I worked at a 4 location local video store chain in the early 1990s. Our location was one of the two locations that had porn titles.
We used to run reports near close and there were some nights where we made 80% of our revenue on porn movies. 75% of that gay porn.
At this store, the actual tapes were shelved behind the counter and an empty box with a hunk of foam inside was on the shelf. You brought the box, we put the tape in a plastic VHS carry case when you rented it.
The porn room was a separate room in the back of the store, but the whole empty box selection routine worked the same. But the porn boxes were probably 50% larger in area than the regular titles, but people would always walk out of there and grab the FIRST title they could reach (the A section of drama) in some vain attempt to cover the box, which of course it never did. And they would do it when no one else was in the store, too -- like, umm, I have to read the title to give you the actual videotape to take home. No secrets here.
One night I moved the tiny self-help & how-to section to where drama was supposed to start because I figured nobody rented them anyway, and if the nervous porn hounds were going to just grab random titles they might as well not decimate the As out of the drama section.
The biggest hoots were when we people whose name you recognized -- or people you knew! -- came in for porn, especially gay porn.
I read that one of the dirty secrets of the mainstream entertainment business was how much money they made selling pay per view porn in hotels.
Which I guess makes sense since it just shows up as "MOVIE" on the bill, allowing people who stay in hotels to buy it (and often expense it) and watch it and no one was the wiser.
When I used to stay at a Hyatt in Irvine, they had a single porn movies and some kind of 6 hour, all-you-could-eat extravaganza of porn. I always wondered who bought the extravaganza. Bachelor parties was the obvious choice, but IIRC this hotel was mostly business people and not a tourist or "party" spot.
IMHO, the problem really seems to be for shows within their peak bubble of popularity (give or take a couple of years).
Once you get out of that bubble, it's tolerable to non-existent in terms of junk postings and occasionally vital for interesting trivia or availability of cult or old movies.
It would only be a problem for a really small subset of topics, just like it's really only a problem for a small subset of IMDB titles. If you look at almost anything that's not a popular current movie/show, there's like zero reason to moderate an IMDB title.
Would some Wikipedia discussion pages get obnoxious? Sure, but the edit wars already are and they could either block miscellaneous question sections or just roll them off.
I suppose it boils down to something like die size or power consumption, but considering that a lot of smartphones can act as access points, why not provide all functionality in one chip?
I've long thought that Wikipedia should have a discussion tab devoted to general comments on a given entry unrelated to the editorial critiques the "Talk" tab is designed for.
I occasionally have questions about pages I've read, and Talk isn't a great (or even technically allowed) place to put them. It would also allow knowledgeable editors to see where some aspect of the topic could be clarified.
Maybe I should have led with my Navy ID and an explanation that I was a scientist in the civil service, but they did NOT like that I admitted to having explosives residue on me.
I doubt it would have worked, I think most security people are in the don't-believe-anything-they-say mode. The only thing that overrides it is force majeure -- a higher ranking individual within their own organization, or another security agency with greater power and authority and the ability to apply it to the conflicting agency on the spot.
What I wonder about is how many TSA people have pissed off local or state PD, only to later feel the power of local authority. Probably nothing like experiencing a felony traffic stop, having your car impounded and spending the night in jail to re-evaluate the limits of power.
Your reasoning seems to be that if they simply sold the tickets at higher prices, there would be no scalpers. If they increased the prices to what the scalpers charge, they wouldn't sell out the venue.
You're really sounding like an economy 101 student right now. Newsflash: Not everything is a classical market. Hell, even Adam Smith realized that not every area is best served by a classical market.
*Of course* if you raise prices close to what scalpers charge now you'd reduce nearly all scalping *and* sell out venues. Venues sell out now *with* ticket prices inflated due to ticket scalping. What makes you think they would stop selling out simply because the seller of the tickets changed from scalpers to the box office?
And the purpose of a reverse auction with prices which drop when demand drops is to reflect that not everyone is willing to pay a high price to see the concert -- if the prices are too high, people won't go and will stay home, so you keep dropping the price until it reaches some floor where demand picks up.
And yes, it is very close to an ideal market, despite your desire to cloud the basic economics with vague concepts like "fandom" and the emotional relationship between fans and musicians. Like it or not the musicians are a business and the entire tour is run as a business. They won't tour for free nor will the venues, roadies, etc, work for free.
And really, "fandom" actually drives demand and demonstrates fans are willing to pay more for a high demand product.
It's blindingly obvious that you have absolutely no idea how touring schedules, venue booking, staffing, transportation or anything related to these subjects actually works in the real world, outside your economics textbooks.
Obviously a global tour mapped out city-by-city in advance has logistical demands where adding extra shows is difficult to impossible, but the problem is they don't usually build in extra concert dates or the flexibility to add them up front. Other touring events, like Broadway shows, often stage weeks of performances in a single city.
Like I said before, this is a *choice* on the part of musicians and their management -- they could build in extra time so that shows could be added when they planned the tour. But the touring schedule is chronologically compressed on purpose, probably because generally speaking pop music stardom is publicity driven and they are recording artists primarily (regardless of where their net income comes from) because touring drives record sales and radio airplay *not* record sales and radio airplay driving ticket sales.
The vast majority of artists make the overwhelming bulk of their income from touring and especially from merch sales at shows, probably 80-90% or more.
All the more reason that it's puzzling that artists would leave their own income on the table and allow scalpers to make the extra money. Why not play more shows at conventional prices or auction the tickets to eliminate the profit margin of scalpers?
There's no way to avoid the economics of this situation, it is a very large business, not merely a service to fans -- you can't eliminate scalping via laws that ban it.
Like I said in my first post, the only other paths to controlling it are much more complex. I think closer auditing of ticket sales by touring management might be the best thing you can do. Make sure that tickets "sold' are actually sold through retail outlets, and not sham sales by managers/promoters directly to scalpers for kickbacks -- this would be tax evasion and some kind of fraud.
Short of that, you are a prisoner of the market -- demand exceeds supply, and people (and mostly fans) are already proven willing and able to buy tickets way above face price.
Why is not immediately apparent to almost everyone who isn't very wealthy that much of the rest of the world is very nearly a complete shithole? At best desperately impoverished and politically corrupt, at worst a desperately poor post-apocalyptic war zone?
There is no economic math where even trailer-park lifestyles, let alone something like the relative affluence of a middle class lifestyle, is sustainable in the US with anything remotely like open borders.
In the most optimistic of scenarios we get a massive population surge and a huge number of poor and ignorant people who implode the schools and social services -- and those systems are not that good to begin with.
In the worst case we end up with all manner of economic, social and environmental problems and politics so ugly it makes Trump look like a competent and effective leader. If marginalized white people will vote for Trump under current circumstances that only seem desperate, they will vote for actual ethnic cleansing when things really are desperate.
The merely wealthy are nuts if they think it won't affect them, too. They risk either massive redistribution of their wealth and/or having to spend a ton of it to literally fortify their affluent suburbs with walls and mercenaries.
[Popular concerts are usually priced well below the demand price ceiling] Why is this somehow a bad thing? Sure, there is a drive to maximize profits, but it is countered by a drive to not piss off your fans and primary customers with ridiculously high ticket prices.
It's a bad thing because it creates an unstable market for tickets and results in scalping!
This will also severely piss off the fans, and without fan goodwill, you are nothing as an artist. It will be seen as greedy and petty, and it will turn fans into haters. The major flaw in your thinking is that you only think about maximizing profits. But you're completely forgetting the human element, the artist-fan relationship, the long-term goodwill and a bunch of other "soft" factors.
If you want to be pissed off about high ticket prices, blame the artist for having too few performances. They can easily address the supply side of the market by playing more concerts. If a concert with $25 tickets (I just made the number up, I only wish they were that cheap) sells out and results in $250 scalped tickets the fan-savvy solution is to just perform more concerts in a given city.
IMHO, the larger problem here has something to do with the nature of popular musicians (whether it's Metallica or Adele). I don't think many of them think of themselves as performing musicians, but they think of themselves as recording musicians. They don't tour that much, or if they do, their idea of a "World Tour" is 75-odd concerts in 9 months, covering the entire world, after selling 5 million records. If you can sell 5 million records, shouldn't that mean you can sell 5 million tickets at reasonable prices?
It would seem there's a short-term publicity machine at work here, that's as or more focused on short-term popularity rather than long term artistry.
Uh, have you completely missed what happens whenever a new Apple product goes on sale?
No, I intentionally glossed over it, because arbitrage for iPhones usually only happens for the first 1-2 months the new model is available (in the US) and then shifts to international arbitrage, selling new models where they aren't yet available. And Apple has gotten a lot better at ramping up production to eliminate this.
But it's not a "what the market will bear" situation. Ticket sales for an even are generally from one source only, with a price agreed upon by the venue, the artist's management and the ticket company. In this situation, there is no market competition. The price is set at a level where they expect to be able to fill the venue.
No, it is what the market will bear. The "market competition" for a concert is basically all the other entertainment options other than seeing the concert -- other shows, staying home and watching Netflix, other hobbies, etc. Just like the market competition for iPhones is Samsung, Google, LG, etc.
There is a single source for the tickets for any other show (just like there's a single source for iPhones), but there is a market of buyers who represent the "demand" side of the market. If there are more people who want tickets for a given concert than there are seats inside the venue, then demand has exceeded supply.
Basic economics suggests that as demand rises, price will rise as well, until the price rises to the point that demand falls off -- this is the demand price ceiling, the price above which people will not buy and will seek alternatives. Popular concerts are usually priced well below the demand price ceiling and the fact that scalping exists at all demonstrates that. If tickets were already at the demand price ceiling, nobody could resell them above face price because above that price there is nearly zero demand.
You imply that there is something of a monopoly on tickets because scalpers corner the market. Yes, sort of, but the natural monopoly actually rests with the *artist* who is the source of the tickets. Apple prices iPhones at about 3x their manufacturing price and has high demand and waiting lists, but almost no "scalping" because they have already priced the phone close to the demand ceiling *because* they are using their monopoly on supply to set the price. If they didn't, there would be "scalping" of iPhones at the price the demand would bear.
It's weird that artists will *willingly* surrender a natural monopoly on the supply of tickets to resellers and let *someone else* take all the extra profit the market demand can obtain. They are literally the only monopolists who decide they "make enough already" and will hand over *all* the extra profit the market will deliver for their product.
No amount of hand-waving will make the demand for popular concert tickets go away -- the only thing that will lessen is raising prices, and to eliminate resellers you have to make it unprofitable to resell them. The price *has* to rise to control demand, and pricing tickets near the demand price ceiling is the only way to do this. Price the tickets very high and then slowly reduce the price as demand falls, but hold prices if demand is constant. This keeps the price at the market demand ceiling and eliminates the profit that scalpers need to operate.
why not simply make it illegal to sell tickets at above face value?
Because making selling some things illegal doesn't work? Here in Minnesota scalping used to be illegal and it never stopped anyone, and like drugs, it only made the problems worse (fake tickets, etc).
And since when did people stand in line for hours to buy tickets? It's all online now.
I would argue that's made dominance of the ticket market by scalpers worse, not better. Now they can automate dominating ticket sales. At least in-person ticket sales can impose reasonable limits on per-person sales and give people with the gumption to show up early a chance of buying tickets. And it forces scalpers to work a lot harder to corner the market -- they need to hire a lot of mules, especially if the box office does something like indelible UV hand stamps.
Look, I don't like the notion that big events are a rich man's game anymore than anyone else, but there's no practical way to ensure only true-blue "fans" get reasonably priced tickets. You have to make arbitrage of tickets unprofitable by shifting the profit to the ticket originator -- attack the fundamental economics of price and scarcity. Holding prices down just means you're picking winners and losers on some other criteria.
The bottom line is you're chasing a good priced below what the market will bear and the market will respond by pushing the ticket price up.
My personal response has just been to see fewer "popular" shows and attend more local/indie events. They're priced reasonably and easier to get into, and quite often just plain better because the venues are more intimate. I will still go to the occasional (once a year or less) popular event, usually because my wife wants to go, but really at that point I'm happy to buy from the legal resellers we have -- I can actually *get* the tickets then and not worry about getting ripped off.
So you basically just want the rich people with high disposable incomes to go to the shows, and no ordinary people?
Uhh, "ordinary people" can't own yachts, exotic sports cars, large precious stones, private jets or any of a number of expensive things.
The reality is that popular concerts have a demand that exceeds supply at the face value. Even if you could manage to totally eliminate scalping and sell the tickets on first come, first serve basis with limits you'd be basically re-writing the rules to say "just the people who can stand in line for hours get to buy tickets and not ordinary people with jobs or families". There is no form of rationing that can please every person with a demand for the product when demand exceeds supply.
A reverse auction makes the most sense, starting the price very high and dropping it as demand ebbs. You'd still pay more for the tickets, but it would cripple scalpers who expect to buy at face value and resell at market-demand prices since the initial ticket prices would be high and with demand driving price drops, scalpers wouldn't be able to buy tickets in any volume without keeping price levels high. Scalpers can't arbitrage tickets at prices above price points where the market has already refused to buy them. Scalping only works because they are able to sell tickets at a price the market accepts and buy them at below-market prices.
I've long suspected that the artists (which includes their management) collude with the scalpers anyway by supplying the scalping market with tickets marginally above face price. They get to write off the face price of the tickets as a promotional expense and gain the income as off the books cash.
They seem to do a good job on overall routing but I don't see that kind of detail in ordinary routing, and quite often they pick routes that I know will be worse to drive qualitatively due to stop and go traffic -- a lot of freeway shunting when the side streets are much less stop and go.
Do the trucks have internal GPS guidance for the routes?
If they do, why would a driver bother overriding what are likely better directions except in really bad machine choices where some mapping data was off or something?
Although I kind of wonder if its only really beneficial for multi-stop routes where the entire route can be re-planned with right turns only and thus gaining some other efficiencies, versus a single-destination trip where avoiding a single left turn could involve a lot more distance.
Usually the mob/union/business narrative is more like extortion, where they threaten the business with mafia tactics and cut some deal with the employer that results in a payoff to them and little or no benefit to the employees.
Obviously there are variations, and probably historically there was more value in giving the workers something (otherwise they lose support or risk subversion) and probably smarter guys with more long term vision figured controlling the union and access to its funds was the smart play, so jacking worker salaries meant more slush fund money vs. getting paid off by the owner to allow them to do nothing.
My question here is -- what value to the mob is muscling the employer to get improved wages and working conditions (which cost Wal Mart something) without actually successfully unionizing? Wal Mart doesn't strike me as the kind of organization that pays extortion to the mob, so the only real value to the mob would be unionization resulting in dues.
I agree with your assessment of how to prevent unionization, though -- co-opt the employees by addressing enough of their issues that it makes more sense to accept the company's generosity now vs. risking a failed unionizing effort. And for Tesla it would cost them much less to be generous up front than the accept unions long term, and they could probably quietly back-track for new hires on a lot of stuff, too, although that has its own risk/reward calculus.
I don't know why we can't blend UBI with some kind of large-scale project that would roll in some kind of jobs tied to a larger purpose or project, sort of like the Civilian Conservation Corps or the WPA organizations.
Maybe it's a bad example, but couldn't something like the space program be greatly expanded with the idea that low level labor positions could be UBI-program jobs? It would be more than just providing an income, it would be a productive long-range project.
And a lot of the people who would potentially qualify for UBI wouldn't be just the stereotype of the uneducated urban ghetto dweller, they would be people who have educations and a desire to work but face an economy not offering livable jobs.
So you wouldn't just be stuck with a work force capable of only the most basic and unreliable labor, you would have people who presumably have some level of initiative and interest who could potentially obtain even more skills.
And society would end up with some kind of useful work product -- and I just used the space program as an example, maybe there's other kinds of initiatives that could benefit.
All of these stories about the uptake in renewables have these funny phrasings that seem to indicate they are cherrypicking to get the numbers they want.
I don't doubt that wind/solar/etc are being installed in increasing numbers, but the way these figures are presented have a "the chocolate ration has been increased" quality to them.
I was in Manhattan 4 years ago we stayed at the Embassy Suites in Times Square and I couldn't get data *at all* unless we got 2-3 blocks away. The only time I had usable data was in the middle of the night.
Can't they just encase the thing in some kind of packaging with its own cooling system? Or is it a case of whatever it takes to keep it running on Venus is too fucking big to send to Venus?
I'd guess the H1-B visa system will have one of two possible primary biases.
Primary Bias A: Visas are harder to get, and some "key innovators", really smart people that even most morons would agree should work here, can't get a visa.
Primary Bias B: Visas are too easy to get, and a lot of run-of-the-mill IT jobs get outsourced, costing people their jobs.
What's wrong with having Primary Bias A?
The number of actual key innovators is numerically small and presumably they are filling high-end jobs and have significant resources lobbying on their behalf, increasing the chance they will ultimately get in. And by default you are making it much harder to outsource potentially thousands of good-paying "information age" jobs through visa abuse.
It seems like we have a choice -- we can protect many American jobs by making visas tougher to get, potentially risking that some smart guy doesn't get to work for an American multinational that buries its profits in Ireland. Or we can make them easy, bulk import foreigners, outsource jobs and render Americans unemployed on the outside chance that 1 in every 10,000 we import is some genius who makes a bunch of multinational executives fabulously wealthy.
His column in the Times today was explaining how much Silicon Valley needs immigrants for their hard work, inspiration and outside-the-box thinking.
Which is just fine -- but really, the complaint isn't about too much innovation in the Valley, the complaint is about run of the mill non-innovator jobs being outsourced to H1-Bs in the name of corporate profits.
Of course he didn't mention that issue at all, choosing to cast the issue as predominantly one of racism and ignorance killing the innovation hub of America.
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I worked at a 4 location local video store chain in the early 1990s. Our location was one of the two locations that had porn titles.
We used to run reports near close and there were some nights where we made 80% of our revenue on porn movies. 75% of that gay porn.
At this store, the actual tapes were shelved behind the counter and an empty box with a hunk of foam inside was on the shelf. You brought the box, we put the tape in a plastic VHS carry case when you rented it.
The porn room was a separate room in the back of the store, but the whole empty box selection routine worked the same. But the porn boxes were probably 50% larger in area than the regular titles, but people would always walk out of there and grab the FIRST title they could reach (the A section of drama) in some vain attempt to cover the box, which of course it never did. And they would do it when no one else was in the store, too -- like, umm, I have to read the title to give you the actual videotape to take home. No secrets here.
One night I moved the tiny self-help & how-to section to where drama was supposed to start because I figured nobody rented them anyway, and if the nervous porn hounds were going to just grab random titles they might as well not decimate the As out of the drama section.
The biggest hoots were when we people whose name you recognized -- or people you knew! -- came in for porn, especially gay porn.
I read that one of the dirty secrets of the mainstream entertainment business was how much money they made selling pay per view porn in hotels.
Which I guess makes sense since it just shows up as "MOVIE" on the bill, allowing people who stay in hotels to buy it (and often expense it) and watch it and no one was the wiser.
When I used to stay at a Hyatt in Irvine, they had a single porn movies and some kind of 6 hour, all-you-could-eat extravaganza of porn. I always wondered who bought the extravaganza. Bachelor parties was the obvious choice, but IIRC this hotel was mostly business people and not a tourist or "party" spot.
IMHO, the problem really seems to be for shows within their peak bubble of popularity (give or take a couple of years).
Once you get out of that bubble, it's tolerable to non-existent in terms of junk postings and occasionally vital for interesting trivia or availability of cult or old movies.
It would only be a problem for a really small subset of topics, just like it's really only a problem for a small subset of IMDB titles. If you look at almost anything that's not a popular current movie/show, there's like zero reason to moderate an IMDB title.
Would some Wikipedia discussion pages get obnoxious? Sure, but the edit wars already are and they could either block miscellaneous question sections or just roll them off.
I suppose it boils down to something like die size or power consumption, but considering that a lot of smartphones can act as access points, why not provide all functionality in one chip?
I've long thought that Wikipedia should have a discussion tab devoted to general comments on a given entry unrelated to the editorial critiques the "Talk" tab is designed for.
I occasionally have questions about pages I've read, and Talk isn't a great (or even technically allowed) place to put them. It would also allow knowledgeable editors to see where some aspect of the topic could be clarified.
Maybe I should have led with my Navy ID and an explanation that I was a scientist in the civil service, but they did NOT like that I admitted to having explosives residue on me.
I doubt it would have worked, I think most security people are in the don't-believe-anything-they-say mode. The only thing that overrides it is force majeure -- a higher ranking individual within their own organization, or another security agency with greater power and authority and the ability to apply it to the conflicting agency on the spot.
What I wonder about is how many TSA people have pissed off local or state PD, only to later feel the power of local authority. Probably nothing like experiencing a felony traffic stop, having your car impounded and spending the night in jail to re-evaluate the limits of power.
Your reasoning seems to be that if they simply sold the tickets at higher prices, there would be no scalpers. If they increased the prices to what the scalpers charge, they wouldn't sell out the venue.
You're really sounding like an economy 101 student right now. Newsflash: Not everything is a classical market. Hell, even Adam Smith realized that not every area is best served by a classical market.
*Of course* if you raise prices close to what scalpers charge now you'd reduce nearly all scalping *and* sell out venues. Venues sell out now *with* ticket prices inflated due to ticket scalping. What makes you think they would stop selling out simply because the seller of the tickets changed from scalpers to the box office?
And the purpose of a reverse auction with prices which drop when demand drops is to reflect that not everyone is willing to pay a high price to see the concert -- if the prices are too high, people won't go and will stay home, so you keep dropping the price until it reaches some floor where demand picks up.
And yes, it is very close to an ideal market, despite your desire to cloud the basic economics with vague concepts like "fandom" and the emotional relationship between fans and musicians. Like it or not the musicians are a business and the entire tour is run as a business. They won't tour for free nor will the venues, roadies, etc, work for free.
And really, "fandom" actually drives demand and demonstrates fans are willing to pay more for a high demand product.
It's blindingly obvious that you have absolutely no idea how touring schedules, venue booking, staffing, transportation or anything related to these subjects actually works in the real world, outside your economics textbooks.
Obviously a global tour mapped out city-by-city in advance has logistical demands where adding extra shows is difficult to impossible, but the problem is they don't usually build in extra concert dates or the flexibility to add them up front. Other touring events, like Broadway shows, often stage weeks of performances in a single city.
Like I said before, this is a *choice* on the part of musicians and their management -- they could build in extra time so that shows could be added when they planned the tour. But the touring schedule is chronologically compressed on purpose, probably because generally speaking pop music stardom is publicity driven and they are recording artists primarily (regardless of where their net income comes from) because touring drives record sales and radio airplay *not* record sales and radio airplay driving ticket sales.
The vast majority of artists make the overwhelming bulk of their income from touring and especially from merch sales at shows, probably 80-90% or more.
All the more reason that it's puzzling that artists would leave their own income on the table and allow scalpers to make the extra money. Why not play more shows at conventional prices or auction the tickets to eliminate the profit margin of scalpers?
There's no way to avoid the economics of this situation, it is a very large business, not merely a service to fans -- you can't eliminate scalping via laws that ban it.
Like I said in my first post, the only other paths to controlling it are much more complex. I think closer auditing of ticket sales by touring management might be the best thing you can do. Make sure that tickets "sold' are actually sold through retail outlets, and not sham sales by managers/promoters directly to scalpers for kickbacks -- this would be tax evasion and some kind of fraud.
Short of that, you are a prisoner of the market -- demand exceeds supply, and people (and mostly fans) are already proven willing and able to buy tickets way above face price.
Why is not immediately apparent to almost everyone who isn't very wealthy that much of the rest of the world is very nearly a complete shithole? At best desperately impoverished and politically corrupt, at worst a desperately poor post-apocalyptic war zone?
There is no economic math where even trailer-park lifestyles, let alone something like the relative affluence of a middle class lifestyle, is sustainable in the US with anything remotely like open borders.
In the most optimistic of scenarios we get a massive population surge and a huge number of poor and ignorant people who implode the schools and social services -- and those systems are not that good to begin with.
In the worst case we end up with all manner of economic, social and environmental problems and politics so ugly it makes Trump look like a competent and effective leader. If marginalized white people will vote for Trump under current circumstances that only seem desperate, they will vote for actual ethnic cleansing when things really are desperate.
The merely wealthy are nuts if they think it won't affect them, too. They risk either massive redistribution of their wealth and/or having to spend a ton of it to literally fortify their affluent suburbs with walls and mercenaries.
[Popular concerts are usually priced well below the demand price ceiling]
Why is this somehow a bad thing? Sure, there is a drive to maximize profits, but it is countered by a drive to not piss off your fans and primary customers with ridiculously high ticket prices.
It's a bad thing because it creates an unstable market for tickets and results in scalping!
This will also severely piss off the fans, and without fan goodwill, you are nothing as an artist. It will be seen as greedy and petty, and it will turn fans into haters. The major flaw in your thinking is that you only think about maximizing profits. But you're completely forgetting the human element, the artist-fan relationship, the long-term goodwill and a bunch of other "soft" factors.
If you want to be pissed off about high ticket prices, blame the artist for having too few performances. They can easily address the supply side of the market by playing more concerts. If a concert with $25 tickets (I just made the number up, I only wish they were that cheap) sells out and results in $250 scalped tickets the fan-savvy solution is to just perform more concerts in a given city.
IMHO, the larger problem here has something to do with the nature of popular musicians (whether it's Metallica or Adele). I don't think many of them think of themselves as performing musicians, but they think of themselves as recording musicians. They don't tour that much, or if they do, their idea of a "World Tour" is 75-odd concerts in 9 months, covering the entire world, after selling 5 million records. If you can sell 5 million records, shouldn't that mean you can sell 5 million tickets at reasonable prices?
It would seem there's a short-term publicity machine at work here, that's as or more focused on short-term popularity rather than long term artistry.
Uh, have you completely missed what happens whenever a new Apple product goes on sale?
No, I intentionally glossed over it, because arbitrage for iPhones usually only happens for the first 1-2 months the new model is available (in the US) and then shifts to international arbitrage, selling new models where they aren't yet available. And Apple has gotten a lot better at ramping up production to eliminate this.
But it's not a "what the market will bear" situation. Ticket sales for an even are generally from one source only, with a price agreed upon by the venue, the artist's management and the ticket company. In this situation, there is no market competition. The price is set at a level where they expect to be able to fill the venue.
No, it is what the market will bear. The "market competition" for a concert is basically all the other entertainment options other than seeing the concert -- other shows, staying home and watching Netflix, other hobbies, etc. Just like the market competition for iPhones is Samsung, Google, LG, etc.
There is a single source for the tickets for any other show (just like there's a single source for iPhones), but there is a market of buyers who represent the "demand" side of the market. If there are more people who want tickets for a given concert than there are seats inside the venue, then demand has exceeded supply.
Basic economics suggests that as demand rises, price will rise as well, until the price rises to the point that demand falls off -- this is the demand price ceiling, the price above which people will not buy and will seek alternatives. Popular concerts are usually priced well below the demand price ceiling and the fact that scalping exists at all demonstrates that. If tickets were already at the demand price ceiling, nobody could resell them above face price because above that price there is nearly zero demand.
You imply that there is something of a monopoly on tickets because scalpers corner the market. Yes, sort of, but the natural monopoly actually rests with the *artist* who is the source of the tickets. Apple prices iPhones at about 3x their manufacturing price and has high demand and waiting lists, but almost no "scalping" because they have already priced the phone close to the demand ceiling *because* they are using their monopoly on supply to set the price. If they didn't, there would be "scalping" of iPhones at the price the demand would bear.
It's weird that artists will *willingly* surrender a natural monopoly on the supply of tickets to resellers and let *someone else* take all the extra profit the market demand can obtain. They are literally the only monopolists who decide they "make enough already" and will hand over *all* the extra profit the market will deliver for their product.
No amount of hand-waving will make the demand for popular concert tickets go away -- the only thing that will lessen is raising prices, and to eliminate resellers you have to make it unprofitable to resell them. The price *has* to rise to control demand, and pricing tickets near the demand price ceiling is the only way to do this. Price the tickets very high and then slowly reduce the price as demand falls, but hold prices if demand is constant. This keeps the price at the market demand ceiling and eliminates the profit that scalpers need to operate.
why not simply make it illegal to sell tickets at above face value?
Because making selling some things illegal doesn't work? Here in Minnesota scalping used to be illegal and it never stopped anyone, and like drugs, it only made the problems worse (fake tickets, etc).
And since when did people stand in line for hours to buy tickets? It's all online now.
I would argue that's made dominance of the ticket market by scalpers worse, not better. Now they can automate dominating ticket sales. At least in-person ticket sales can impose reasonable limits on per-person sales and give people with the gumption to show up early a chance of buying tickets. And it forces scalpers to work a lot harder to corner the market -- they need to hire a lot of mules, especially if the box office does something like indelible UV hand stamps.
Look, I don't like the notion that big events are a rich man's game anymore than anyone else, but there's no practical way to ensure only true-blue "fans" get reasonably priced tickets. You have to make arbitrage of tickets unprofitable by shifting the profit to the ticket originator -- attack the fundamental economics of price and scarcity. Holding prices down just means you're picking winners and losers on some other criteria.
The bottom line is you're chasing a good priced below what the market will bear and the market will respond by pushing the ticket price up.
My personal response has just been to see fewer "popular" shows and attend more local/indie events. They're priced reasonably and easier to get into, and quite often just plain better because the venues are more intimate. I will still go to the occasional (once a year or less) popular event, usually because my wife wants to go, but really at that point I'm happy to buy from the legal resellers we have -- I can actually *get* the tickets then and not worry about getting ripped off.
So you basically just want the rich people with high disposable incomes to go to the shows, and no ordinary people?
Uhh, "ordinary people" can't own yachts, exotic sports cars, large precious stones, private jets or any of a number of expensive things.
The reality is that popular concerts have a demand that exceeds supply at the face value. Even if you could manage to totally eliminate scalping and sell the tickets on first come, first serve basis with limits you'd be basically re-writing the rules to say "just the people who can stand in line for hours get to buy tickets and not ordinary people with jobs or families". There is no form of rationing that can please every person with a demand for the product when demand exceeds supply.
A reverse auction makes the most sense, starting the price very high and dropping it as demand ebbs. You'd still pay more for the tickets, but it would cripple scalpers who expect to buy at face value and resell at market-demand prices since the initial ticket prices would be high and with demand driving price drops, scalpers wouldn't be able to buy tickets in any volume without keeping price levels high. Scalpers can't arbitrage tickets at prices above price points where the market has already refused to buy them. Scalping only works because they are able to sell tickets at a price the market accepts and buy them at below-market prices.
I've long suspected that the artists (which includes their management) collude with the scalpers anyway by supplying the scalping market with tickets marginally above face price. They get to write off the face price of the tickets as a promotional expense and gain the income as off the books cash.
They seem to do a good job on overall routing but I don't see that kind of detail in ordinary routing, and quite often they pick routes that I know will be worse to drive qualitatively due to stop and go traffic -- a lot of freeway shunting when the side streets are much less stop and go.
Do the trucks have internal GPS guidance for the routes?
If they do, why would a driver bother overriding what are likely better directions except in really bad machine choices where some mapping data was off or something?
I wish this was a Google maps navigation option.
Although I kind of wonder if its only really beneficial for multi-stop routes where the entire route can be re-planned with right turns only and thus gaining some other efficiencies, versus a single-destination trip where avoiding a single left turn could involve a lot more distance.
Usually the mob/union/business narrative is more like extortion, where they threaten the business with mafia tactics and cut some deal with the employer that results in a payoff to them and little or no benefit to the employees.
Obviously there are variations, and probably historically there was more value in giving the workers something (otherwise they lose support or risk subversion) and probably smarter guys with more long term vision figured controlling the union and access to its funds was the smart play, so jacking worker salaries meant more slush fund money vs. getting paid off by the owner to allow them to do nothing.
My question here is -- what value to the mob is muscling the employer to get improved wages and working conditions (which cost Wal Mart something) without actually successfully unionizing? Wal Mart doesn't strike me as the kind of organization that pays extortion to the mob, so the only real value to the mob would be unionization resulting in dues.
I agree with your assessment of how to prevent unionization, though -- co-opt the employees by addressing enough of their issues that it makes more sense to accept the company's generosity now vs. risking a failed unionizing effort. And for Tesla it would cost them much less to be generous up front than the accept unions long term, and they could probably quietly back-track for new hires on a lot of stuff, too, although that has its own risk/reward calculus.
I don't know why we can't blend UBI with some kind of large-scale project that would roll in some kind of jobs tied to a larger purpose or project, sort of like the Civilian Conservation Corps or the WPA organizations.
Maybe it's a bad example, but couldn't something like the space program be greatly expanded with the idea that low level labor positions could be UBI-program jobs? It would be more than just providing an income, it would be a productive long-range project.
And a lot of the people who would potentially qualify for UBI wouldn't be just the stereotype of the uneducated urban ghetto dweller, they would be people who have educations and a desire to work but face an economy not offering livable jobs.
So you wouldn't just be stuck with a work force capable of only the most basic and unreliable labor, you would have people who presumably have some level of initiative and interest who could potentially obtain even more skills.
And society would end up with some kind of useful work product -- and I just used the space program as an example, maybe there's other kinds of initiatives that could benefit.
All of these stories about the uptake in renewables have these funny phrasings that seem to indicate they are cherrypicking to get the numbers they want.
I don't doubt that wind/solar/etc are being installed in increasing numbers, but the way these figures are presented have a "the chocolate ration has been increased" quality to them.
I was in Manhattan 4 years ago we stayed at the Embassy Suites in Times Square and I couldn't get data *at all* unless we got 2-3 blocks away. The only time I had usable data was in the middle of the night.
Can't they just encase the thing in some kind of packaging with its own cooling system? Or is it a case of whatever it takes to keep it running on Venus is too fucking big to send to Venus?
Numb nuts, it's spelled "jawohl", even when an actor on Hogan's Heroes says the line.
I'd guess the H1-B visa system will have one of two possible primary biases.
Primary Bias A: Visas are harder to get, and some "key innovators", really smart people that even most morons would agree should work here, can't get a visa.
Primary Bias B: Visas are too easy to get, and a lot of run-of-the-mill IT jobs get outsourced, costing people their jobs.
What's wrong with having Primary Bias A?
The number of actual key innovators is numerically small and presumably they are filling high-end jobs and have significant resources lobbying on their behalf, increasing the chance they will ultimately get in. And by default you are making it much harder to outsource potentially thousands of good-paying "information age" jobs through visa abuse.
It seems like we have a choice -- we can protect many American jobs by making visas tougher to get, potentially risking that some smart guy doesn't get to work for an American multinational that buries its profits in Ireland. Or we can make them easy, bulk import foreigners, outsource jobs and render Americans unemployed on the outside chance that 1 in every 10,000 we import is some genius who makes a bunch of multinational executives fabulously wealthy.
Sounds like a hard choice.
If you're going to suggest German Fascism, you might as well get the fucking German right.
He's an H1-B apologist.
His column in the Times today was explaining how much Silicon Valley needs immigrants for their hard work, inspiration and outside-the-box thinking.
Which is just fine -- but really, the complaint isn't about too much innovation in the Valley, the complaint is about run of the mill non-innovator jobs being outsourced to H1-Bs in the name of corporate profits.
Of course he didn't mention that issue at all, choosing to cast the issue as predominantly one of racism and ignorance killing the innovation hub of America.