There's no such thing as a free lunch...Or is there?

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It's official. The next president of Indonesia is former army general Prabowo Subianto. Quite how the next five years will pan out is anyone's guess but hopefully the foreign pundits who always bring up his dodgy human rights record will be proven wrong. Nonetheless, on policy making, Prabowo's popularist move to literally offer the poor 'a free lunch' every day of the week does not augur well for the future. Such a policy - if it ever came to fruition - would cost a phenomenal amount of money and likely lead to huge inefficiencies (food waste) and poor incentives (make people lazy). Another concern is Prabowo's strong nationalist bent. Thus, in the possible event that he finds himself with his back against the proverbial wall in the face of stern economic challenges, there is a big chance that he will simply scapegoat foreigners. But he will have to be careful. Construction of the new capital city, Nusantara, for example, is highly dependent on foreign in
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Suharto and Warhol

Take a copy of an international news magazine. Tear the front page off. Now the creative part: duplicate it (say three times) and mess around with the colors a bit (piece of piss with Photoshop).

And hey presto: you have a masterpiece!!

Warhol did this back in 1963 with a photographic portrait of Mao Tse Tung, ripped out of a 1963 edition of Newsweek magazine. It sold for a cool US$17.37 million.


I’ve done a similar thing with the late great Suharto:


Now the original ain’t for sale. But I am offering prints at just US$100 (payment via Paypal).

And I reckon this is a good offer. Cos a print of former president Suharto is gonna turn out to be a much better investment than the original of Mao.

I mean, do the people who paid the millions of dollars for Warhol’s effort really think that the value of their investment is going to hold up in the long term? Because although Warhol is still famous today, who is going to care about his pop art in say another 50 years? Or what about in 100 years? US$17.37 million for Mao? I’d rather eat a banana...

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