Cards Against Humanity is digging a hole in the earth
holidayhole.com
holidayhole.com
Q: Why aren’t you giving all this money to charity? A: Why aren’t YOU giving all this money to charity? It’s your money.
(Educational tangent: the deepest hole in the ground is the Kola Superdeep Borehole - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole )
Upon death or filling, ownership is bequeathed to the plot of land that takes it's place.
I posit that someone who's banned from shopping at AMZN is more dangerous than someone who plays card games with a dark sense of humor. How does that even happen?
Fraud and abuse.
Treating Amazon like a mail-in library for books, tools, and other products is the easiest way.
Returning a huge number of your orders regardless of other forms of abuse.
Contesting valid CC charges.
Etc.
> I posit that someone who's banned from shopping at AMZN is more dangerous than someone who plays card games with a dark sense of humor.
I wouldn't necessarily say "dangerous". Maybe "untrustworthy" or "lacking in good judgement" or "lacking a strong moral compass".
They could be someone who cycles in and out of addictive or manic shopping. The word that comes to mind for me there is "tragic".
I probably wouldn't blindly trust someone who cycles in and out of addictive or manic shopping with a large line of credit or with carte blanc access to a lot of other people's valuables. Just because their addiction makes them untrustworthy doesn't mean they're a bad person.
Also, using Amazon as a library isn't necessarily indicative of manic shopping. It could just be that the person is acting in their own self interest and not taking into account the effects of their actions on Amazon's other customers.
Canceling valid CC charges has a lot of explanations -- maybe the person is just a habitual liar in way that's best thought of in a medical context.
But in all of these cases, empathy and judgement can go hand-in-hand.
doubtful that that is a strategy or else there would be a ban on common names.
1. Set a cookie (lowest form since cookies get cleaned/deleted, but useful)
2. Recognize username + email address (tied to cookie so multiple usernames/emails can be used)
3. Address - physical shipping address is difficult to constantly change (for a normal person, scammers that use drop addresses are a different story all together)
4. Credit Card number w/associated billing address. The billing address is also difficult to constantly change and would correspond to shipping address.
There are additional steps a company can take, if necessary.
Example I've heard: buying all the tubes of a certain kind of paint in an art supply store in anticipation of doing some huge project. The project realistically would've taken years to complete & their delusion was they were an unnaturally fast artist. Once they snapped out of it, they realized the work they'd done so quickly was shoddy, at best, though they couldn't tell in the grips of mania. They returned most of the unopened paint the next day.
Sometimes, the projects you failed at eat away at you, daily proof that you are as big of a failure as you think you are, marking your failure as a person. When it's already hard to get out of bed, having to walk past hallmarks of your incompetence makes it even harder.
Rinse and repeat a couple times a year.
That's what mania is for me: a surge of confidence in myself, visible to others as pressured speech and hyperactivity, occasionally leading to irritability. It varies from person to person, though.
Isn't that part of their business? I order stuff to try it out and if it turns out it sucks, I send it back. Isn't that the point of the online store to trump the disadvantage that I cannot try things out without buying them first?
EDIT: It turns out you have to do quite some abuse there and they even send you warning emails. So it won't just happen out of the blue.
EDIT2: What's with the downvotes? Here I was thinking this community is better than Reddit for certain things, but I guess I was wrong.
What's IMHO worse is that they remove Kindle access etc as well (I think here in Germany they've been sucessfully sued for that, so not sure if they still do it)
Also, AliExpress is like second coming of Amazon.
EDIT: re How does that even happen?, link with some examples that I dug out for a comment further down: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/mar/18/banned-by-amaz...
I really wonder why people put so much trust in such decisions by tech companies...
So now you've conclused she's dangerous, based solely on her standing with a retailer, without knowing anything about the situation?
I imagine many people not getting this is the same feeling I had growing up and being dragged to museums.
"Is there some sort of deeper meaning or purpose to the hole?
No."
"No."
Two different things.
Throwing money at a hole in the ground.
I think this analogy needs a little unpacking, because I am lost. What are OK Go the OK Go of?
I like the one they did in microgravity:
That was amazing - thanks.
Postmodern is so passé.
From the top of their page: "The holidays are here, and everything in America is going really well" (emphasis mine).
It's hard for me not to read the last part of that as sarcasm, given many people's reaction to the recent US election.
Perhaps CAH is saying that the US is digging itself a hole by electing Trump and a Republican Senate.
"tremendous" is one of the words that Donald Trump is very known for using. So I think you're right.
0.6s/$ is $6,000/hour (thanks @danielvf).
The excavator is around $2000/day[1].
The truck is around $2200/day[2].
Plus at least two operators with $200/day each[3].
And then the cost of Stripe's fees, buying the land, getting a permit (?), etc.
[1]: http://www.rentalyard.com/listings/construction-equipment/fo...
[2]: http://www.rentalyard.com/listings/construction-equipment/fo...
[3]: http://gcsenergy.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/2016-Hourly-R...
We need the gates foundation to donate a billion, that should get us 31 years on the clock.
I don't think "Parable of the broken window" captures the essence of our economy, it only mentions the handyman receiving 6 francs, and not him paying his suppliers, them paying their suppliers and so on, his tools, his rent, his taxes, etc.
The company mining sand is wasting sand and people's time mining the sand for the broken window.
The company that melts the sand into glass is wasting time and energy making the glass for that window.
The company that transports the window to the distributor is wasting storage space, energy(gas), and salary transporting it to the retail location(Home Depot).
The retail company is wasting storage space on the window, and perhaps a couple minutes of a salesperson's time.
The handyman is wasting his time when he installs a window to no benefit.
The insurance company is wasting their time handling the claim, and is implicitly costing everyone else in their client pool time with increased premiums.
And the person whose window was broken has their time wasted working in order to pay for the new window.
Any property that any of these people use is wasted, because if your office processes claims for broken windows the portion of the rent used for office space is wasted. (For example, if you spend enough time on broken windows, you might need extra staff and therefore a larger property.)
In each of these, maybe only a few minutes, seconds, or milliseconds(in the case of the sand needed) is wasted. But the entire ripple effect is ultimately a waste. In some cases, there appears to be no effect because a company may have additional capacity already available. But if you make a complete accounting of all effects, it is all a waste.
When I look at issues in economics, I like to erase the money entirely, since money is often nothing more than an accounting tool to make a graph reduction problem easier. In the case of a broken window, all you've done when you eliminate the money is waste resources, land usage, and many people's time.
Contrast this with a new window for a brand new building: Presumably that building is being used for some productive purpose, so the entire supply chain is implicitly being used for a productive purpose.
Leaving aside money, efficiency should never be a problem because there is always plenty of work that urgently needs doing. Freeing up people to work on more important things should always be a win.
That's not the world we live in. To explain why, you need money: nobody will pay for it!
Convincing people to spend money on things that urgently need doing is the heart of the problem. The broken window doesn't have that problem. It's a waste, but it's a very convincing reason to spend money, and the shopkeeper has money, so that's what happens.
Building a new building could be a waste, too. Overinvestment happens and new buildings do stand idle sometimes for lack of tenants.
Only if you believe people exist to serve the economy, rather than the other way around.
That isn't actually a multiplier. When the handyman is paying other people it means he isn't actually making $6. He receives $6 but then the tax man takes $2, the window costs $1, various other things cost another $2 and the handyman only keeps $1. No matter how you slice it the grand total has to be $6.
But you don't want a multiplier here anyway, because it's $6 of waste. If the $6 somehow turned into $100 then it would be that much worse.
Middle-class Americans spend more money landscaping their backyard than the cost of this entire project.
As part of the total cost of home ownership over a lifetime, a lot of people probably do spend tens of thousands of dollars on their lawns. Especially if they have an HOA telling them what their front and back yards should look like at all times. Much less fun than just digging a big hole!
b) Funnily enough, the example of paying people to dig random holes is frequently given in economics arguments to illustrate why the Subjective theory of value makes more sense than the Labor theory of value.
C) Holes are made to be filled. Next year's gag is probably filling the hole back up with something.
C) Like e waste for Christmases past?
The sleeper must awaken.
Arguably here they're pumping $X per day into a project that is also depreciating at $X per day (i.e. no net value is produced, ignoring the entertainment value of the stunt). So the project contributes to GDP but not to net wealth.
The failure to account for depreciation is one of the major problems with GDP as a measure of prosperity.
The only reason people think CAH is worth it, is because they think other people think it is funny and not stupid. If nobody cared about it, you wouldn't either.
I guess my real point is something like "why aren't you asking this question about theater or television or live music"
I have spent this morning depressing about it.
I still can't stop laughing.
This is so marvelously stupid, I love it.
What do I get for contributing money to the hole?
A deeper hole. What else are you going to buy, an iPod?Study after study shows that even if you think you're immune from advertising you still gain a positive outlook on a brand just from familiarity/repetition alone, nevermind if you agree with the content of the advertisement.
And they have for a very good reason.
People are easily manipulated, and advertising is subconscious manipulation.
I abhor all ads, and I never get how Americans actually willingly watch TV with the constant garbage thats stuffed into your brain. (it's not nearly as bad in most of Europe)
But then again, our economic model is dependent on driving demand (aka on people continuing to buy stuff, always more stuff), so it all works out.
Just see advertising as the necessary grease in the economic engine that is endless consumption.
There's some science, but the advertising here is a perfect example that many people have no idea how to spend their ad money in a way that meaningfully engages some target audience.
Besides, they are literally changing the world.
it's genius
Existing startups won't get any less money and research won't get any less grants because some folks take donations to dig a hole :)
Every one of us can think of ways this money, or any lump of money, could be put to good use. But instead it's being used to dig a huge hole.
And the same thought can be applied to many things in our economy. Gargantuan wastes of resources that __could__ be used to do good, but are instead squandered on pointless work. And none of us do anything about it, we just sit around and go "herp derp let the market solve everything".
This stunt highlights some of the naked stupidity of our society and how it allocates resources.
If ever there was an appropriate event for the quote.
---
A few weeks into the maiden voyage of the Interplanetary Transport System, a middle-aged woman named Alex Kimber sat quietly in the library behind the kitchen. The term "library" is perhaps a bit gracious. American walk-in closets back on Earth were often larger than this enclosure.
It was a good place for thinking, though. Not surprisingly, the compact spaceship didn't provide much privacy, as each additional pound of weight came with a $200 price tag.
Alex was near the peak of an enviable career. She possessed master's degrees in two different engineering fields as well as in political science, was the founder of two companies valued in the $10M to $100M range, and had held multiple advisory positions with her state's long term development board.
Her fellow voyagers were good company. Only the highest caliber applicants had been accepted for the first 10 missions. These "founding missions" were responsible for building a secure base capable of housing at least 5,000 individuals. All within five years! This would be an immense challenge. They would be testing the prototype blueprint for a self-sustaining Mars base.
These difficulties, however, were not on Alex's mind. She was ruminating on more fundamental matters. As both a scientist and passionate student of modern philosophy, her personal framework for understanding life was strongly colored by materialism and absurdism. On a pragmatic level, however, she found much peace and stability through mindfulness.
She had always felt that greatest institutions of the current age were severely lacking in their integration of such principles. The chance to tend to the young seeds of the first society on Mars played no small role in her willingness to risk so much and join the expedition.
Over the years, as she pondered the deepest dynamics of human relationships on both the micro and macro scales, Alex had scribbled down notes here and there. Yet she often still struggled to summarize her views.
An unexpected connection sparked in the unseen layers of her subconscious mind, and she opened her laptop. She began browsing through her collection of saved articles and other media. She clicked the "post-modern" tag, and a diverse set of articles, blog entries, lectures, and videos filled the screen.
The whimsical title "Cards against Humanity is digging a hole in the Earth" jumped out. She opened the file. Vaguely remembering this offbeat stunt from more than a decade and half ago, she couldn't help but smile.
Some moments passed. Her thoughts turned serious. A few clicks later, and a blinking cursor yearned at her from the blank canvas of the editor. Like a hurricane forming from the gentle flaps of a butterfly's wings, the keys of her laptop softly succumbed to the pressure of her fingertips, and the text "Mars Political Treatise: Volume 1" filled the first line of the page...
Black Friday 2017 - plot twist! For each $10 donated, CAH will put $7 in cash in the hole (using the remaining $3 to secure it against elements). At the end of the fundraiser, they'll fill the hole back in, creating a literal case of hidden underground treasure.
Over the past 3 years, I have created about 4 or 5 web apps, and sunk my own money into them to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. In most cases, it was a struggle to get people to pay even $3/month for one of them, and I ended up shuttering some of them.
The feeling I get from this is that hundreds and hundred of hours of blood, sweat and tears from me, (which includes 50 years of knowledge, and personal sacrifices that I and my family have had to make) is, at the end of the day, worth less than a hole in the earth.
Excuse me while I go sit in a darkened room and ruminate about this over a glass of wine.
I've been there, so please don't take this the wrong way, but yes, your hundreds of hours of blood, sweat, and tears may mean less than a hole in the ground. And why shouldn't it?
Your hard work on its own means basically nothing to anyone. People buy because of the perceived value to them of what they're buying, not because of what the seller did or didn't put into it. If people weren't going to pay $3 / month for your project, it's because you weren't offering them at least $3 / month of perceived value.
There is basically no connection that I can see between how much hard work goes into something and how much the market is willing to pay for it. Some people labor a lifetime on something that no one will ever want, others spend a weekend throwing together a website that will one day IPO for billions [1].
This is why so many successful startup founders and investors advise getting a project out there as quickly as possible and iterating rapidly to either find product / market fit, or to abandon it for something else. Fighting an uphill battle to make people want something that they don't care about, just because you've poured so much into it is a recipe for disaster.
Again, I've been there, so please don't take any of this the wrong way! Just my own rumination in response.
1. Yes, a lot of hard work goes into it along the way, but that's a hell of a lot easier with early success.
But seeing people put even $10 into the 'hole' project just highlights that someone, somewhere, thinks that giving their hard earned $10 is better value to them than an app that costs $3. More than 3 times the worth, really.
That kind of thing really sucks, to me. I've spent a few dollars here and there in the past to support people whom I think deserved it for their efforts - be it a small trinket at a craft fair or a CD from a busking musician in the street. To me, spending money on the efforts of their craft (even if it is on things I didn't really need) rather than a cup of coffee, or a hole, says to them "I think that your efforts and creative energy are worth something, and I am willing to give you some of my hard earned cash to prove its worth". Even giving a few dollars to a homeless person is leveraging the money for the betterment of humanity.
The sadness here is the fact that I live in a society that thinks a hole in the ground is worth more that someone's creative output. All the worse for the fact that they are prepared to make a statement about it by quite literally throwing away money to make their point. Is this the every day person's equivalent of lighting up cigars with $100 bills?
I put $10 in the hole. If such a thing existed, I'd be willing to put a lot more toward any effort that would plausibly put Facebook out of business without an equally evil alternative arising.
I can't say the same for your apps, since I don't know you or your apps, but the average app I wouldn't install for free, because I know they would collect my data and use it against my interests.
The same people who avoid your app likely think email isn't worth $3/month, do you?
I think one of the base factors people fail to take into account is "will the outcome / result exist if I _don't_ contribute".
Sometimes the current / alternatives are _good enough_ that reasonable options are completely overlooked. I bet Yahoo could have found your last 10 searches, but you probably wouldn't say their search service is worth less than a hole in the ground, right?
If your apps were unique compared to alternatives, this could also be a barrier until some of those elements are more widespread or common. I don't know what you can really do in this case.
I'm probably not the best person to comment from a business perspective, I've never launched a personal project or anything, but your 'failures' sound like you were able to build the apps you had envisioned, which is awesome. You're basically where I'm aiming to be in the next 5 years, for what it's worth.
They are making a point against the blind consumerism. And that too in style.
Companies have donated more than $1k in some cases and CAH makes it look a mockery of them throwing their money into a literal hole for advertisement.
I'd been racking my brain, thinking it sounded too sarcastic for a BBC doco, I didn't even think of The Simpsons.
At the moment it's a vehicle code scanner, LEO/Tachical gear, flavored nicotine (I guess?), and a BBQ thermometer.
They even state at their page "Why don't you donate this to a charity?" and they reply, "It's your money. Why don't YOU donate it to a charity.".
It's almost like we are looking past the mirror they have held up for us in our faces.
http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/topics/oakisland/story....
I remember reading something about both conservatives and liberals thinking Colbert's character was making fun of the other.
It's a card game where a group of people piece together sentences with cards with phrases and words. One of the funniest "party games" I've played.
The company is also known for viral marketing campaigns, like mail-order poo.
They also have a more elaborate social deduction game called Secret Hitler about politics in Weimar Germany. With cartoon lizards.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Werewolves_of_Millers_Holl...
That means that they can't dig longer than ~3.417998 x (10^300) years.
If you'd like to find the exact amount, you can copy this into the custom amount field and keep altering digits until you come up with the right number:
179769313000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
…we're gonna need a bigger hole. Keep going.
I threw in 15 dollars for entertainment purposes.
They don't have a history of burning money. It's inconsistent with past behavior as well as their own description of themselves.
So that you ask exactly that question.
I tried presenting that argument to the judge, but I still got sentenced :(
I would suggest you stay away from Cards Against Humanity (and threads thereabout), as jokes like these are literally the game's raison d'être.
CAH's black Friday stunts have consistently shown that people will spend money on stupid shit they don't need. Maybe there's a deeper lesson in there on the nature of people?
Anyway, judging by the history of CAH Black Friday stunts, I'd say it's definitely a critique of consumerism - of people spending money to buy stupid shit. The difference between CAH and all other Black Friday sales is that CAH tells you up-front you're buying stupid shit (at one occasion, they literally sold bull shit).
In this case, they probably checked those records and found a big patch of land with no underground utilities at all, before buying it. In rural areas that includes most land.
In the city: Fiber optics run chiefly along suspended wires (search terms "messenger wire" and "aerial cable") or buried in conduits along established cable routes. Municipal water and sewer lines usually run under roads or along easements parallel to roads. Taps serving individual buildings branch off these. Electrical wires are usually aerial, and in places where they're run underground, they're usually very well marked and dotted with pad-mounted transformers along their length.
If you wanted to dig a hole like this in the city, you'd be navigating a forest of little flags and might have a very hard time of it.
In rural areas: Fiber optics usually run along railroad tracks, since those are pre-existing straight-line paths that connect population centers. Oil and gas pipelines are usually underground but usually well-marked and often kept clear of vegetation on the surface for inspection purposes. Electrical wires in rural areas are always aerial. Water is usually from wells, sewage is handled in septic systems, and heating gas is trucked around and stored in tanks at each house, so there are no buried lines for any of those.
Digging a hole like this out in the country is pretty straightforward.
EDIT: It's OK. I was naive. I had thought it was a joke AND had a good cause.
>Why aren’t you giving all this money to charity?
>Why aren’t YOU giving all this money to charity? It’s your money.
You pay for N seconds of digging. That's the whole thing.
>Q: Why aren’t you giving all this money to charity? A: Why aren’t YOU giving all this money to charity? It’s your money.
"Is the hole bad for the environment? No, this was just a bunch of empty land. Now there’s a hole there. That’s life."
Edit: Lol, I'm not endorsing their answer. Just pointing it out.
Edit: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted, those three vehicles are burning diesel...
How is this any different? It's entertaining plenty of us, it's less fuel than a race and less land than a racetrack, and maybe we'll learn something in the process. Maybe innovations in moderating the futility of online comment systems. ;)
I mean, if the only loss is some flowers and a mound of dirt I don't really see how it's a "nature massacre".
Massacre is a pretty strong word...