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hprotagonist · a year ago

  I met a traveller from an antique land,
  Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
  Stand in the desert...

OutOfHere · a year ago
IMHO, this is proof that an aggressive wealth tax on the top 1% would be well deserved, assuming that the tax is structured in a way that fully pays off the national debt faster than the debt can grow.
lenerdenator · a year ago
This is way more fun than spending money on content moderation team benefits or proper customer service.
sprior · a year ago
The misunderstanding here is that you think you're their customer - you're the product not the customer.
lenerdenator · a year ago
This mainly comes from people who wish to post their business or other commercial page on Facebook and have, for a reason that isn't particularly clear, been prevented from doing so, and no one at Meta can give them an explanation.

I don't have it in front of me right now but there's a Python podcast episode I listened to recently where a person involved with the Pandas project was banned from having some sort of presence on a Meta property. The theory was that the content moderation algorithms had marked his account as being related to the exotic animal trade because of the words "python" and "pandas" being in so many posts. This person had extreme difficulty in getting any sort of answers from Meta.

pushcx · a year ago
This might be less ostentation than assumed. There is a California startup named Monumental Labs who have recently developed tech to enormously reduce the cost of statuary: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-26/the-start...
igrekel · a year ago
Roman style? It seems like today's rich don't have statues depicting them naked like in ancient times.
snapplebobapple · a year ago
as Pericles sayeth: "ostende mihi faciem tuam libris"
chamakits · a year ago
This really opened my eyes to some historical context I never thought of before.

My initial gut reaction was judgmental about the way billionaires spend their money; thinking it might involve some amount of hubris.

Then I realized I have no idea of how sculpture that are now show in museums as treasured historical art pieces were judge in the time they were created. Today we treasure them. But what did the general population think of them? I have no idea.

I imagine that at the time of their commissioning they were also paid by affluent people that could afford such luxuries. People that probably mirror today’s billionaires in influence and access. So what’s different about these?

midiguy · a year ago
The difference is that Roman sculpture is revered for it's ingenuity and craftmanship at a time where that style of sculpture was being developed with the more limited resources they had back then, and it often depicted important motifs from religion, society, etc. Whereas this is just a copy of that with limited cultural relevance (no one is going to be talking about Priscilla Chan in 20 years, let alone a couple thousand).
HeyLaughingBoy · a year ago
This is on a level with the thousands of Roman sculptures that we've never known about because they were unremarkable and crumbled to dust long ago.
edward · a year ago
The Internet Archive got there first: https://www.getty.edu/news/clay-sculptures-of-archivists-sho...

Full disclosure: There's a statue of me at the Internet Archive.

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mysterydip · a year ago
Why doesn't she look happy (or at least not annoyed)? If that was the photo I took of my wife, she'd make me take it again.