Lily!
How about paying the grants back?
That's Impossible- dot com.
Californian tycoons stole my sharing economy, says Lily Cole
Big Money has poisoned the utopia of the sharing economy, says the millionaire supermodel and “social entrepreneur” Lily Cole. Once upon a time, unicorns grazed innocently over websites like Cole’s own Impossible.com, the “gift economy” website that was powered only by love (and a gift from taxpayers). Contributors were happy …
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Tuesday 8th March 2016 15:29 GMT Preston Munchensonton
Re: Lily!
And the complete berk who authorised them not once, but twice now should be fired for blatantly throwing tax payers money at a sinking stinking ship.
In case you hadn't noticed, the line forms to the left for those in public service that waste taxpayers' money. I might go so far as to suggest that there isn't a politician or bureaucrat for whom this wouldn't apply.
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Tuesday 8th March 2016 12:37 GMT tiggity
And I wonder what the carbon footprint, use of planetary resources of Coles lifestyle is compared to your average UK pleb?
I so love to be preached at by people who do so much travel outside the UK, I especially think about them flying across the Atlantic as I stand (sardine special commuter train, only the lucky few sit) on my commuter train thinking how unworthy & profligate I am for wasting resources by not walking 15 miles to work.
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Tuesday 8th March 2016 13:51 GMT Triggerfish
@Tiggity
This.
The amount of privileged people who stand there saying we should give up stuff as long as it's not their stuff. Or telling us from one of their many million pound mansions, how we should be helping the homeless or giving them our money to help with the latest charity they have decided to promote in the hope of appearing on the queens honours list or something, all the while having more cash than they actually ever really need to live comfortably.
Well they can all fuck off.
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Wednesday 9th March 2016 00:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Adam Hart-Davis once did an interview that pissed me off. I can't remember exactly what was said (it was many years ago), but the basic gist was that we all needed to stop flying, before then telling us all about his fact finding trips to Africa and America. Presumably flying at the front of the place at license payers expense.
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Tuesday 8th March 2016 12:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Nobody is sharing my "under utilized resources". Take the drill as an example. It's a wear component, it will come back from being "shared" fucked up.
It's like when people ask to "borrow" consumables like paint. May as well just give them £10 to buy a pot of paint.
Let's limit sharing to Hollywood movie torrents.
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Tuesday 8th March 2016 12:41 GMT Dave 126
There's a serious thought...
...bubbling up through my brain, but it isn't there yet. It the meantime, I'm just thinking:
'Cause I got a brand new combine harvester and I'll give you the key
Come on now, let's get together
In perfect harmony
I got 20 acres and you got 43
Now I got a brand new combine harvester and I'll give you the key.
That, and also Homer Simpson's garage, full of tools and lawnmowers marked 'Property of Ned Flanders'.
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Wednesday 9th March 2016 12:59 GMT Jimmy2Cows
@LewisRage Re: Newsflash
Define spoiled little rich girl...
Well first up I didn't say little. That's clearly what you thought when you read my comment - though whether it was just because that's what you expected to see, or whether you tacitly believe that of her yourself and that's a Freudian slip, is unknown.
From personal experience, people who think the world works the way they want it to have been spoilt as children. Really spoilt. Those who've not been spoilt tend to have a more rounded, realistic outlook. Probably bordering on cynical/pessimism. YMMV of course, and I respect that.
So it's not a massive leap to believe she was spoilt as a child.
Am I right? I don't know. Freely admit that.
You don't know either, as you obviously don't know her personally. Relying on that fount of all things truthful Wikipedia for your information is kinda daft.
Does it actually matter? Not a damn bit, and it doesn't alter the thrust of my argument in any way.
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Tuesday 8th March 2016 15:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Newsflash
Come on, what do you expect from a history of art major? A nobel prise level comprehension of economics? I do not think so.
At most you can expect a good professional killer. Though I suspect she does not quite make the grade and the fitness test for that one either.
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Tuesday 8th March 2016 12:41 GMT Duffy Moon
Lead by example
If money is so abhorrent to her, why hasn't she given 99% of hers away? I wonder how much of the planet's resources she uses, jetting all over it. Actually, I'm not sure that she is actually from this planet.
I do hope that grant money can be recovered and spent on something sensible (ha!).
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Wednesday 9th March 2016 00:27 GMT dorsetknob
Re: Lead by example
she could easily recover the grant money to repay and make her Site profitable if......
If she was to start selling her used underwear
There are Apparently People queuing to buy her used soiled .................... Oh God where is my credit card
Paris Cause she knows how to make a buck or two
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Wednesday 9th March 2016 12:17 GMT SVV
Re: £200,000 for no tangible output
"After the Cabinet Office creatively interpreted its guidelines to give Cole £200,000 for Impossible.com, an “innovation in giving” grant,"
So, after redefinig low pay as a "living wage", wasting taxpayers money on meaningless, vacuous crap is now an "innovation in giving"?
Orwell would have been impressed, although his pessimistic vision of the future wasn't quite right. He saw it as "a jackboot stamping on a human face forever" but it turns out that in reality it's more like a shiny gold trainer.
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Tuesday 8th March 2016 15:11 GMT Bloakey1
Re: Not sure about the tomato
"but give me a drill, a mile of road and an hour of boredom and I could probably do something quite funny"
When you were bored, you could take the seeds out of the tomato, drill and plant them alongside a road and grow lead and pollutant laden tomatoes and give them away to the proletariat.
She does seem to appear a lot in the *cough*, ahem, gentleman's magazines with all her charms on display. That is the last time I type her name into google when it is on pictures.
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Tuesday 8th March 2016 13:38 GMT Chris King
Oh, poor Lily...
Sounds like someone clubbed all her Unicorns with the Iron Bar of Economic Reality and threw them on the barbie. (Bonus points for turning a profit on the Unicorn steaks)
Beer icon, because the "sharing economy" probably won't stretch to a pint, let alone repay those grants.
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Tuesday 8th March 2016 15:02 GMT JayB
Fixing the quote...
But the model, actress and philosopher, whose net worth was estimated at £7m, has realised that some people have become wealthy from doing what she exactly was doing.
Should read...
But the model, actress, bumbling idiot and all round hypocrite, whose net worth was estimated as all the kittens and rainbows you can hug, has realised that people have become wealthy from not being wildly credulous and doing what she exactly was doing, but doing it much, much, MUCH better.
Honestly, how are people like this able to survive in the real world? Has she ever visited the real world? We used to lock people like this up in Coney Hatch, now they get a Govt grant and fly around the world. Please stop the world, I'd like to step off it for five mins.
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Tuesday 8th March 2016 15:02 GMT Uplink
For starters, I can't get what impossible.com does from their front pages. It has that neo-dotcom look where it screams "it's great! believe us!" but without actually saying how it works. I'm a software developer. Put an algorithm in front of me or Hulk Smash(tm). What I did get, is that it's something about sharing skills, time, objects (this is buried in the "About Us" page), but as soon as I land all I see is "shop". I can't reconcile being paid in Thanks with shopping in Pounds Sterling, and I've already spent enough time on their site, so I'll stop trying.
On a tangent:
Given a very recent past experience where a friend maxed her "underutilised" brand new credit card in two months and then came asking for help, I'm starting to move away from the idea of sharing. I'd gladly help her grow, but she failed so many times (I played the role of creditors to Greece in this play) that I have no idea what else to do. She's willing to cut on food and keep pay tv... and she even got upset when I suggested she does it the other way around...
If you want to do good in the world, help people grow. But as soon as you realise that they not only don't grow, but abuse the help to fuck their lives up, walk away - find somebody else. This should also be a prime directive when it comes to state benefits: Grow so you stop needing the benefits or fuck off.
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Tuesday 8th March 2016 15:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
She's half right
The actual "sharing economy" of today is terminological bullshit; it's not about "sharing", it's companies using loopholes in the law to avoid regulations and taxes that they would otherwise be subject to. However when it comes to what she seems to think are meaningful alternatives...
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Tuesday 8th March 2016 15:29 GMT All names Taken
She is right but ...
... that is the way the world is no?
I was going to type somethi but then couldn't be bothered.
Then could, so:
community stuff is not the monopoly of non-profit, not-for-profit or tax-dollar-funded, or ... organisations.
Big business can and does find models that return a profit and do some good for community and is that a bad, bad, bad thing?
Big business can and does find some horrid horrible detestable business models and makes mistakes and lose profits and can go out of business if the 'orrible coefficient is sufficiently large to turn profit opportunities into loss makers
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Tuesday 8th March 2016 18:00 GMT Herby
Property?
One of the basic tenants of common law (used in most English speaking countries) is that "owning" property is the right to DENY others its utility. She seems to forget that in her discourse. When you "share" you really don't own anything any more. Of course this includes money in various forms as well.
It seems she needs a basic lesson on how the world works!
p.s. Politicians please take note as well!
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Tuesday 8th March 2016 20:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Imagine no possessions - I wonder if you can"
"No need for greed or hunger - A brotherhood of man.
Imagine all the people - Sharing all the world..."
Wrote John Lennon, sat in front of his Steinway piano in his Georgian Country house on his 72-acre Berkshire estate.
There's a lesson there for all of us, I feel. Ms Cole included.
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Tuesday 8th March 2016 20:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Lots of dissing comments regarding Lily Cole, but very little of actual substance.
Shame on you commentards!
Personally, I've never heard of the woman so I really wouldn't know anything about her motivations or her background.
Interesting thing though. Sharing economies really do work, at least on a small scale.
The problem that they always encounter is the difference of mindset that are required to understand them, so entrenched we are in the modern, competitive environment in which we live.
I remember a guy phoned into a radio program explaining his vision of what he called a "gift" economy.
His point was that when he does something for his family, he doesn't charge them or expect reciprocity from them. He is a cobbler by trade and mends shoes for all his friends for exactly nothing.
Why, then, do we not extend this ethos to the wider society, he asks?
Well for a start, he has a genetic investment in his kin, so that explains the difference. However, in purely practical terms, he does have a point. Certainly at the local level, it can be made to work and in older times, this is exactly how things worked before fiat currency came along to replace barter.
There are certainly problems with this kind of system that would have to work out, especially the problems related to scale.
However, this over-reliance of competition and of people set against each other for advantage really does foster the kind of evil that we see particularly in the US where people are expected to "stand on their own two feet" and make a life for themselves, even if it is to the detriment of their fellows. Often this is expressed as opposition to social healthcare systems leaving everyone to find their own way, or die/suffer through lack of the right kind of policy or money.
One of these days, as a race we'll remember that we are only successful as a tribal species. We really do work better when we work and live together for the collective good.
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Tuesday 8th March 2016 23:46 GMT Old Handle
Mainly I think people are annoyed that she took alot of money from the government and accomplished essentially nothing with it... while acting like a superior git. As far as "sharing economy" websites, Craigslist's Free section is vastly more practical. (and already existed) Lets see... right now I could get a futon, aloe clippings, cranberry sauce, pet fish, firewood, a whole bunch of "clean" dirt and a jacuzzi.
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Wednesday 9th March 2016 00:11 GMT Mark 85
What you say makes sense...however, in the States the IRS got involved. For example.. doctor to doctor courtesy is taxed such that if Doc A does a procedure on one Doc B's family, Doc B has declare that as income. They were starting, at one point, to clamp down on barter clubs and the like but I'm not sure where that is on their priority list. Turns out that cash is easier to deal with.
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Tuesday 8th March 2016 23:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
To help, Silly Mole's dwindling bank account and all three earths literally at once, I've just purchased 54 of these natty rucksacks at £290 a pop - http://shop.impossible.com/collections/gifts-for-him/products/africas-out-joe-rolltop-rucksack
It certainly made a 'talking point' here at home when I explained I might well have to sell the car when the next credit card bill arrives, but I'm just thinking about Africa so that's ok.
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Wednesday 9th March 2016 00:37 GMT x 7
actually.............I just looked at her website for the first time in months and its changed so much that one would be forgiven for thinking its been hijacked by a commercial sales org
Previously it held a simple list of peoples wants/wishes, often esoteric (eg I wish for a ton of money, or I wish for a testicle transplant, or I wish for world peace.....)
Now it just seems to be a cheap tat sales bazaar. But the point is that change in layout and style could only come about due to her control and decisions. Unless in reality she wasn't the brains behind it all....
Personally it looks to me as if she was the figurehead (or bowsprite) for a fraud
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Wednesday 9th March 2016 11:45 GMT x 7
Hey Bloakey, here's a safer one for you
bit.ly/1TsazcK
moderator note - this link goes to a possibly NSFW picture of Lily Cole wearing a slinky leather outfit
would you buy a used website from this girl?
More seriously, is she the girl who Roger Daltrey was thinking about when he sang "Pictures of Lily"?
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Wednesday 9th March 2016 21:37 GMT x 7
"Men, if you're going to link to full-frontal nudity and/or NSFW pictures, for pity's sake write NSFW before suckering people in with your obscured bitly links."
Sorry, I thought the story was a bit thin and needed fleshing out.
To be honest I thought the warning about wives would be enough. I used bit.ly because of the length of the links - not to obscure.
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Wednesday 9th March 2016 01:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Money and ownership both seem toxic to Lily Cole..."
And yet she has somehow managed to accumulate millions of pounds.
Of which she has managed to retain ownership, using the public's money for her hare brained efforts.
I imagine all that toxicity has Lily feeling pretty poorly.
She is a model you say? Of what, may I ask?
Please don't let it be a modern Major General.
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Wednesday 9th March 2016 15:34 GMT Infernoz
Miss clueless doesn't get that Socialism is an economically bankrupt idea.
Only nothing is free, everything else has some cost attached which someone has to pay, even just in effort and time. She didn't model for free, did she, and is quite welcome to use her wealth to pay for her stupid ideas...
The whole idea of capitalism is property ownership and its incentives to do the right things enough to prosper, and fail when you do the wrongs things too much. This would work if Socialist governments hadn't distorted markets so much with disincentives and incentives to do the wrong things, and require wasting resources on pointless junk, so cause new and smaller businesses to die prematurely!
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Wednesday 9th March 2016 18:44 GMT Someone_Somewhere
Re: Miss clueless doesn't get that Socialism is an economically bankrupt idea.
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." — John Rogers
"Generally, the work of Ms. Rand is hugely enjoyed by people with the literary sensitivities of 11-year-olds who imagine they have fierce political sophistication." — Rationalwiki
Just to, you know, put the anarchosyndicalist wetdream of 19th Century laissez-faire Capitalism in perspective.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
