Airlines can add more flights and bigger planes for more seats. Try doing that with a pop star.

I was responding to saloomy, who said "just make a law...".

That ain't retail. It's the futures wholesale market.

The fact that you don't list them doesn't prove their existence.

I'm aware of wholesale auctions and small exceptions. If you want, consider TicketMaster as a wholesaler.

Why would concert tickets need an auction any more than almost everything else? No auction for beans, none for gasoline, or haircuts. If they price them too high, they don't sell enough. If they price them too low, they sell out fast and learn to charge more next time, just as any other limited commodity does. If they can get more, they do, and raise the price next time. If they can't, well, that's life.

I don't think TicketMaster is making a fortune, because if they were, competitors would want some of the action. That's how markets work. If artists actually cared, they would sign up with alternative sellers and pull the rug out from under TicketMaster. They don't. Artists either don't care, or don't know. From the noise they make, they are hypocrites either way.

The actual real value of concert tickets for established artists is well-known by now. But artists want to pretend they support the little people, so they refuse to charge realistic prices, and act all miffed when the market establishes the real value people place on their tickets.

The simple fact is that more people want tickets than tickets are available. The only realistic alternative is long long lines and make people pay in time and hassle. But then others will charge high prices to stand in line as placeholders. Price caps are no more useful than Richard Nixon's gas price controls in 1973. People pay in dollars or time or barter of some sort. The market will always establish a more realistic price.

Or one could just let the market handle it. You can't stop scalping any more than Custer could. Prohibition doesn't work, it just creates black markets.

There were two theaters in San Francisco, the Richilieu? (Geary near Van Ness) and a second near the TransAmerica Pyramid. Great selection of old movies, mostly b/w, and great trailers for old movies. They eventually decided the second one just wasn't profitable enough, early 1980s, and had a final night of nothing but previews, several hours of them, the trashiest exploitation movies from the 1950s, glorious stuff. Then they interrupted it, lights came on to announce someone with a private copy of Vertigo had brought it in and did we want to see it? Apparently it was locked up in some copyright ownership dispute and could not be seen commercially, but since we hadn't paid for it ...

A fantastic night. I'd gladly do it again, nothing but hours of trashy ancient B and C movie trailers.

Because OCT 31 == DEC 25.

I have never been so disappointed. Slashdot is going to the dregs.

I remember noticing a huge speedup at some point, seemed like only 5-10 seconds to get the login prompt. This was 20(?) years ago when I was still building my own towers. Then something happened, I'll guess 10-15 years ago ... my next laptop took that long just to ask for the full disk decryption key. My latest laptop sometimes takes 30 seconds just to ask for the decryption key. No messages, nothing. After that, it's still only 5-10 seconds to get the login prompt.

Of course, this is all from memory, not logs or anything. I'm sure the timeframes are off. But the general trend is right ... slow, then much faster, then slow asking for decryption keys.

More taxes. of course. Or they could rely on SpaceX, but that contradicts their insistence on autarkey.

Technically impressive, but other than a few early adopters, the public saw no need for it. 8K might do better, but few people can tell the difference with 4K, so they'll need a better hook than just imperceptible resolution.

I wonder if AI game players could benefit. Their fake vision is as good as they want.

But has it been your job to do this every minute *all day long*? I doubt it. News shows waste so much time repeating themselves and showing nice visuals that few people actually concentrate on what they say, treating it more as a background noise generator with occasional cute pet videos or hurricanes pounding a marina. If you're reading a book, say on the financials of the Nazi economy, you are skeptical on the broad overall level, not every single detail reported; you don't worry that it's made up a complete production category from scratch, including the government ministry and minister responsible. Even if you're reading reports on the financials of a corporate division, the skepticism is nowhere near as pervasive as necessary with AI, which can hallucinate in the most unexpected places, and when you extend that to code, where literally every character can be hallucinated, that is the true full time skepticism at issue.

The last thing bureaucrats want is to solve the problems that created and sustain their jobs. Independent thinking workers scare the daylights out of them. And since the only measure of their success is counting subordinates, measuring budgets, and issuing new regulations, memos must continue to pour forth lest the outside world think they have solved their problems and are no longer necessary.

And dealing with bureaucratic paperwork is always a decent distraction. The more nonsensical paperwork lets you vent some of your frustration too. Taking that away doesn't help.

Intelligent people also didn't used to do it all day long, and humans provide clues that AIs are incapable of.