Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.

If marriage is the equivalent of selling yourself into slavery, women with self respect should reject the offer.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about it’s history.”

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

Books are my comfort food!

White supremacy is terrorism.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Second rate reporter says what?

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

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Speaking of Crypto

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Here’s a pretty deep dive on someone who is not putting up with the nonsense from the crypto scammers, Wikipedia editor Molly White:

A 28-year-old software engineer who writes Wikipedia articles for fun, White is an odd figure to make the crypto industry cower. On her website, “Web3 is Going Just Great,” White documents case after case of crypto malfeasance: investments that turn out to be scams, poorly-run projects that collapse under mismanagement and hacks that drain supporters’ money.

As much of the financial and tech elite has rallied around crypto, White has led a small but scrappy group of skeptics pushing the other way whose warnings have seemed vindicated by the cratering in recent weeks of cryptocurrency prices.

“Most of my disdain is reserved for the big players who are marketing this to a mainstream audience as though it’s an investment, often promising to be a ticket out of a really tough financial spot for people who don’t have many options,” White said. “It’s very predatory.”

I have learned over the years how to spot bullshit, but I do not know the technical side.  Molly does, which is why I have bookmarked her website.

Reader Interactions

130Comments

  5. 5.

    Carlo Graziani

    There’s this odd feature of US financial markets since the Reagan era. They always need some version of a tulip mania. The classic constructive, essential roles of finance in a capitalist economy — connecting savings with investment, and insurance/hedging risk — have seemed insufficient to the types who have flocked to Wall Street since then. We’ve had manias over S&Ls, junk bonds, mortgage bonds, tech stocks, mortgage derivatives and others I can’t summon to mind, each leading to massive enthusiasm and conviction of a New World Of Wealth just for the sharp people who get in early, each really characterized by financial operators setting up huge complicated trades with themselves in the middle so that they can collect a rakeoff, and each leading to a crash and a poof of vanished wealth, with those self-same financial operators innocently looking straight in the country’s eye and saying, with a straight face: “I was paid fairly for creating value! Don’t blame the crash on me!”

    Crypto just seems like the latest iteration of this incredibly tedious story. The only difference seems to be that there’s been a democratization of the scam artists,– it’s no longer just Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and so on  (although I would be shocked if GS did not have some kind of crypto-issuing operation) — now it’s also any techno-libertarian cretin who thinks he (it is mostly “he-s”) understands money and the government shouldn’t be “printing” it, and the bonus of this incredibly deep insight is the opportunity to make practically risk-free investments because crypto is obviously the wave of the future. And not another tulip mania at all.

    Humans really line up to pay people to hurt them, don’t they just? I’m kind of tired of feeling sorry for them.

  6. 6.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    Part of me wishes I would’ve had the money to buy something like Bitcoin in say, 2012 or 2015, back when it was uber cheap and sold it in the run up last year. Of course, that’s knowing what I know now, which I couldn’t have possibly known. Who can say, it might’ve gotten stolen in those crypto exchanges by the owners like Mt. Gox

  8. 8.

    PaulB

    I’m going to have to take issue with this statement: “As much of the financial and tech elite has rallied around crypto….”

    I can’t speak for the financial side of things but the “tech elite” generally haven’t “rallied around crypto.” On the tech side, it’s been driven by a small, but very vocal, minority. The rest of us know just what a house of cards it is and how “web 3” is mostly smoke and mirrors.

  9. 9.

    RaflW

    Last winter we had a Lyft driver try to talk to us about some crypto product. He’d picked us up from our place, which TBF is in a fairly prosperous part of town “Hey, are you guys into investing…?” to which my partner very quickly said in a very gentle tone “We’d just really like to relax on our way to the airport. We’ve been rushing around getting ready. Thanks.” (There were bitcoin ads in the car, so investing.. yeah).

    He seemed like a youngish Asian immigrant. I have no brook with trying a side hustle. But man, he’s the kind of guy who probably cannot afford the sort of stomach-clenching drops in value that have been happening. You don’t drive Lyft because you’re investing your mad money. You’re working for a living, and modestly compensated at that.

    It pisses me off that, despite a lot of regulation of legit investing, crypto has been let to basically run wild for years. And to see places like the big retail brokerages get into crypto gave it an imprimatur of legitimacy it didn’t and doesn’t deserve.

  12. 12.

    catothedog

    As a very simple explanation, crypto currency is not any different from any of those “limited edition” beanie babies or baseball cards or classic cars.    It’s just an asset. And lime any other asset, its value will fluctuate depending on vagaries of demand.

    Modern currencies have somebody willing to backstop it. Someone with big guns and power who guarantee the value of the currency.

    All these attempts to create “money-like” assets out of crypto, is to  pressure the banking system   to become the bag holder  (like fraud mortgages during the housing bubble).

    The crooked VC’s will run with the loot, and the public will have to bail out the banks.

    Crypto is outright fraud, being perpetrated by crooks on an unsuspecting public. My sincere hope and prayer is that this will end like the tech bubble of the late 90s, and not like the housing bubble

  13. 13.

    PaulB

    @Carlo Graziani:

    There’s this odd feature of US financial markets since the Reagan era. They always need some version of a tulip mania.

    Back in 2008, there was reasonable speculation that much of the boom & bust we’ve seen since the Reagan era is, at least in part, due to the wealthy having too much money and having nowhere to put it. When the money was more evenly distributed, those in the bottom 80% were spending their money on things like a new car, a vacation, home maintenance, etc. There was less free-floating cash around to generate the massive bubbles we’ve seen.

    With things so badly unbalanced, and with so much cash floating around and nothing to do with it, it’s not at all a surprise that events have played out as they have. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. There is simply too much power concentrated at the top, along with that massive wealth.

  14. 14.

    JaneE

    To me investing is buying something I know at least enough about to make a decent judgement as to whether or not my money will grow.  It depends on the business as to how long is too long to wait.

    Anything else is just a form of gambling, relying on luck or chance to provide you with a winner.

    I don’t see any business behind crypto, except the people supporting the others who buy it.  I don’t need some secret fund to buy black market anything, so that reason to buy it doesn’t apply.  Frankly, I don’t see the difference between this and a pyramid scheme.  If and only if there are people willing to buy does it have any value.  Digital memory is really cheap.

    All the while there are real needs being unmet, both here and abroad.

  15. 15.

    MattF

    Dan Davies’ recent book ‘Lying for Money’ is a good read about financial fraud. Davies knows what he’s talking about when it comes to finance— you have to read his stuff carefully, but it’s worth the effort. He commented recently that big-time fraudsters are rarely first offenders- the web3 scammers are generally career liars.

  16. 16.

    Salty Sam

    I have some good friends whose tech-bro son has convinced them to get into crypto for their retirement plan (he’s a broker).  I cringe when they start talking about it…

  17. 17.

    lollipopguild

    @NotMax: My sister worked at Mickey D’s when they were giving Beanie Babies  away in the kids meals and she said it was insane. Customers getting into fights over who was going to get a certain one, employees being threatened because they had run out of that weeks toy(a different one each week).

  18. 18.

    Suzanne

    @NotMax:

    Catnip for those with cupboards stuffed full of Beanie Babies. 

    I had a part-time job while I was in college at an art supply and picture framing store. Do you know how many T E R R I B L E Thomas Kinkade prints I framed?! Just ludicrous amounts of money framing this utter shit.

  19. 19.

    Suzanne

    @lollipopguild: OH DAMN I WORKED AT MCDONALD’S DURING THE BEANIE BABY FREAKOUT. It was bonkers. We had to set a limit that one person could only buy 12 Happy Meals at a time. And we were in a pretty impoverished neighborhood, and people would still buy these things by the dozen.

  20. 20.

    Another Scott

    I was curious how the W Twins have been doing with their Bitcoin stash. Fool.com:

    But more than that, the Winklevoss twins are crypto pioneers and Bitcoin billionaires. Their journey can offer up valuable lessons on how to safely invest in cryptocurrency for the long term.

    […]

    BitInstant (2013): The Harvard graduates announced their involvement in BitInstant, one of the first American Bitcoin exchanges. Unfortunately, Charlie Shrem, the former CEO, was later arrested and sentenced to two years in prison for operating an unlicensed money business. Prosecutors said he knowingly traded Bitcoin that had been used for illegal drug transactions and money laundering. BitInstant shut down later that year. The brothers would later sue Shrem in 2018, claiming Shrem stole Bitcoin from them. An undisclosed settlement was reached in 2019.

    […]

    * Choose a reputable crypto exchange. The twins’ first taste of crypto was with a man who later turned out to be a criminal and stole some of their coins. You can avoid that mistake. These days, there are several reputable cryptocurrency exchanges where you can buy Bitcoin safely and cheaply.

    […]

    Genius billionaires get swindled, but YOU are going to be a winner!!1

    Top of Fool’s list for best crypto exchange is Coinbase. Wasn’t Coinbase in the news recently…??

    Someone is making lots of money in crypto. It’s not, though, all the big guys nor all the tiny players and day traders (remember them?) who are seeing the glitzy ads.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  21. 21.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Suzanne:

    Never understood why people hated Kinkade’s art. It’s kitschy and corny, but it’s still miles better than say, stick figures

    And really, isn’t art subjective?

  22. 22.

    Dan B

    @NotMax: When I was a kid my family went to Taliesin East.  I remember this guy trying to talk my parents into enrolling my brother and I into an Esperanto program.  Nope.  And my mother’s dream of having Frank Lloyd Wright design our house was dashed by my 6′ tall father.  He felt claustrophobic in Wright’s low ceilinged houses.  By the time I was 14 I did as well.  Fallingwater did that to me and the deafening roar of the waterfall was unreal.

  24. 24.

    Another Scott

    @PaulB: Excellent points.  Taxes being too low on the wealthy has caused lots and lots of problems, in addition to endangering our form of government.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  25. 25.

    Roger Moore

    @Carlo Graziani:

    There’s this odd feature of US financial markets since the Reagan era. They always need some version of a tulip mania.

    My theory is this is ultimately a result of the upward distribution of wealth.  We’ve been giving more and more money to the investor class without increasing the opportunities for profitable industries by giving more money to consumers.  The net result is more investment money chasing fewer viable investments.  The net result is there’s lots of money sloshing around in search of profitable investments, which has made bubbles more and more common.

  27. 27.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Roger Moore:

    What exactly is the “investor class”?Venture capitalists? Anybody can be an investor by buying broad index funds that have cheap expense ratios, sharing in the stock and bond market’s prosperity

  29. 29.

    Another Scott

    @Roger Moore: Yup.

    Bloomberg (from April 4):

    The European Central Bank may end eight years of negative interest rates in late 2022 or early 2023 as it steps up efforts to curb record euro-zone inflation, according to Governing Council member Bostjan Vasle.

    Negative interest rates were claimed to be “impossible” by some economists, but the ECB has had them for 8 years. It’s clear that too much money is out there, not doing anything productive. Taxes on those with giant bank accounts need to be higher to get them to spend that money (e.g. increasing wages and benefits, spending on plant and equipment and training and all the rest) and rebalance the economy.

    The evidence is clear to see, but our politics is so captured by big money donors that making progress on these issues is really really hard. Public financing of elections isn’t a panacea, but it seems to me to be part of the solution (especially if we can’t get rid of Citizens United any time soon).

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  30. 30.

    Geminid

    @Carlo Graziani:

     

    @PaulB: The low interest rates the US has had since 2008 probably made people more susceptable to speculative investments. Now, for better or for worse, interest rates are climbing and people may accept putting their savings in safer investments and go about their lives without trying to make that big score.

    Also, I think that a lot of people are so deep in the digital world that to them it’s artifacts seem as real if not more real than those of the real world, which they tend to see as obsolescent.

  31. 31.

    Roger Moore

    @JaneE:

    To me investing is buying something I know at least enough about to make a decent judgement as to whether or not my money will grow. It depends on the business as to how long is too long to wait.

    To me, the big thing is understanding productive assets.  Something like a stock or bond is a productive asset, because it’s either directly producing something of value or lending money to someone else who intends to produce something of value.  You can expect productive asset to have a positive return because they’re actually producing something.  Anything else- an option, currency, artwork, etc.- is purely speculative.  You aren’t buying it because it’s valuable in and of itself but because you think someone else will be willing to pay you more for it later.

  32. 32.

    marcopolo

    Just dropping in for a sec to say good to see BJ is back.  Hope everyone is having the holiday weekend they desire.

    Now, back to dinner prep!

  34. 34.

    Suzanne

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    And really, isn’t art subjective? 

    Sure, to some extent, it’s subjective. We all like what we like. But there is broad consensus on the relative value and creativity and influence of certain work. For example, Jane Austen’s work is usually considered to be of higher quality than a mass-market paperback romance novel you buy at the newsstand at the airport. To just throw up your hands and say that art is subjective and thus totally unknowable is a bit of a cop-out.

  36. 36.

    debbie

    @Suzanne:

    Agreed. Kincaide is kitsch, bought to match the sofa, not to provide any new insight into the world around us.

  37. 37.

    Roger Moore

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    The investor class are people who make money primarily from investing, i.e. the very wealthy.  They are largely distinct from ordinary consumers.  Ordinary consumers may put money into retirement investments, but most extra money they get will be put into increased consumption rather than increased investment.  The investor class already have pretty much everything they want, so giving them more money will result in a lot more investment and only a little bit more consumption.

    Note that to some extent giving more money to the investor class was a deliberate decision.  It’s part of standard Ec101 thinking that increased in productivity, and thus to the overall standard of living, result from increased investment.  Thus the best way of improving standard of living is supposed to be giving more money to investors to spend on productivity-increasing investments.

    The problem is this only works if enough money also goes to consumers to provide worthwhile investment opportunities.  If all the money goes to investors, there’s very little financial benefit from investing money on improving productivity, since consumers won’t have any more money to buy the new things you’ve produced.

  38. 38.

    pacem appellant

    I love Molly. I’ve been following her on Twitter for a while. And I jumped off of Twitter for Mastodon, and she thankfully cross-posts there, so I can still her barbs. Men, especially crypto men, treat her like sh¡t, and it’s a delight to see her stomp them to bits

  39. 39.

    Baud

    @Roger Moore:

    I also think at any given point in time, there’s a limit to how much extra productivity you can wring out of the economy through investment dollars alone.

  41. 41.

    Dan B

    @debbie: Kincade is like a three course meal of flavorless, textureless, and / or sugary foods.  No spice, no fragrance, professionally prepared but lacking most anything and near zero nutrition.

    I do love the Kincades with Godzilla or alien abduction.  Spicey!

  42. 42.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @Carlo Graziani: Remembering Alan Greenspan claiming that hedge funds and derivatives didn’t need to be regulated because of “counterparty surveillance.” Still super funny!

    Now it seems that every currency invention is ripest to be stolen and since most of the community of inventors and investors have no qualms about theft, there’s no way to rat out anyone without ratting out yourself.

  44. 44.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @debbie:

    But art doesn’t have to provide new insight. It can be anything we want it to be.

    @Suzanne:

    I suppose. But a lot of people have bought Kinkade’s work over the years. Obviously they most find some value in it

    How do we define quality? To me, I couldn’t paint like Kinkade

  45. 45.

    David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch

    Crypto is unreliable, which is why I diversified my portfolio btwn stock in Enron, Pets.com and Tulip derivatives.

  46. 46.

    Suzanne

    @debbie: Exactly right. It’s decoration.

    I mean, if philosophy is the study of human thought, I would contend that art is the study and practice of human creation. Some thoughts and creations are more insightful than others. Obviously this is all debatable and that’s part of what makes it interesting, but it’s just intellectual laziness to submit that there’s no way to look critically at it. Establish the criteria and defend your viewpoint.

  48. 48.

    StringOnAStick

     

     

    @Carlo Graziani:  Incisive and well stated.  The twist to the crypto thing is it comes with the libertoonian sauce of getting people to think all currency is just as illegitimate, and thus helps feed into general anti government sentiment.  That’s where I think there’s a Russian link in there somewhere.

  49. 49.

    Suzanne

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    But a lot of people have bought Kinkade’s work over the years. Obviously they most find some value in it 

    A lot of people like Justin Bieber more than they like Beethoven. None of that is a statement of quality.

  51. 51.

    SpaceUnit

    @Dan B:

    On the rare occasions when Kinkade put aside his formulaic shtick ( hobbit houses & sunsets ) and attempted something more somber and realistic he could actually be a pretty good landscape painter.

    He made money but wasted his talent.

  55. 55.

    Starfish

    @Salty Sam: It doesn’t matter that people are investing in stupid things. It matters how much they are investing in stupid things.

  57. 57.

    ColoradoGuy

    Kincaide is to art what Olive Garden is to food.

    As to Frank Lloyd Wright, I visited Taliesin West (Phoenix suburb), and there was a small movie theatre deliberately constructed so everyone had to cross their legs the same way (not joking!). I wasn’t sure if this was a cult or not. Also a little intimidated by a circular meeting hall, half underground, with a ceiling that was a bit convex (hanging down), with visible cracks in the concrete. Not too sure that thing was up to code.

  59. 59.

    StringOnAStick

    @JMG: The current search for yield is driving up home prices because investment funds/hedge funds are buying houses.  I’ve seen numbers like 20% of current home sales are hedge funds, of a newly constructed subdivision in TX being entirely purchased by a single large fund.  Just like how they bought up lots of foreclosed homes after the 2008 bursting of the bubble, and kept a lot of what would be started homes both off the market and converted to rentals.  Rents going up like crazy along with entry to mid range home prices is directly tied to this now being an asset class the big funds are exploiting because the returns have been so good.  Great yield levels.

  60. 60.

    trollhattan

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    He ran it as a kind of MLM grift, misrepresented how many copies of each, who actually painted what you were buying (not him) and for an extra fee you could bring your Kinkade to a clinic or whatever they called them, to have it touched up/embellished by an approved Kinkade “artist” and magically imbue it with added value. I found that last bit a lot like the American Doll people who have beauty parlors where Madison can bring Maryellen Larkin in for a shampoo and makeover.

  61. 61.

    Dan B

    @SpaceUnit: Pwople who love Kincade seem to be in a Venn diagram overlap with people whose greatest desire is to be happy.  They aren’t interested in the full spectrum of human emotion or experience.  It’s like wealth if you only count money.

    I’m not motivated to search for non-kitschy Kincade.

    My sister in law was disturbed that I loved Hodzilla and alien abduction Kincade.  She’s making a quilt for my partner.  We live in fear!

  64. 64.

    trollhattan

    @ColoradoGuy:

    Growing up our family was friends with another and the father had studied under Wright. Whatever Wright’s faults (too many to count) he gave the world many very good architects.

  65. 65.

    Xavier

    @Roger Moore: “You aren’t buying [stocks] because it’s valuable in and of itself but because you think someone else will be willing to pay you more for it later.”

    There’s a lot of that kind of speculation going on in the stock market. Developing a product or building a factory is investment. Most stock market “investing” is chasing asset appreciation.

  67. 67.

    Roger Moore

    @Baud:

    I also think at any given point in time, there’s a limit to how much extra productivity you can wring out of the economy through investment dollars alone.

    Sure, but productivity growth declined a lot when comparing the post-war era to the Reagan era and since.  I don’t think it’s purely a coincidence that productivity gains stagnated in an era when investors got the lion’s share of economic growth compared to consumers.  We can look at areas of the economy that probably could be automated but haven’t been because labor is too cheap to make that automation worthwhile, e.g. a huge chunk of the low-end service sector.

  68. 68.

    Suzanne

    @Starfish: I used to sell $500 custom framing to the Kinkade fans, and it was still less than what the Kinkade galleries (“Painter of Light”) would charge. And that was over 20 years ago now. LMAO.

  69. 69.

    Suzanne

    @ColoradoGuy: It was up to code when it was built.

    Wright was an aesthetics guy. That’s his thing. The people who commissioned him knew what they are getting into. Other architects are different kinds of people and thus their work is different. Vive la difference.

  70. 70.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @debbie:

    Or Cathie Wood’s ARKK ETF lol. It’s been something like 50-60% down compared to the market’s 13-19% this year. She likes to invest in “disruptive” tech companies and made a few bad bets. Only Tesla has buoyed the fund. Yet it’s still seeing record inflows. An interesting tidbit: she’s an evangelical Christian who believes God told her to create ARKK (which comes from the Biblical Noah’s ark, despite what ARKK officially stands for)

  72. 72.

    StringOnAStick

    I wonder just how many trillions are in the various sovereign wealth funds in the world?  And what percentage that is of the giant pool of money floating around the globe, looking for yield.

  73. 73.

    karen marie

    @ColoradoGuy:  I like the idea of Frank Lloyd Wright but find most of his buildings to be depressing.  Taliesen West looks like it should house a mad scientist out to destroy the world.   He certainly was ahead of his time.  The Winslow House (1893-1894) is a huge departure from what one expects of that time period.  I could live in that house but his later stuff really loses me.

  78. 78.

    SpaceUnit

    @Dan B:

    I just mentioned it because there was a little knickknack shop near me that used to have one of his better paintings on display.  It was a wide portrait of a stream meandering through a rugged winter forest.  And it was actually quite good – no sentimental effects whatsoever, rather stark actually.  Very realistic.

    I would have considered buying it had it been from another artist.

  79. 79.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @debbie:

    Don’t care for that Picasso piece, but I like Starry Night and think it’s beautiful. I would never say that Kincade is in the same league as Vincent Van Gogh, but I don’t think his art deserves the hate it gets either. It’s fine for what it is. Same thing with Kenny G and his music. It’s perfectly serviceable and there’s nothing wrong with that. Not everything has to be Shakespeare to be good

    ETA: I’m sorry if I made it sound like I thought Kinkade was comparable to the greats or anything

  80. 80.

    RSA

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    But art doesn’t have to provide new insight. It can be anything we want it to be.

    Think of it this way: If you want to talk about art with knowledgeable people (I’m not claiming to be one), you’ll have to engage them with more than devil’s advocate arguments about why Thomas Kinkade deserves more respect. In my experience, at least, talking with artists, the topic “But is it art?” exhausts itself very quickly.

  81. 81.

    Roger Moore

    @Xavier:

    I won’t deny there’s a lot of speculation in stocks.  The point is those stocks have some intrinsic value because they represent ownership of actual assets that are producing something of value.  Whether you think Tesla is properly valued or not, they are actually making cars and batteries and installing solar panels.  That provides a potential for profit that can be returned to stockholders and thus creates a basis for determining how much other people ought to be willing to pay for the stock: discounted expected future earnings.  Things like cryptocurrency lack that productive potential, so they have no discounted expected future earnings to anchor their value.

  82. 82.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Roger Moore: Years ago, I came up with an acronym for that: TALOMSAATT, short for “There’s A Lot Of Money Sloshing Around At The Top.”  Like you say, it explains so much of the bubbles and other distortions of our economy in the past few decades.

    (Didn’t quite take off like TANSTAAFL, but I still like it. Seems to explain a hell of a lot more.)

  86. 86.

    Sure Lurkalot

    I feel I can tell this story because both parties have met their maker and it blends crypto and art themes.

    I had an uber wealthy boss who bought art both for investment and to decorate the expansive walls in his home. He took a fancy to a piece at a gallery in SF, but balked at its price tag, which he could well afford many times over. Instead he brought home a brochure of the artist.

    My good friend/workmate’s brother was an artist and a starving one at that. Boss arranged for starving artist to paint a replica of the piece he liked for a fraction of the cost, which amount was at the time a lifeline to the starving artist, who truth be told, had grave misgivings along with his rent being due.

    The evil deed was done and the boss then reneged on the agreed upon price for some manufactured reason or another. And what could the starving artist do with the plagiarized piece he spent two months on but take whatever was offered?

    Both the art and crypto worlds are rife with moral hazard and if only the evilest ones got scammed, we’d all be the better for it.

  89. 89.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): ​ 

    How do we define quality? To me, I couldn’t paint like Kinkade

    And I can’t play music like whichever godforsaken 1960s band(s) played bubblegum hits like “Yummy Yummy Yummy” and “Chewy Chewy.” But they’re still crap.​

  90. 90.

    trollhattan

    @RSA:

    If he’d stayed here longer and studied under Wayne Thiebaud, Kinkaid might have turned out to be a very different artist. Sometimes your best resources are right under your nose.

    Fellow Sacramentan Joan Didion: “A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.”

    Man oh man, don’t hold back Joan. :-)

  91. 91.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Sure Lurkalot:

    Wow, that’s really scummy! That’s why every commission artist I’ve ever encountered typically wants payment before work begins on the artpiece

  93. 93.

    SpaceUnit

    I see Kinkade as a tragic figure.  He had better art inside him but rarely let it out.

  96. 96.

    trollhattan

    Soon to be arrested by the Gazpacho: the peach tree meat cabal.

    May 30, 2022 at 3:34 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard

    Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) was mocked for blundering the term “Petri dish” while floating a claim that the government wants surveillance on everything Americans do, including when people go to the bathroom and eat cheeseburgers, Mediaite reports.

    Said Greene: “The government totally wants to provide surveillance on every part of your life. They want to know when you’re eating. They want to know if you’re eating a cheeseburger, which is very bad because Bill Gates wants you to eat his fake meat that grows in a peach tree dish. So you’ll probably get a little zap inside your body that’ll say ‘No, no, don’t eat a real cheeseburger, you need to eat…the fake meat from Bill Gates.”

  98. 98.

    trollhattan

    Soon to be arrested by the Gazpacho: the Peach Tree Dish Meat Cabal.

    May 30, 2022 at 3:34 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard

    Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) was mocked for blundering the term “Petri dish” while floating a claim that the government wants surveillance on everything Americans do, including when people go to the bathroom and eat cheeseburgers, Mediaite reports.

    Said Greene: “The government totally wants to provide surveillance on every part of your life. They want to know when you’re eating. They want to know if you’re eating a cheeseburger, which is very bad because Bill Gates wants you to eat his fake meat that grows in a peach tree dish. So you’ll probably get a little zap inside your body that’ll say ‘No, no, don’t eat a real cheeseburger, you need to eat…the fake meat from Bill Gates.”

  99. 99.

    Yutsano

    Oh yeah forgot I need to redo the nym thing here.​

    EDIT: here meaning on my phone.

  101. 101.

    Achrachno

    Munecat has an interesting and informative video on crypto and related matters on Youtube.  Titled something like “Web3.0:  Libertarian dystopia”

  103. 103.

    Suzanne

    @lowtechcyclist: The thing about technical skill is that, with enough effort, most people can develop it. Most people could learn to paint like Kinkade with enough practice. Most people could play an instrument to a serviceable level, too. Most people just quit because they don’t enjoy it enough to put forth the effort. And that’s fine. But it does mean that calling something great because of proficiency is not convincing to me.

  105. 105.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @StringOnAStick:

    No idea as I haven’t been following it super closely. Looking it up, it appears she’s been trimming the fund’s holdings of Tesla lately. To me, she a ridiculous person. Recently, she had this to say on passive investment:

    “In my view, history will deem the accelerated shift toward passive funds during the last 20 years as a massive misallocation of capital,” Wood added.

  106. 106.

    Ohio Mom

    In her younger years, my cousin’s mother-in-law could paint a pretty good facsimile of a Kincaid. Her special touch was adding little figures of the members of the family she was creating the painting for.

    So my cousin has a large, schmaltzy painting of a cottage in the woods, mountains in the distance, the requisite spots of glowing lights and reflected sunlight, and little likenesses of her, her husband and two children and the dog. They are very proud of it but I think that’s mainly because grandma made it for them, and they’re in it. I bite my tongue.

  108. 108.

    Another Scott

    @StringOnAStick: There seems to be a lot of volatility in the housing business (some of it a result of TFG messing with Canadian framing lumber, fires, etc., etc.).  Bill McBride at CalculatedRisk watches it carefully.  Big builders may be hurting soon if the Fed squeezes too tightly.

    (Quoting Lawler):

    Over the last year some of the nation’s largest home builders acquired an enormous number of lots – either owned outright or “controlled” via land purchase option or other contracts – over the last year in anticipation of a continuation of a strong and perhaps even over-heated economy. Here are the number of lots owned or “controlled” for the three largest home builders.

    [table]

    Obviously, the land/lot acquisition strategy of these (and other) builders over the last 15 months reflected an assumption that the exceptionally strong (frothy?) housing market over that period would continue throughout this year. If, in fact, housing demand slows considerably this year, then there could be some serious weakness in the land/lot markets.

    Prices can’t go up 20+% a year indefinitely. A pause or reversal is coming – it always does. Here’s hoping we learned from the last housing bubble…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  109. 109.

    Mai Naem mobile

    I’ve always thought of bitcoin first and foremost as a tax evasion tool. Isn’t that the reason the Winklevos bros gave up their US citizenship and moved to Singapore?

  112. 112.

    kalakal

    Having only lived in US for just over 10 years I had until today been unaware of the works of Thomas Kincaid.

    This has not been a good day

  115. 115.

    Bill Arnold

    @satby:

    On a serious note, that discovery is going to be lit!

    I want the name of the ransomware gang or APT that perpetrated it. Might start [digging] if reliable information is not soon available.
    Most ransomware attacks are from Russia and are tolerated or encouraged or even targeted by the Russian government. It;s (metaphorically) state-supported arson.  (And the gangs are easily manipulated by other actors, too.)

  117. 117.

    geg6

    @karen marie:

    Kentuck Knob, not far from Fallingwater, is my favorite Wright home.  I adore Fallingwater but Kentuck Knob is…chef’s kiss.

  118. 118.

    Jinchi

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Part of me wishes I would’ve had the money to buy something like Bitcoin in say, 2012 or 2015

    The problem is that crypto looks pretty transparently like a scam from the get-go. The gamble of a ‘savvy’ investor is to figure out just how gullible all the other investors are, and that’s assuming you get in on the ground floor of a semi-legit investment and not a literal scam.

    We all imagine ourselves buying in at the dawn of Bitcoin and knowing enough not to get involved in TrumpCoin, but how are we supposed to know which of the hundreds of cryptocurrencies are actually going to grow and when to bail out.

    It’d be interesting to know just what percentage of crypto investors have actually made real money. My guess is far less than half.

  119. 119.

    karen marie

    @geg6: The idea of them works for me but not the actual places – they’re not homes, they’re thought experiments.

  120. 120.

    kalakal

    @Suzanne: It’s a shock.

    He’s bloody awful. I can see a fair amount of technical ability there but what he produced is the equivalent of the Clan MacSporran Scottish tourist kitsch industry that plagues my homeland.

    It was the “painter of light” that I lost it at. One of my favourite artists is John Atkinson Grimshaw* who was known as the painter of moonlight. Let us just say that any comparison between the two would not be to Kincaid’s advantage.

    *Grimshaw has an extra bonus for me as I lived many years in West Yorkshire, he literally painted where I lived and much of it is pretty unchanged

  124. 124.

    SpaceUnit

    At least the guy who painted Dogs Playing Poker was in on the joke.

    I think.

  125. 125.

    Butter Emails!

    @Jinchi:

    Crypto at its least fraudulent is still essentially a legal version of a modified pyramid scheme. There’s no or minimal underlying value. It’s all geared towards making bank for the initiators and first entrants. The innovation is that there isn’t any need to generate false returns or payouts. The increasing number of suckers bidding for a fixed or or heavily constrained supply drives up value until one runs out of suckers.

  126. 126.

    phdesmond

    this is relevant to the discussion on aesthetics.  it’s an anti-war poem by the deceased Tommy Raskin.  how long can you listen before you have to shut it off?   Where War Begins

  128. 128.

    Chris T.

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    Of course, that’s knowing what I know now, which I couldn’t have possibly known.

    Yeah, but if you’re FutureMan, you don’t have to do Bitcoin. Just buy AMZN at the bottom and sell it at the top, buy AAPL when it tanks and sell it at the top, etc.

    (There was some old SNL sketch where FutureMan is asked how he made so much money in the stock market….)

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