This is a well orchestrated publicity stunt. A reputed auction house like Sotheby's would never put an item up before thoroughly checking and documenting it.
Post this stunt, the artwork will now be valued much higher than what it sold for at this auction. Banksy has been known for such ingenious and clever marketing stunts.
Please tell me which other ingenious and clever marketing stunts Banksy, the anti-capitalist artist who refuses to allow his work or even prints (with rare exceptions) to be sold is known for?
(Alleged) anti-capitalism and marketing are not mutually exclusive.
Banksy has an eye for publicity, from selling his art for $60 on New York’s streets [1] to parading a painted packiderm [2]. Whether it’s to sell his art (which it does), sell his name (which it also does) or sell his ideas (which it does, too) is orthogonal to it being clever and effective marketing.
Yes, in this case Banksy is clearly trying sell his name and idea, I can't dispute that. But the comment I replied to implied it was done in partnership with Sothebys in order to increase the value of his art and therefore make more money from it. At least, that is how I read it. That kind of 'marketing stunt' is one that just doesn't fit into his MO which makes it hard to believe.
It was the very last peice sold. If it had been sold at the beginning or middle, odds are the whole auction shuts down, at best the tone changes. This was calculated.
Someone had to put in new batteries in it and they took it off the wall right away to show that there was no cord. It is possible the auctioneer himself was not in on it but others had to be.
“Like, hey man, if you’re complaining that the system is totally unfair and forces most people powerlessly into a narrow set of compromised choices, why are you making one of those choices?”
When I worked with Tom Morello he used to get it all the time too. It’s a bogus argument. There’s no requirement that one leave the system they are in prior to expressing fundamental doubts about that system.
I could often be described as an “anti-capitalist”, in the sense that I advocate for newer systems of organization of labor and productive resources, but I recognize that I do not live in a post-capitalist society. I still need to participate in the capitalist world to participate in society and acquire the resources I need to survive and thrive. An anti-capitalist will often need to participate in capitalism. They can still work to build an alternative system even as they participate in this one. The process of promoting or designing a new system could benefit greatly from some capitalist wealth to reach others who may want to exit.
Being against capitalism doesn't mean total aversion to commerce or the capital it generates., but opposition to market forces being the dominant ideology. Even hard core communists I know don't mind if someone is a bit rich (eg worth a few million), but are opposed to the vast concentrations of capital in limited liability firms, and want industrial infrastructure to be publicly owned.
Capitalism was never alive. We live in a state capitalist system. A free market capitalism is a fiction, and where it was almost a reality ( Somalia ), it never ended well.
As a piece of performance art, the stunt wouldn't have as much impact if it was shredded during the auction. The idea of establishing a classical 'value' of an object by process of auction only for that object to be classically devalued moments later allows you to explore what gave that thing its value in the first place and what takes away its value after its 'destruction'. Without having a clear moment of delineation between these two states, you don't have a clear way to discuss and understand this question.
Article 13 puts more onus on websites to enforce copyright and could mean that every online platform that allows users to post text, sounds, code or images will need some form of content-recognition system to review all material that users upload.
You choose A, Facebook wins. You choose B, Facebook wins.
I believe WhatsApp and FB Messenger are the two top chat networks right now (sadly), at least when looking at regional dominance. And since the value of a network to the individual is dependant on the size, AND they're locked up, they win whatever you choose.
You might loose because you chose the network with less friends, but that changes nothing in the end.
How is this not different from the strategy MS used to follow either kill opponents or buy them? How did the anti trust dept of US allow whatsapp acquisition since it literally made FB king of everything digital?
Mostly because they still have tons of competitors in the messaging space and they're not leveraging their success in social networking to force success in messaging. I'm personally reachable from 10-15 different forms of messaging (and neither WhatsApp nor FB messenger), and most people probably have at least 4-5 so it's a really tough argument that because of Facebook users have to use WhatsApp or FB messenger.
They showed a graph in the keynote, WhatsApp for one-on-one communication, Messenger for small group communication. So they see them as different use cases.
They may not have that data in a form useful for comparison, and the data may conflict with your assumption. Intra business politics / desired integrations / engineering reasons can dissuade teams from a pure data-based decision.
Not for Brazil, at least. Here, most people use WhatsApp: local and even larger business are starting to list their WhatsApp number in advertising, even radio stations use it for users to send messages instead of calling.
And it's even hard to spot a Java-applet based phone. Even the lowest classes just use cheaper or older Androids.
Messenger and WhatsApp are popular in different regions but combine both and you have the lions share of worldwide mobile chat users. For example, Messenger is much more dominant in the US, while WhatsApp is crazy popular in places like Brazil or Germany. So i guess they are just starting with the US market (Messenger) and will eventually offer similar stuff on WhatsApp.
I'm thinking that either they are really afraid of messing up WhatsApp like how the current and previous Skype owners messed up, or else it is part of the purchase deal to mainly stay out of WhatsApp.
The whole end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp doesn't seem in the Facebook spirit at all.
But they can't really monetize chat by inserting ads. That would be a dumb thing to do, even if we assume most users don't care about privacy. Well, the reality is even those who don't really don't like having an AI spitting out an ad in the middle of your chat with friend.
The Permanent Portfolio [1]. The plan is based on very simple economic theory, and historically it generates market-competitive returns in the long run with much lower volatility than stock indexes or 60/40 portfolios.
As in the peer thread on stock funds, this plan is not a great income generator because it's designed more for capital preservation and long term capital gains. (Unless you have half a million dollars in there and interest rates are favorable for the bonds or cash holdings.) But for me it's a great way to carve out savings and get some real compounding going. The longest drawdown in the past 40 years is 2-3 years, so I'm comfortable using it with any savings I don't expect to need to use in the next five or more years.
Implementation could hardly be simpler for the robustness that it offers. You put the money in and divide it into four parts. Once a year take a look at the balances and rebalance if any category is too far out of alignment.
For resources, Harry Browne's book mentioned in [1] is awesome for general investment sense and lays out the basics of the plan. Another book by Roland and Lawson [2] goes into much more of the nuts and bolts of implementation using different account types, tax status, and many other factors in individual situations.
Vanguard had very low fee reit index funds. If you want to generate income it is a good option (as opposed to stock index funds) because reits are required to pay 90% of their income as dividends. You can look at all the historical dividend data on the website
I parked some money in a vanguard reit a year ago as an experiment, and to create more of a balanced portfolio. Yes, it has paid quarterly dividends but it's also down -11% in total. So as usual, it all depends...
In terms of throwing off a lot of passive income, they just aren't very good though. Looking mainly at income-generating investments, the best index one might be Vanguard LifeStrategy income (with provides income and moderate capital appreciation to protect against inflation).
The yield? 2.1% Nothing to write home about. [1]
Is there some high-yielding, regular-income fund I should know about? Even allowing for sorta-irregular funds, you probably can't do much better in this environment, though I'd like to be proven wrong.
I found Choosing The Right Dividend ETF [1], which discusses several dividend funds and mechanisms they use to predict which companies will continue paying high dividends. A poster on another forum [2] warned that you should watch out for companies that prop up a dividend and then tank but don't roll out of the index right away. I guess that's where the more conservative filtering ETFs come into play (or you can screen stocks from the index yourself and monitor them).
The chart in [3] shows a few funds against the S&P 500. Prices seem to largely track the S&P index. Maybe there's a way to chart the dividend yield over time, too.
I use betterment for automated investing. It's pretty straightforward, they provide a tech wrapper around vanguard index funds. I agree with their portfolio allocation, so it works great for me.
This is essentially what Personal Capital, Wealthfront, Betterment, etc., do for you. I don't use those services because I enjoy learning about personal finance and I think the work required on my part is pretty easy. Your mileage may vary.
In the past 12 months, I've been up as much as 4% and am currently down 11%. The allocations in foreign stocks, emerging markets, and natural resources are killing me lately.
Yup. And the carnage created brought operator licensing, mandatory registration, mandatory & regulated insurance for personal liability in most states and a substantial traffic code + police to enforce said code.
But people have been flying RC forever. It's not like it's a new hobby. AMA has been around for 80 years. It's just a fad right now. Everyone couldn't fly 4 channel airplanes or 6 channel helicopters, but a monkey could fly a quadcopter.
The same guy who gets into RC airplanes and helis is not the same person who gets into quadcopters. From what I've seen the quadcopter community does not feel like the regular RC community. Very reckless bunch of folks from what I've seen, and they're ruining it for all the other RC folks like me who have flown for 20+ years with no problems.
Reminds me an NPR story I listened to a few years ago about how the cigarette industry is responsible for furniture needing to be fire retardant (people falling asleep while smoking). The story was about the unknown effects from the chemicals found in the furniture.
During the early days, whenever a horse cart came in opposite direction to a car, the car owner was supposed to disassemble the car and hide behind a bush before the horse came near.
I also read, maybe when a kid, that in the early days of cars, a hired person had to walk on the road ahead of the car to notify horses and humans that a car was coming, with a flag or something ...
"Mindfulness meditation reduced pain by activating brain regions (orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortex) associated with the self-control of pain while the placebo cream lowered pain by reducing brain activity in pain-processing areas (secondary somatosensory cortex).
Another brain region, the thalamus, was deactivated during mindfulness meditation, but was activated during all other conditions. This brain region serves as a gateway that determines if sensory information is allowed to reach higher brain centers. By deactivating this area, mindfulness meditation may have caused signals about pain to simply fade away, Zeidan said."
FUD was first defined with its specific current meaning by Gene Amdahl the same year, 1975, after he left IBM to found his own company, Amdahl Corp.: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products."[
Post this stunt, the artwork will now be valued much higher than what it sold for at this auction. Banksy has been known for such ingenious and clever marketing stunts.