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Messages - BaldricksTrousers
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551
« on: January 26, 2016, 04:52 »
no one said or insinuated that
Well Shutterstock and other sites seem to think so?
Surely it's not about being old-timers, it's about having a track record of producing stuff people want to buy. One person might have 100 images sitting there from 2004 and still be on the bottom earnings tier while another who started uploading six months ago could already have reached the top tier if he or she is really, really good.
552
« on: January 26, 2016, 04:38 »
For it to get worse they'll have to come round my house and rob me.......
Well, if they've got your portfolio it wouldn't be strictly necessary for them to visit your house to rob you. I'm already a little perturbed by the number of views I got on Veer without any sales. I'm closing my Veer account and hoping they will put my paltry earnings into my card - I think I got two or three sales there last year from 700 images, but I've got the price of a few drinks sitting there from previous years.
553
« on: January 26, 2016, 03:11 »
Well they've just sold themselves to some Chinese company I've never heard of, so maybe things will get better or maybe they'll get worse (if that's possible). Check out your e-mail folders or the other thread about Veer if you don't know about it.
554
« on: January 25, 2016, 14:32 »
There is a market for black skies and coloured city lights - they look good in back-lit displays.
555
« on: January 25, 2016, 09:45 »
I sent a request to Veer at the end of last year to delete my account and remove all images. I received a boiler plate message back that my request had been received. To date, nothing seems to have changed. My account is still open and all images still up. Is there something else I should do?
Under article X. of the Contributor Agreement you have the right to terminate the contract with 30 days' notice, so if you wrote at the year end your portfolio should disappear any time now. This deal is too shady for me, with the portfolios being shunted out to God knows how at an unknown commission rate or sale price, so I've just told them to drop me. I sent them this message which might be a handy template if others want to follow suit (not that I have taken any legal guidance on the wording): Dear Sir or Madam,
In accordance with article X. of the Contributor Agreement I hereby notify you that I am terminating the contract between us with effect from 30 days after the date of this e-mail (Jan 25, 2016). Please ensure that my portfolio is removed from your site and any associated sites on or before the due date.
I would be grateful if the balance of my earning could be sent to my Payoneer address.
The relevant part of the contract says: X. Term and Termination
A. Contributor may terminate this Agreement at any time by providing Veer with thirty (30) days notice by using the Contact Us page to provide notice to Veer or byfollowing the written notice provision below.
.........
D. Upon termination of this Agreement:
(i) Veer will remove your Content from the Site within a thirty (30) day period, and
will use reasonable efforts to cause Content to be removed from the Sites of any affiliates and partners within sixty (60) days from the removal from the Site, provided, however, that Veer may retain a copy of your Content for archival and record-keeping purposesThere may be other relevant stuff in the agreement, I haven't ploughed through it all, just found the escape clause and wrote to them.
556
« on: January 15, 2016, 12:04 »
There's a difference between 8 years ago and today. Today, you can't rely on the skills you learned 8 years ago. The market was young back then. What works then no longer works today. Today, you need to have knowledge of SEO, marketing, a broad understanding of different fields and a mixed portfolio (instead of just a photography portfolio). 5 years from now, different skills will be needed. The question is...will the veterans learn those new skills or will they give up altogether?
You've been doing this less than a year. You're not a guru.
I'm doing this since more than 3 years. I'm obviously not a guru, but you don't have to be a guru to realise that he is right.
I'd say he's partly right. It helps to be up to date on the latest stuff but I'm still selling shots every day that I took 12 years ago. No doubt having a lot of video as well as photos would add to sales (if it didn't involve shooting fewer photos), but the photo market is still as strong as ever - in fact stronger than ever, given that stuff keeps selling despite the scores of millions of shots that are available compared with a few hundred thousand a decade ago.
557
« on: January 15, 2016, 02:05 »
558
« on: January 14, 2016, 13:17 »
the veterans of yesterday are nowhere to be seen. It appears they've given up on microstock altogether. Perhaps that's the future for us all.
I'm still around. Even though other things have meant that I haven't been uploading for almost a year I'm still shooting stuff for later use and the sales are still coming in, though my earnings are not much more than half what they once were. It's not a game I would recommend to others, though: the earnings from new files dropped so much that it would seem to be pretty pointless putting in the effort to build a diverse portfolio of 5,000 or 10,000 files - but once you do have those numbers the portfolio provides a significant return for a long time. It probably took me an hour per file uploaded, once shooting, selecting, processing, keywording, uploading (keywording again for IS and Alamy)etc. was all added up. 10,000 hours is five working years. Say you reckon you should earn at least $50,000 a year, that means the effort in producing 10,000 files should deliver $250,000 in eventual earnings. I doubt if there are many who could achieve anywhere near that sort of return starting now with the market as it is.
559
« on: January 08, 2016, 04:06 »
Bang on target, as usual, Jo Ann. I suspect that the only power in the Getty empire that really understood iS was Bruce. There must have been others in the set-up who did (and probably some with influence who didn't) but they weren't allowed the authority they needed. As soon as Bruce left it all went tits-up as Getty bosses - some of whom openly despised iStock - decided to seize control of the policy-making.
You could see from their actions that they never regarded it as anything more than a dumping ground for cr@p, such as snapshots of toilet doors and stuff scanned upside down, so it's no wonder that this rubbed off on customers. I used to be in charge of a division of a company that was despised by the chief exec - even when it was propping up his favourite bit that was in financial trouble - and it's very destructive
560
« on: January 08, 2016, 03:46 »
It's exactly the same sales pattern on SS this year as it has been for a long time. January is always a bit of a slow month, especially at the start - and I've been with SS for 12 Januaries.
Pauws - if you've seen the sun this morning you ain't where I am! South Wales is just notching up its 67th consecutive day with rain, which must be a bit of a record even for Wales. The sky has definitely been falling!
561
« on: December 25, 2015, 04:07 »
The very obvious decline in activity on MSG reflects an accelerating loss of interest in microstock. This should be a red flag to the agencies - except all their execs are in meetings discussing either their stock price, or who might buy their companies.
But you have to realise that with tens of millions of images online they no longer need us very much, they can just keep on selling the old stuff - there's still plenty of new material coming through, anyway. And it's better for the agencies to have the earnings spread more thinly among the suppliers because that means that it takes longer for people to get paid so the money sits in the agency's bank accounts improving their credit rating (or acts as a free bridging loan for the day-to-day expenses).
562
« on: December 25, 2015, 04:02 »
Can't believe I forgot about BT. He was a super smart interesting guy too.
Thanks for the compliment. I've got a lot of stuff going on at the moment that's got in the way of doing stock but I'm hoping to get back into the swing of it some time in the next year. Meanwhile, I lurk here from time to time. I'm not sure if a public spat I had with Gostwyck may have had something to do with him being less active here. I hope not.
563
« on: July 21, 2015, 13:27 »
Oh, I don't think the loans to Greece are a money-making project, isn't the ECB ready to give a lot of the interest back in certain circumstances? No, the loans are about protecting the European financial system from contagion, which would have been catastrophic six or seven years ago and still poses the risk of unpleasant surprises. If the European banks had been left to fend for themselves the entire economic edifice would probably have gone up in flames. So there were very good reasons for taking over the debt.
I wonder how much debt the EU would have been willing to write off if Greece had gone back to the drachma. You'll recall that there was a promise in 2012 to get round to dealing with sustainability and absolutely nothing was ever done about that. Greece would have gone to the drachma on a promise of looking at debt write-offs, but if Schwaeble went to his electorate to say that Germany had to forgive 30bn euros just to get Greece back to where it was before the drachma depreciated, plus another 15 billion to ensure sustainability, plus a generous social support package to keep the people going .... well, I don't think he'd survive the political fallout.
564
« on: July 21, 2015, 09:50 »
There was a Brit in our village who suffered a serious illness with a blood vessel exploding in his stomach. He was hospitalised, had emergency surgery (which he was lucky to survive) was flown to Athens by military aircraft because he had to be kept a sea-level pressure, had more operations, was flown back to the local hospital after about a year and then had another operation to reconstruct his throat - I think they'd taken a bit of it out - which, unfortunately, proved too much for him. I never heard of a single "envelope" being involved, so perhaps they only expect envelopes from locals.
I agree that the church should pull its weight and that the wealthy should be pursued to get the tax - hopefully Syriza will do something about that, since they are supposed to be champions of the poor - but then, so were Pasok.
The shipping magnates are apparently taxed on their local revenues but not on cash earned outside Greece, even so, they still make up about 18% of the Greek economy. There was an interesting paper published recently that argued that the thing to do with them was not to try to tax their global earnings - which would drive them away - but to require them to do almost all their banking through Greek institutions, which would bring a huge amount of foreign capital that is being stored overseas at the moment. It sounds a sensible solution to me.
The point of the bailouts is to ensure that Greece doesn't get free money from other countries, if they would call it a loan instead of a "bailout" (which sounds like a gift) it would probably help with public sentiment. Even with "haircuts" they are talking about reduced interest rates, not about capital being written off, aren't they? Borrowing money at an interest rate of -0.2% and lending it to Greece at 2% or whatever is a good deal for German taxpayers - but only as long as the loan is eventually repaid, that's the tricky bit.
I'm not sure about the drachma. It would make the debts far worse - probably push them up to 300% of GDP, it would make securing imports of vital goods - including food, fuel and supplies for manufacturing - difficult. It would, however, provide a solid bottom to start rebuilding on but without access to foreign capital untill the even more unrepayable loans had been repaid or forgiven.
565
« on: July 21, 2015, 08:18 »
I've just noticed Table 5, which gives a different analysis taking account self-employment - and puts Greece higher up the table at 4.8% (but still behind Malta 4.9%, Cyprus 5.4, Bulgaria, Romania - Gemany is at 1.9%). I think these figures are using a calculation for including the shadow economy but I can't be bothered to try to understand the whole paper, I was just searching to try to find out what the relative levels of tax evasion are believed to be.
My point still stands that it's far from being an exclusively Greek offence and Greece is apparently not the worst offender, though it's held up almost as if it is unique to Greece and every other country is white as the driven snow. There's no doubt tax evasion is a major problem but there's also no doubt that it is being blown completely out of proportion when people say 90% of tax is evaded - which is wildly untrue.
I don't know if bribes have been calculated into the mix or not, they should have been as a bribe is a form of earnings. I really have trouble believing the bribe level that Transparency International suggests is "average", I'd been told, for example, that 50 euros was the going rate for a doctor, while Transparency's bottom level is double that. And perhaps the massive bribes from Seimens and suchlike are included in the calculations. Since nobody is going to issue their list of bribe fees the statistics are going to be even harder to establish than tax evasion figures. If bribes do, indeed, run at 1,500 euros on average it's obvious that very few people pay them more than once every few years since you can't be handing that amount out "on average" every few weeks.
566
« on: July 21, 2015, 06:08 »
tax collection is what? 10% of what is due every year?
No, it's something like 32% of GDP, very close to the German level. The nonsense about "Greeks only pay 10% of their taxes" comes from a misinterpretation (wilful?) of a report on total outstanding arrears, which cover many years and now amount to about 90% of the annual "take". The German figures look good compared to the Greek ones because Germany routinely writes off unpaid taxes after a certain time so the total doesn't keep piling up. If you look at the actual level of tax evasion as a percentage of GDP you find it is cited as 1.8% in Greece and 1.1% in Germany. (Open the link in this page and go to p.16 on the PDF to see the table https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_4004.html). Furthermore, Ireland is almost at the Greek level, the UK is exactly the same and Cyprus, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Bulgaria are all ahead of Greece. Even Denmark - surely seen as an upstanding, moral, north-European country - is within a whisker (0.1%) of the Greek rate. So the idea that Greeks are the world's worst tax evaders isn't true - they not even anywhere near being the worst in the EU, in fact they are exactly average for the OECD, yet the Greeks are whipped for it while nobody say a thing about the immoral attitude towards paying tax of the Danes, the Swedes, the Irish, the Poles or the Cypriots (in fact, Ireland and Cyprus are held up as examples for the Greeks to follow). BTW, I notice with some amusement that the report I quoted there is a discussion paper for a Munich-based economics research group. https://www.cesifo-group.de/ifoHome.html
567
« on: July 20, 2015, 07:50 »
I use the Epson V500, which does have a carrier for 120 negs (and I've managed to scan 5x4 large format, too, with a bit of messing about to create three equally exposed sections for stitching). It's certainly time consuming, especially cleaning up the image after scanning, and takes some practice to avoid quality destroying defaults but I have had scans accepted as stock - and some have sold quite well.
The V550 and V600 seem to be the more recent replacement models. The V700 (now 800 and 850, I think) was touted as more professional and did sheet film as well as rolls but at a much higher price.
568
« on: June 29, 2015, 17:13 »
Yes Paul. Obviously Dijsselbloem exactly anticipated what kind of people he is dealing with. And now it turns out he is right.
I think it's a fair view from both sides. It was hardly an "anticipation", since he was basing it on Tsipras's Friday night comments. Tsipras tied his colours to the mast and must stand by them to the end. It's not dishonourable in any way.
569
« on: June 29, 2015, 16:24 »
Your map deliberately confuses US bases with Nato bases. The two may be the same but they are not all the same.
570
« on: June 29, 2015, 16:19 »
And there it was, stathakis just said on cnn live if people vote yes although they are asking them to vote no, the current government will not negotiate for yes. There will be a new government he said.
So they have just been playing with everyone, if the will of the people does not fit their agenda they will hand over their mess to someone else and refuse all responsibility.
Yesterday Djisselbloem said that the EU could not accept Syriza as negotiating partners on the outcome of a yes vote because they clearly didn't believe it and could not be trusted to implement a deal. He and Stathakis seem to be on the same page on that one.
571
« on: June 29, 2015, 08:21 »
Greece presented the EU with incorrect figures and lied about their financial state. If there was any shoehorning done, it was because Greece painted a rosy picture. I dont see why the EU has to be blamed for the mess in Greece.
Its like jailing a person for leaving their home unlocked instead of jailing the burglar for entering it.
Yes, and the EU knew the figures were fiddled and didn't care because the political aim of achieving ever wider union, with the euro as the currency. So it's more like inviting a known burglar into your house and showing him the combination of the safe before you go out for the evening.
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/united-kingdom/eu-knew-greece-cooked-its-books-when-it-joined-eurozone-243927.html
Well you are right. So the EU is very much to blame here. This does change my perspective about the EU and it's role in this disaster.
As an aside, I'd also argue that the disaster may well have been an inevitable consequence of serious misjudgements made in the 1990s and maybe even 80s. Even the electoral revolt that brought Syriza to power after five years of austerity may have been historically inevitable, in which case the favoured bogey-people - Tsipras, Merkel or Juncker, depending on your perspective - really aren't to blame at all, they are just marionettes. If Asimov had written the script this would have been a "Seldon Moment" and the god would jump out of the machine and show us all the one route out of the dismal labyrinth.
572
« on: June 29, 2015, 05:09 »
Greece presented the EU with incorrect figures and lied about their financial state. If there was any shoehorning done, it was because Greece painted a rosy picture. I dont see why the EU has to be blamed for the mess in Greece.
Its like jailing a person for leaving their home unlocked instead of jailing the burglar for entering it.
Yes, and the EU knew the figures were fiddled and didn't care because the political aim of achieving ever wider union, with the euro as the currency. So it's more like inviting a known burglar into your house and showing him the combination of the safe before you go out for the evening. As for "north" and "south" - sheesh, it's not about the pedantic niceties of geography.
573
« on: June 29, 2015, 02:28 »
Obviously, Putin's troll army is pushing his divide and conquer, salami tactics agenda on all fronts.
Greece is, probably, another victory for him after the destruction of Ukraine. Rejoice Titus! (or Titov?)
EU and NATO are the root cause for this mess,
No, the shoehorning of Greece into the euro, which is an economic mis-match is the root cause of the mess. It distorted interest rates and drove debt south into Greece and other Med countries and cash north into Germany, France and presumably the UK, too. The money the North lent to the south was then recycled North again in the purchase of luxury goods, making repayment of the loans almost impossible. The South thought the good times were a permanent feature of euro-membership, not an artificial effect of misaligned economies, while the North thought it was doing well because of a superior work ethic and higher moral values, not because of an artificial effect of the euro in cycling debt south and money north. When the crash happened the South still believed the euro was the harbinger of eternal prosperity and the North couldn't see any reason why it should pay to subsidise lazy feckless Southerners who would have been rich if only they had the same superior morality as the North.
574
« on: June 29, 2015, 01:46 »
At least we can all weep for the poor hedge fund managers who have lost their shirts when they thought they were going to make a killing: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/business/dealbook/panic-among-hedge-fund-investors-in-greece.html?_r=0
Precisely...
I hope the lads do have that plan B ready. 
Worth watching - filmed in 2012 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=203&v=Z1LCBp0twLE
I love the wording used in that article. These guys are "brave" they are "hardy", they are "luminaries" because they "make bets", while the Greeks by comparison are "panicky" and are "stashing cash" or "bulging bags of gold coins" .... yeah, you can hardly move in Greek houses for the cupboards ripped from the walls by the weight of gold, quite different from the impoverished state of the poor hedge fund investors. And whose fault is it if they "make bets" and lose? Why, the Greeks, of course!
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