Dialogue Partners - what's the big deal?

[rousseau]

Consultancy can be such a scam at times. This is one of them. Make up a website, corral a few people with "experience in the field" for a bio and a photo, and get good at hitting the Control + C and P keys to add extra content to a boilerplate "report."

I'm well acquainted with and very accepting of the concept of paying for knowledge. I'll happily pay a plumber $100 to come over and take care of a vexing problem that turns out to be a simple 5-minute fix, because what for him is a simple 5-minute fix could turn into a disastrous $2,000-dollar boondoggle if I get my mitts on it and screw it up.

But these people aren't plumbers. There's a name for people who charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for "reports": shysters.