Mark Zuckerberg unveils giant Roman sculpture of his wife – AP News | Hacker News Reader

Mark Zuckerberg unveils giant Roman sculpture of his wife – AP News

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22 pointsssahoo32 comments

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

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.

This is way more fun than spending money on content moderation team benefits or proper customer service.

The misunderstanding here is that you think you're their customer - you're the product not the customer.

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.

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...

Roman style? It seems like today's rich don't have statues depicting them naked like in ancient times.

as Pericles sayeth: "ostende mihi faciem tuam libris"

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?

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).

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.

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.

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.

Mark claims that he's "bringing back" the practice of making "Roman" sculptures for partners. Was this actually common?

Does not look Roman.

Hard to tell the size, but based on the tree doesn't seem all that giant either.

It looks barely 2:1 scale, IMO big but hardly giant:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/entertainment-celebr...

> In the post, captioned "Bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife"

The "Roman" aspect is the tradition not the style I assume.

Ugly and soulless.

I wish billionaires were spending more on beautiful public places with cool sculptures.

Better than hiding wealth with art in storage centers that will never be seen again.

Bezos is funding this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now

Which sounds like it will never be open to the public.

Say's Bezos is getting the prototype. A public one is planned for Ely, Nevada.

do they not?

little island in NYC was funded by Barry Diller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Island_at_Pier_55

Say what you will about the robber barrons. We still have rockefeller, carnegie, and vanderbilt buildings, institutions, and colleges today. Being a patron for general public welfare was at least socially popular for the ultra wealthy capitalists in this country 100 years ago. A shame how that has changed.

We don't call them robber barons anymore, they've succeeded enough at spinning their entrepreneurship in the public eye that they don't need to build those institutions these days

Instead they now buy enough land to keep common folk far enough away from them on what used to be areas free to roam, eg what they're doing in Hawaii

I’ve visited Lanai, you can too you know.

> We still have rockefeller, carnegie, and vanderbilt buildings, institutions, and colleges today

A very narrow slice of American geography has those things, primarily within the Mid-Atlantic and New England states.

Regardless, they did that kind of thing back then because there was a real risk of a lower-class uprising if they didn't at least pretend to care about the little people.

They did that where they lived. Chances are if some town in texas or wherever had a local magnate in the 1920s they made similar investments in the local community.

Decadent nobility wasted fortunes in basically gardens and lawn ornaments. It's reprehensible, but I think most of us are already decadent and wasteful in out own scale, at least compared to poorer societies.

Christ the Redeemer statue of Jesus Christ in Rio de Janeiro is giant. This one is not.

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