings, and a slide into bankruptcy. The money all flowed up to Home Franchise Concepts, the parent company of Bath Tune-Up, she said.
“I got to the point where I almost killed myself,” Hagenau said. “Because I couldn’t do it. I was completely on my own, with no one to hold me at night.”
She blames Home Franchise Concepts for her mental state. “These people gaslighted me, they told me I was a winner, and I am. But this model was a lie … what they told me was a lie.”
“The business model for the franchisor is to extract money from people,” said Kay Sharaf, a Kitchen Tune-Up and Bath Tune-Up franchisee from Bloomington, Minnesota who has produced a 29-part YouTube series called Inside the Franchise Experience. The series details not just struggles with the business but the franchisor’s efforts to silence her.
This reminds me: How many Amway sales presentations have you been fooled into listening to during your lifetimes? Me? Three. I like to think of myself as not being particularly gullible, but the facts don’t lie.
Why Does Meta Download So Much Porn?:
Amid tech companies’ ongoing efforts to vacuum up as much data as possible to train AI models, Meta has taken public posts from its own platforms, scraped massive amounts of content from the rest of the internet, and pirated millions of books to train its AI models. Now the company is being accused of downloading much more illicit material: huge volumes of porn, nonconsensual celebrity nudes, blueprints for 3-D-printable handguns, and millions of passwords acquired by hackers.
Strike 3, the parent company of Vixen Media Group, a prolific producer of adult films, is suing Meta for allegedly downloading 2,973 of its copyrighted videos. But in its efforts to collect evidence about these purported downloads, Strike 3 also captured information relating to many other files that Meta may have acquired over the course of two years: They include images from “Celebgate,” a 2014 hack that resulted in the leak of private photos belonging to Jennifer Lawrence, Kirsten Dunst, and others, plus several collections of deepfake celebrity porn featuring the faces of Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Elizabeth Olsen, Gal Gadot, and others.
Strike 3’s file-transfer lists include ordinary movies and TV shows, alongside dozens of videos from GirlsDoPorn, which was shut down after six people associated with the site were charged with sex trafficking. Meta allegedly downloaded several individual episodes from the website and two “GirlsDoPorn MegaPack” archives. Strike 3 also presents evidence that Meta made some content publicly available in addition to downloading it.
When I reached out to Meta, a spokesperson told me via email that “these claims are bogus.” Meta also noted in a court filing that Strike 3, which regularly files lawsuits against people who download its work illegally, “has been labeled by some as a ‘copyright troll.’” (I know weasel words when I see ’em. Those are weasel words.)
This is a complicated case. Piracy can be hard to track with precision, and both parties are clearly conflicted: Strike 3, in seeking damages, wants Meta to look bad, and Meta would prefer not to be associated with this kind of content. Yet if Strike 3’s data are accurate, they would show that participating in mass piracy is a by-product of modern tech development—whether or not any of the material collected is explicitly used to engineer AI models or other programs. (Well, duh.)
Nineteen of the allegedly downloaded files contain models of functional handguns that can be produced with 3-D printers. A file labeled “5.7 million passwords list” purportedly contains 5,718,107 passwords from accounts that were hacked from 2015 to 2019. The downloads also include password-cracking tools that can be used by hackers to break into people’s accounts. Other files include the movies BlacKkKlansman, The Banshees of Inisherin, and everything made by Studio Ghibli from 1979 to 2020; music by Dua Lipa, Elton John, and Paul McCartney; radio shows and podcasts such as The Howard Stern Show and 1619; and software including Microsoft Windows, Adobe Photoshop, Ableton Live, and NBA 2K23.
Hey, look on the bright side. If Zuckerberg gets in trouble over this, he can simply dial up Bryan Townsend to make it all go away. What’s that? Meta isn’t incorporated in Delaware any more? Never mind.
Will This Woman Inherit Jeffrey Epstein’s Fortune?
The young dentist was smiling and soft-spoken, wearing a Columbia University fleece jacket and holding her long hair back with a clip. She was introduced by her assistant simply as “Dr. Karyna.”
But what the patient — who had come to the office in December expecting to see a different dentist — didn’t know was that she was being treated by Dr. Karyna Shuliak, the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s girlfriend.
Dr. Shuliak was the last person Mr. Epstein called before he killed himself in his jail cell in 2019. She could inherit as much as $100 million from his estate, including a 33-carat diamond ring, according to a trove of investigative records released by federal authorities.
But on that winter day, Dr. Shuliak was working as a part-time dentist in an unremarkable office in Downtown Brooklyn, according to dentists who work or used to work at the practice.
Dr. Shuliak, 37, emerges as a complicated and unusual figure in Mr. Epstein’s world, based on a close review of the files and conversations with several people familiar with her. A native of Belarus who met Mr. Epstein when she was 21, she has not identified herself as a victim, nor have federal authorities considered her a co-conspirator in Mr. Epstein’s sex trafficking. There is no indication that the Federal Bureau of Investigation ever interviewed her, and lawyers for hundreds of his victims have never deposed her.
That, folks, is a tease. The article delivers. Highly-recommended.
We’ll let Board Fave Graham Parker sing us out:
