It's not the ticket system that is broken; it's the people.
The problem with stadium tours is that 95 percent or more of the seats are awful. They provide an extremely poor concert experience.
The sound is very bad for most of the audience. Many technological innovations in stadium sound have tried to address this, but the underlying physics has been resistant to an acceptable solution.
The visuals are even worse. An enormous fraction of the audience cannot resolve the headliner on stage as a result of the size of the performer and the distance to the viewer. The visuals then devolve to the viewers ability to see an enormous television screen.
So why would anyone want to go to a stadium show, if not for the visuals and the audio?
It comes down to human competitiveness. Bragging rights. Ingesting mass media nonsense about how a product or experience will make one feel, and then disgorging it to a peer group as a method of creating an artificial distinction between the "haves" and the "have-nots".
Taylor Swift, in particular, has been a genius at creating hysteria among her fans. They have ingested the idea that, if Taylor is in town, and you are not there, then you are a resident of the outer, miserable, darkness.
The truth, however, is that if you attend a stadium show, the only positive aspect is that you "were there". You will not see, hear, or in any meaningful way, experience the object of your hysteria. You will be packed into a seat with a group of strangers also experiencing a mass-media induced mental derangement.
The foregoing may lead you to believe that I am not a fan, but you would be wrong. My opinion was formed by the experience of going to all the Taylor Swift stadium tours, up to a certain point.
What changed was that I stopped fighting Ticketmaster at one point. I opted out and did not buy a ticket. However, I still wanted to go to the show. All seats were prohibitively expensive on the secondary market; good seats, even more so.
There were two shows in my city on subsequent nights. The first night, I watched prices on the scalper sites and I discovered that, in the last few minutes before the start time of the show, prices for even the best seats tumbled dramatically.
This was simple economics; unsold seats are a cost that subtracts from overall profit. It makes sense to dump them for any amount, even at a loss.
The second night, I waited until the price for a single front-row seat fell below the original price of the least expensive seat anywhere. I bought it, printed my ticket, and went to the show.
This was a transformative experience because I was literally a few metres from the stage. I could get out of my seat and stand by the barricades and see and hear as if the show was at at my neighbourhood folk club or an open mic night. I then turned around, with Taylor directly behind me, and I could see the view of a packed stadium waving lights and singing along, just like what those on stage would see.
I learned the difference between what the few who had the money or influence to obtain the best seats experience, and what the great majority of stadium show concert-goers endure.
I was cured. I have never, since that day, had any desire to attend a stadium show or buy a ticket for a standard seat in any large venue.
Unfortunately, it isn't really practical to educate a significant fraction of fans by demonstrating this.
Maybe there is a technological solution, though. If we could arrange for people to have a feed from a front row observer in fully immersive VR, we could perhaps recreate enough of the experience that the rush to purchase a grossly substandard product would diminish.
There are probably significant economic forces that would oppose this (Ticketmaster, obviously) because education is often the enemy of mass-market driven capitalism.
The longer-term solution is probably to recognize that the innate social behaviour of humans has been exploited to our total destruction by those who would hoard all wealth for themselves, and to begin another great eugenics experiment: breeding selfishness, conflict and the tendency to self-destructive herd behaviour out of the human genome, But that is beyond the scope of this discussion.
"Too Many People" is actually an idea with roots in fascist ideology, did you know that?
If you think about it, you can come to that conclusion yourself - just ask yourself, what is the ultimate ratio of this way of thinking? And who can decide between who belongs to the "too many" group and who not?
Also it is not a very analytical approach to solve problems. The problem is usually not "too many people", but people doing things in a wrong way, using old technology or doing things that should not be done at all.
Occasion-related giving is madness on a finite planet. It is one of the main drivers of the waste economy. We buy things people don't need and exchange them for things we don't need.
I refuse, on principle, to buy or give or receive gifts for "occasions".
A friend recently had her television fail, out of warranty and could not afford to replace it. I bought her a new one with a 6-year warranty. I bought it on the length and strength of the warranty above all else. That gift was needed and appreciated.
I have no problem giving. I just refuse to do it mindlessly in response to a ringing bell and for no reson other than idiotic social convention.
That is a work of stunning arrogance and foolishness.
Math is a game we play in our heads that represents a fictionalized ideal version of reality.
An alien intelligence might have realized that two plus two never equals four not because the underlying logic is wrong, but because two does not exist in reality.
The idea that the little game of math we play represents an immutable and universal truth is typical of the overwhelming anthropocentrism of our kind.
Just because some alien societies will not mimic our rules of addition, we do know for certain it is possible that other societies can build abstract concepts that are isomorphic to those we have. And many of these concepts, such as addition, are very useful.
Does this guarantee that aliens come up with the same stuff? No. Does it guarantee that if they did, they would these concepts to the same esteem? No. Is there an element of 'truth' here that can be replicated by others? Absolutely
And that is the killer app! When you have 3 dozen 4GB DDR3 SIMMs sitting around doing booger all, it is overwhelmingly tempting to get a card like this, if it is priced aggressively, and run something really fast. Re-image the OS from slower storage at boot, or whenever the 18650 falls out.
Cheating... I'm not sure that word means what you think it means.
Give a quiz that can be completed in your own time over the course of a week. That sounds more like an assignment to me. So... the cheating was violating the rule that it can't be done cooperatively? If I'm cheating by asking other students about an assignment then I think I cheated on everything.
And, of course, I did not. My answers to assignments were my own, but, often, I collaborated with other students to understand the questions, or to develop an idea of how to approach finding the solutions, or to clarify issues that were unclear.
And, always, to make sure I got the right answer. Because if I didn't, it meant that I did not understand something and I needed to go back over the material to work out what that was. Any other approach would have rendered school valueless.
This is the normal process of education. You can tell that I did not cheat because my work and my answers were unique. If I submitted an image of someone else's work, that would be obvious.
Ah, but wait! I think I see. If the answers are multiple choice, that doesn't work.
But why are they multiple choice? To make it easier and cheaper for the school. Your inflation of the profit margin on my education makes me a cheater because you can't tell if I did the work myself? That sounds about right.
I think academic integrity is eroded more by the profit motive than by the Jesuitical definition of cheating in the article.
Even though I went to what are considered some the best schools, the greatest insult to academic integrity was always the faculty, because most of them didn't know the subject they were teaching, faked it, and didn't care.
And when I see many of the students who didn't cheat coming out of school not knowing shit from Shinola, I have to wonder why it matters? You get out what you put in, so who cares if people violate an arcane rule that says, "this, this here is an assignment; but that over there, that thing that looks identical to this in every way, that's a quiz, so don't talk to your friends about it or we'll nip your promising young academic career in the bud. Understand?"
The only lesson here is that you need to cheat better.
I came across an "Eight Sleep" unit, which is a high-tech system for cooling a mattress topper. Apparently, someone had problems with leaks in the topper section and threw it out.
I took it apart. It has a custom ARM board with a removable 8GB micro-SD card containing the OS. The ARM board has a combo WiFi/Bluetooth unit and apps for Android and iPhone.
Turns out, this makes a heckuva cooling unit for my gaming PC without modification. It is completely silent and easily has the capacity to keep my CPU and GPU frosty. The price to buy one is prohibitive for this application, but the ol' "dumpster dive discount" makes it worthwhile.
I see why it is so costly. This thing is a combination of a robust Peltier heating/cooling unit, a high volume pumping system with auto-prime routines, two excellent Noctua silent fans, and a very capable custom Arm board. It's like a Bed Keurig.
Because market research has discovered that many customers are not price-sensitive, even when it makes no sense.
Some people with limited means do not even look at prices. The ready availability of consumer debt allows them to buy whatever they wish without considering price as a factor. They simply do not consider any form of budgeting or interest rates on debt when they spend.
The problem with stadium tours is that 95 percent or more of the seats are awful. They provide an extremely poor concert experience.
The sound is very bad for most of the audience. Many technological innovations in stadium sound have tried to address this, but the underlying physics has been resistant to an acceptable solution.
The visuals are even worse. An enormous fraction of the audience cannot resolve the headliner on stage as a result of the size of the performer and the distance to the viewer. The visuals then devolve to the viewers ability to see an enormous television screen.
So why would anyone want to go to a stadium show, if not for the visuals and the audio?
It comes down to human competitiveness. Bragging rights. Ingesting mass media nonsense about how a product or experience will make one feel, and then disgorging it to a peer group as a method of creating an artificial distinction between the "haves" and the "have-nots".
Taylor Swift, in particular, has been a genius at creating hysteria among her fans. They have ingested the idea that, if Taylor is in town, and you are not there, then you are a resident of the outer, miserable, darkness.
The truth, however, is that if you attend a stadium show, the only positive aspect is that you "were there". You will not see, hear, or in any meaningful way, experience the object of your hysteria. You will be packed into a seat with a group of strangers also experiencing a mass-media induced mental derangement.
The foregoing may lead you to believe that I am not a fan, but you would be wrong. My opinion was formed by the experience of going to all the Taylor Swift stadium tours, up to a certain point.
What changed was that I stopped fighting Ticketmaster at one point. I opted out and did not buy a ticket. However, I still wanted to go to the show. All seats were prohibitively expensive on the secondary market; good seats, even more so.
There were two shows in my city on subsequent nights. The first night, I watched prices on the scalper sites and I discovered that, in the last few minutes before the start time of the show, prices for even the best seats tumbled dramatically.
This was simple economics; unsold seats are a cost that subtracts from overall profit. It makes sense to dump them for any amount, even at a loss.
The second night, I waited until the price for a single front-row seat fell below the original price of the least expensive seat anywhere. I bought it, printed my ticket, and went to the show.
This was a transformative experience because I was literally a few metres from the stage. I could get out of my seat and stand by the barricades and see and hear as if the show was at at my neighbourhood folk club or an open mic night. I then turned around, with Taylor directly behind me, and I could see the view of a packed stadium waving lights and singing along, just like what those on stage would see.
I learned the difference between what the few who had the money or influence to obtain the best seats experience, and what the great majority of stadium show concert-goers endure.
I was cured. I have never, since that day, had any desire to attend a stadium show or buy a ticket for a standard seat in any large venue.
Unfortunately, it isn't really practical to educate a significant fraction of fans by demonstrating this.
Maybe there is a technological solution, though. If we could arrange for people to have a feed from a front row observer in fully immersive VR, we could perhaps recreate enough of the experience that the rush to purchase a grossly substandard product would diminish.
There are probably significant economic forces that would oppose this (Ticketmaster, obviously) because education is often the enemy of mass-market driven capitalism.
The longer-term solution is probably to recognize that the innate social behaviour of humans has been exploited to our total destruction by those who would hoard all wealth for themselves, and to begin another great eugenics experiment: breeding selfishness, conflict and the tendency to self-destructive herd behaviour out of the human genome, But that is beyond the scope of this discussion.