Burning gasoline for useless digging actually is bad for the environment. And it might not be amazonian rain forest that we're talking about, but an "empty land" is better left untouched than slaughtered like this.
Burning fuel for NASCAR and Formula 1 is also useless to a first approximation, and surely the land used for racetracks could be used for other stuff. But millions of people find it entertaining, and occasionally useful stuff comes out of it, like innovations in engines or telemetry or safety equipment.
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. ;)
There is no such thing as empty land. From the billions of microbes to the insects, worms; the fungi, the grass... something just lost their home or food
I think the fact that advertising persists in such widespread forms is pretty good proof of its efficacy.
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.
I think the "it's for advertising" excuse is actually the cherry on the top of this satirical turd pile. It highlights ever so nicely the feeling we all have that money thrown at advertising instead of used for buying actual things or paying people for actual services is somehow equivalent to throwing it into a hole. Yet, it's the advertisers choosing to do this. That's what makes it brilliant. Getting advertisers to literally throw their advertising budget into a hole, and when we ask why these sums are there, we are given the excuse, well, "it's advertising." As if that excuses it, in such a matter-of-fact way that we are supposed to accept it without question, as if it should somehow be obvious that that's not a waste of money. Amazing.
Almost every large consumer facing company has a huge advertising budget.
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.
I'd say they have very large advertising budgets for a fairly bad reason: advertisers for the most part throw shit at the wall to see what sticks.
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.
I'd say they have very large advertising budgets for a fairly bad but different reason: they're making useless crap nobody needs, and so is everybody else, so the product will drown in the sea of useless crap and will never make any profit unless a massive amount of money is used to make it stand out from that sea of junk. Of course, everybody else is trying to do the same...
The way I see it, capitalism doesn't work when people behave rationally in self-interest, because if they did, they would buy a fraction of what they do. Advertising exists to persuade people to act irrationally in the interest of a company.
The opportunity cost of the people digging the hole should be lower, and at the end, at least they'll have a hole. A clear win over the median startup.
Also often wastes fuel, time and other precious resources manufacturing physical swag that will end up in trash cans after the company inevitably dies. Externalities of the hole are at least related to the hole itself.
This is perhaps part of a lesson they're trying to teach.
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.
I think you're vastly underestimating the cost of the equipment, land, operators etc. The three pieces of heavy equipment would be >$5000/day. Plus 3 shifts of 3 skilled people would be another $1500/day. Plus the cost of the land, I'd guess they have 5-10 acres, and even super cheap land in the US is $1000/acre. Plus stripe fees. So $75k after fees - $10k in land - at least $6500/day and the current numbers will have them going for 3 days so $20k. If they make $30k in profit on this I'll be very surprised.
They did have a Black Friday sale once where everything was marked up. IIRC, they had some pretty impressive sales that day. They also did one where you send them money and get nothing in return (a donation?).
As a former member of the non-US audience who don't know what exactly is this Cards Against Humanity, I can confirm it's better to remain under the bliss of ignorance.
This game (Secret Hitler) ruined quite of few nights when I was an exchange student: people kept playing it while it was limited to only 10 players IIRC and was an obvious albeit less-fun rip off of the game "Les Loups-garous de Thiercelieux"[1].
If Secret Hitler is a ripoff of anything, it's Avalon, which is similar to Mafia/Werewolf, but is much deeper and lacks the issue of player elimination.
I'd say it draws more from The Resistance/Avalon Resistance than Werewolf, since it focuses on voting and scoring points more than killing players and eliminating them from the game.
Aside from what everyone else has said, it's also a shameless knock-off of Apples to Apples, which preceded it. It's basically the same game, but more profane.
I'd call it an "intelligent continuation" rather than shameless knock-off. Apples to Apples targets innuendo for a family setting, CAH is a very adult game.
This is one of the greatest things I have ever seen. Much better than the laser cutting of a Picasso. CAH is the OK Go of postmodern satire and have outdone themselves. Really incredible art.
I imagine many people not getting this is the same feeling I had growing up and being dragged to museums.
I think the interesting thing about this is to think how weird our economy functions, because at the end of this, all we will have is a net gain for the economy and an empty hole.
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 multiplier effect exists, but in the broken window fallacy all it does is multiply the wasted effort.
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.
The problem is that if you could magically remove all the waste in the economy, but didn't find new work for people to do, then all that happens is you have a lot of people out of work, which is in itself a waste. The way our economy is built, the waste from people being idle is in many ways worse than the waste from people doing things that don't need to be done, which is why politicians are always pro-jobs and never mind whether the work is worth doing.
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.
If we had something like basic income then maybe you'd have a point. But spending a lot of time looking for a job and not finding one is certainly a waste. Deferring expenses (like going without medical care) is a waste. And crime causes lots of waste. So, back to broken windows again.
I agree that the economy exists to serve people. The fact that the economy demands people get jobs in order to be served and then doesn't give them jobs should be seen as a damning case where the economy isn't performing the function for which it exists.
> 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.
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.
That parable is misleading. If his window wasn't broken then the shopowner would've invested it in some improvement to the store or as a safety cushion which would also trickle through to the relevant suppliers. We'd actually all be better off if the window wasn't broken because we should have some other investment that was equally valuable without having to lose the asset of the window.
That hole ain't gonna stay empty for long. It will probably fill with water and provide a habitat for a fairly large variety of plants and animals. Which might or might not be a net gain for the environment as well, depending on what species it attracts.
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!
a) Is it really a net gain for the economy? Not really, unless this hole has some other future productive use, because you're ignoring what this money would have otherwise gone to pay for in lieu of this 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.
I'd say it is a net gain. The money went to pay the company that dug the hole who used the money to pay their contractors working on the project, equipment leases, gasoline, etc. It will also end up being mentioned on the various blog and news outlets all selling ads against the story of the hole. CAH will also sell more product because of the hole & subsequent publicity. It looks like an increase in GDP (aka net gain for the economy) to me.
It's meant to be useless. That's the punch line. All the same activity to burry a fiber optic cable would give you better communications in the end. Now could you make a story about laying fiber exciting? Enough for people to donate to? Maybe not.
All the money I don't spend on absurd acts of Dadaism I just spend on liquor, which is bad for me and occasionally for those around me. So the world is probably a little bit better off for the money I spent on digging this hole.
It's technically (I say "technically", ask an economist and they will have to admit it is "very definitely") a net gain because they are selling a service and people are paying for it. The GDP is the total sum of all goods and services sold and this hole will increase that total by a small amount. I think the hole digging is hilarious and very clever. :)
GDP is gross domestic product. The problem is in the term "gross": GDP doesn't measure depreciation.
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.
I think what's interesting about this, is how you can manipulate online users by creating the perception that something is awesome and popular even if it actually isn't, using the magic of online marketing.
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 don't know if this is manipulation, CAH has a history of mocking Black Friday and making "in your face" jokes. I bet most people who send the money did it because they share the sentiment behind the joke, or just to have something fun to say to friends next time.
The central bank automatically equalizes over changes in money demand/velocity. That what a demand target (in the Feds case Inflation) is all about. So this action might increase velocity/decrease money demand, but it will not have a larger effect on Aggregate Demand.
You've got a type error going on here with money. Money is just how we keep score for "getting the things we want". Is this something that we want? Apparently, digging a pointless hole, streaming it, and asking for donations is terrifically entertaining, so yes. All things considered, the holiday hole is probably the best use of those resources. Like, construction equipment usually isn't used as postmodern art, but postmodern art is something we want, so yeah.
I guess my real point is something like "why aren't you asking this question about theater or television or live music"
That's exactly the point they are making and have been for the last two years. They were able to sell actual 'bull shit' to people last year and jacked up their prices last to last year and yet sales went higher than ever before. The margins from last year were distributed among employees to do as they saw fit and can be seen on their website (a lot of them decided to donate). The last to last years' went all to charity.
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.
Digging holes requires a lot of horizontal space. Generally 2:1 width to depth is needed for standard topsoil. Go to deep too fast and you won't be able to get your digger and dump truck back out of the hole.
Yeah, but it's not as impressive. With a drill, the only visual part is the machine at the top. With a conventional digger, you can have a youtube stream of the hole getting visibly larger every minute.
I wonder what will happen if someone enters their land, falls into the hole, gets hurt, and sues for damages. US liability law is a funny thing. Is a big-ass hole shown in video on the internet an attractive nuisance?
Oh, yes. But US liability law is a funny thing and its reach is vast. That's why US swimming pools tend to be surrounded with serious fencing with locked gates: to avoid liability for the kids and drunks and $OUT_GROUP members who would otherwise wander in and drown.
Sure you can. You just cannot use standard cheap home policies. I have learned that someone somewhere will always write a policy. It may be crazy expensive. But they will write it.
Yes, but 'attractive nuisance' laws are there to stop you escaping liability this way. If you make a super-dangerous thing, which is likely to attract idiots or small children, and then kill them, you can't just say 'it was their own fault, your honour, they shouldn't ought to have been there on my land...', rather you must erect a fence and post warnings. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractive_nuisance_doctrine
I don't understand when people argue like that. It's like punching someone in the face and when they ask what the hell is wrong with you answering, "Ha! I knew you would be confused!"
I don't think it has anything to do with the actual cost of digging. IMHO the primary reason is they don't want to keep digging for weeks. By baking in an artificial cost increase they make sure this will stop after a couple days maximum.
Yes, they seem to have set the digging period in advance. Somehow that seems dishonest to me. If they knew they were going to dig for 48 hours come what may, they should have said so.
The time added per donated donated dollar is decreasing towards a limit. The subreddit seems to think that it is designed to max out at 48 hours total.
Maybe they are reburying the Atari 2600 E.T. cartridges using a deeper hole this time in an undisclosed location. Perhaps they were never meant to be uncovered.
No, the money is paying for the cost of operating excavators. This is not a charity, the CAH team is not going out with shovels, the men driving the excavators are not volunteers. You're paying them to dig a hole. When CAH runs out of money for hourly expenses of hole-digging, the digging stops. That's it.
You pay for N seconds of digging. That's the whole thing.
Yes. You choose the charity yourself, send the money to it directly, and, most importantly, you leave the CAH completely out of it, because they don't care.
It's what the market wants, apparently. The digging will continue while the market exists. I thinks it's brilliant performance art and provides some introspection to a part of capitalism.
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?
Looks more like a critique to government spending money on unproductive shit as a measure to "improve the economy". The difference is that you are forced to finance that through taxation, whereas the hole digging is voluntary.
I don't know how people are making connections to government of all things. Because there are excavators there?
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).
I don't personally think it's a commentary on government, but it's a reasonable conclusion. It was John Maynard Keynes who famously said (talking about government stimulus) that the government should "pay people to dig holes and fill them in again". As a result, a hole is the classic example of a useless government make work project.
The folks at CaH have a history of pranks around Black Friday. They've invited people to send them money in exchange for absolutely nothing. They've sold boxes of actual bullshit. My personal favorite was when they raised their prices $5 and called it a 'once in a lifetime' opportunity and they still had record sales.
An interesting question is what volume of earth could they move in the allotted time with this equipment. In the live feed it looks like they are making the hole wide, rather than deep though. It would be fun if they accidentally dug up a massive fossil find or something like that.
I would guess most people live in populated areas where you can't just dig a hole without a permission from a municipal board of construction or some such governing body.
... you can watch the live feed. They're not digging up someone's backyard. Just because I happen to live in a city doesn't mean that I have no imagination for what things are like outside cities.
The thing is, I live in Hong Kong. And if you tried to pull off this kind of thing here, even on land that you own, it's possibly illegal unless you have other paperwork done because you may damage fibre optics cables or rupture a cooking gas pipe or whatever.
In the US, I don't believe there's any paperwork unless you plan to build something in the hole. Then it would be construction, but this is just a hole. You call a "utility locate" service (commonly known as Miss Dig) a few days in advance, and they look up all the records for buried stuff, and come mark it with little flags. (If you damage something because you didn't call, you bear full responsibility for the damage, but I don't believe it's a criminal act, just civil liability. But I'm definitely not a lawyer!)
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.
In Hong Kong, you may have a hard time getting the paperwork especially if you are not actually building something. You'd go to the offices and they'd ask you why you are applying for the paperwork, and then you'd tell them "I'm just going to dig a hole", and then they'd think you are crazy and say "no", and then you'd need to fight them through the Office of the Ombudsman.
This is Cards Against Humanity, if it's anything other then just a hole in the ground, it'll be very much outside of their usual black-friday offerings.
That isn't how it played out in 2015. They said give us money for nothing and then they spent it on stuff including giving a week off to their factory workers and buying stuff for the staff.
"For nothing" has 2 meanings and I think you are thinking it meant "for us to do nothing with". I think it meant "give us money and you get nothing".
I could be wrong though.
In their own words...
"Cards Against Humanity is known for our charitable fundraising - since 2012 we've raised nearly $4 million for organizations we love like Worldbuilders, the Sunlight Foundation, the EFF, DonorsChoose.org, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Chicago Design Museum. We even started a $500,000 full-ride scholarship for women getting degrees in science."
https://cardsagainsthumanity.com/blackfriday/
They don't have a history of burning money. It's inconsistent with past behavior as well as their own description of themselves.
The appeal to vulgarity is a tired cliche of social critique. At this point, no one can make a fresh point about it. Now it's just exploitation of the weak.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] threadI 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...
"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 have spent this morning depressing about it.
I still can't stop laughing.
This is so marvelously stupid, I love it.
[1] http://mashable.com/2011/03/31/godaddy-ceo-elephant/
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.
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...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game)
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWGJA9i18Co
That was amazing - thanks.
Postmodern is so passé.
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"
https://twitter.com/c_frieds/status/802217118964023296
They are making a point against the blind consumerism. And that too in style.
Companies have donated more than $1k in some cases and CAH makes it look a mockery of them throwing their money into a literal hole for advertisement.
Q: Why aren’t you giving all this money to charity? A: Why aren’t YOU giving all this money to charity? It’s your money.
(Educational tangent: the deepest hole in the ground is the Kola Superdeep Borehole - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole )
Upon death or filling, ownership is bequeathed to the plot of land that takes it's place.
So that you ask exactly that question.
0.6s/$ 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...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnX-D4kkPOQ
We need the gates foundation to donate a billion, that should get us 31 years on the clock.
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.
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.
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.
I remember reading something about both conservatives and liberals thinking Colbert's character was making fun of the other.