That's exactly what I found too when we got another car for my wife. To get a price around $5k on a decent car (a good Japanese brand, not a shitty American brand), I had to look at cars with over 100k miles, plus I had to pay a bunch of money for Carfax. Also, we ended up spending a ton of time searching and running into a bunch of dead ends and one really really horrible Hyundai dealership.
When I needed another car and didn't have 3 months to hunt around for a used car, I went ahead and got a new one. Buying a new car (not a Hyundai!) was a totally experience. Also, you can get far better loan terms on new cars, frequently at or close to 0%.
Personally, my formula is to buy a good Japanese car new, maintain it really well, and keep it a long time. There's just too much of a chance of problems with new cars, it takes too long to find a good one, and there's not enough of a discount to make it worth it. The cars that usually have a big discount are ones that suck, like Chevys.
Here in the US, good luck getting a used car dealer to honor their "warranty".
You can get a "certified pre-owned" car from a high-end dealership, for one of the luxury brands, where you will get a good car with a strong warranty, but now you're looking at a whole lot of money for a used car; you might as well just buy a new one from one of the mainstream Japanese brands.
$700 to replace brake discs (not "disks" - those are things you use in a computer)? I could have done that for $50 with parts from Autozone.
Fuel injector cleaning is a total scam and not needed. Brake pads for an '07 Chevy (say, an Impala) cost about $20 online. Spark plugs $10-15. Tires are the big expense.
If you're actually interested in keeping your car expenses low, you'll figure out how to do these things on your own. Otherwise, you might as well just lease a car and get a new one every 2 years.
Pen and paper don't fail me in the middle of a deadline.
I keep reading variations of this theme in this discussion.
Am I the only one here who's able to plug in his phone every night?
I even have a spare battery for my phone in my backpack just in case, but I never need it, even on long rides or hikes where I'm running GPS tracking in the background. It's really simple: I plug in my phone at night when I go to sleep. Then it always lasts for the whole next day, with plenty of reserve.
I saw the first JJTrek in the theater. I wasn't impressed. I wouldn't waste my $1.xx on renting any of them at Redbox, nor would I waste my time. I have better things to do with my time than that, such as re-watching old TOS or TNG episodes, or even watching campy old 70s sci-fi movies.
And I've seen fan-made stuff that looks better than the actual props used in the show. Ever see the real props they used? "Good enough for TV" doesn't have to be very good at all.
While TOS was actually filmed in real film, it was then broadcast with the very poor-quality and low-resolution NTSC TV of the day, so they had a lot of leeway: people weren't going to be able to tell the difference on the crappy little TV screens they had back then. Now that they're dug up the original film footage and digitized it, you can see the flaws much better, and this of course necessitated redoing the effects, which were all done for NTSC and came nowhere close to the 35mm film the live action scenes were shot on.
Another fun fact: notice how in TOS the ship has all kinds of psychedelic colors, even just for the paint schemes in the rooms? That wasn't just because it was the 60s; they did that because color TV was new, and they were trying to encourage people to buy color TV sets.
With MS in ~1999, people didn't really have a lot of viable alternatives if they wanted to use a desktop computer with any commercially available software (desktop Linux was still really young then, and even Macs had recently come out with the iMac and still ran OS 9). They had a de facto monopoly.
Yes, Apple has a monopoly over the Apple store, but that only affects iPhone/iPad users. They're a minority of the market. It's no different than how BMW has a monopoly over genuine BMW accessories for BMW cars and over factory service for BMWs through BMW dealerships. If you think BMW's accessory and service prices are ridiculously high, that's not a problem: don't buy a BMW. You have plenty of alternatives to BMWs, and much cheaper ones in fact. The exact same applies to Apple. Just because so many hordes of people (but still a minority) have willingly chosen to subject themselves to Apple's walled garden doesn't mean we need government intervention to force them to treat their customers nicely.
I'm not claiming it's non-assholish; it definitely is. I just believe that if people don't like this behavior, they can choose to not buy Apple products. I sure as hell don't, because I do view them as assholes, and much bigger assholes than the alternatives. I'm not going to reward their behavior with my money. And unlike Windows for instance with applications, there's nothing that compels you to use Apple products; just about any app you want is also available on Android (except Bumble, gee darn).
They're not a niche player, but you're measuring wrong. There's only a handful of players in the market: iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry. Samsung is not a player at all, nor is Sony, etc. When someone makes an app for a phone, they don't make a Samsung app, they make an Android app and it works on all Android devices regardless of manufacturer. So Apple is still in second place. They aren't competing against Samsung, they're competing against Google. This is all about the app stores, not the handset makers.
Microsoft was a monopoly at the time: they had well over 90% (IIRC, probably more actually) of the desktop market. That isn't comparable to Apple, which has less than 50% of the smartphone market in the US.
The lesson from the MS trial was that you don't have to have literally 100% of the market to be a monopolist and subject to anti-trust law. 95% is good enough.
Trying to compare that to the current situation with iPhones seems rather ridiculous. What we have now is basically a duopoly, with Apple iOS and Android each having roughly half the market, and Windows Phone and others being bit players.
I got a free trial subscription with my car, and tried it out, briefly. The sound quality was so horrible (even 32kbps MP3 sounds better) I laughed when they called me up trying to get me to renew after the trial period.
To be fair, I think Apple should prorate its App Store cut based on the total platform footprint of the service.
E.g., if Spotify is on 4 platforms (iOS, MacOS, Windows, and Android), then Spotify pays 1/4 of the standard rate on subscriptions.
I completely disagree.
Instead, I think Apple should multiply their rates based on the number of platforms an app is available on. e.g., if Spotify is on 4 platforms, and costs $10/month on the other platforms, Apple should charge iPhone users enough that it makes the total cost $40/month to have Spotify (so, $10/month for Spotify, $30/month for Apple).
It's not like Apple users are going to switch to another platform. Plus, it'll make them feel good that they're spending so much more money for the same thing than non-Apple users.
At some point, consumers need to take responsibility for their own choices. In the case of a true monopoly, it's true that consumers have little other choice, and even in the case of Windows you can make the claim that the presence of so much existing software on the platform, and the overwhelming marketshare, qualifies for similar treatment.
However, iPhone isn't even the market leader, not even close. Android is, by far. I really don't see why this warrants any attention other than "look! another way Apple users are getting screwed over! hahaha!"
I'm not worried about Ferrari owners getting the shaft with horrifically overpriced oil changes. So why should I care about Apple users getting screwed for $3/month?
Why should Apple be forced to break up? They're not a monopoly, and not even close. If you don't like their service, then don't buy an iPhone. Most smartphone buyers get Android phones of some kind; you're free to join them (as I have).
I don't like Apple either. My solution was simple though: I simply opted to not spend $800 on a phone from them, and instead got myself a nice used Samsung Galaxy for $100-something. If I get tired of that, I can go get a phone from Sony, or Motorola, or LG, etc. If I get mad about the crapware on it, I can try installing CyanogenMod. I have choices, something you don't have when you lock yourself into the Apple walled garden.
Why should I feel sorry for the rich minority who didn't make that choice?
A web page for a music-playing app isn't going to work very well. I agree that having an app for every little thing is really annoying, but music players are one place where they're really warranted.
He has a point though. Apple is not a monopoly in the smartphone space, they don't even have a majority of the marketshare.
If you don't feel that Apple's extra $3/month fee to have Spotify on an iPhone is worth it, and you don't feel that a company that operates this way should be rewarded, you can get yourself an Android phone instead. And apparently, you have!
Why should we be worried about people who willingly buy massively overpriced phones, from a vendor with a long history of this kind of behavior, and then get screwed over when they could have seen it coming? Do we worry about how Aston-Martin owners get screwed over with overpriced accessories or service or mis-features on their cars which make it hard for them to change their own oil? Why should we worry about the plight of luxury phone buyers who have to spend an extra $3/month for a service they can get on Android without that surcharge?
When we see this behavior by Google as well, then maybe we can start complaining. But at least on Android, you're not physically prevented from loading apps from places outside Google's Play store.
But are they big enough? All the numbers I've seen show Apple to be a rather small portion of the smartphone market, and that's just in the US. Outside the US, they're tiny. Of course, there's also data showing that iPhone users are much more likely to spend money on apps than Android users, but as a portion of the market itself, Apple is not dominant. They merely hold a very lucrative niche.
A car looses 25% off resale price as soon as it drives off the lot. I agree that this is a standard heavily influenced by the old industry that demanded a fat dealer markup
I completely disagree, and I can prove it.
Go buy a brand-new car. Now, go resell that vehicle on Craigslist. No dealer involved. You're not going to get close to the brand-new price for that car.
Resale price is what someone is willing to pay for the car, that's it. Dealer trade-in prices are lower because they have to make a profit, but private-party sales really show the true value (given that the seller can't really offer a warranty unlike a good dealer, which is one reason why used cars from better dealers cost more).
The reason you're not going to find someone on Craiglist willing to spend 98% of the new-car price for your just-off-the-lot car is because they can just go to the dealer and buy a brand-new one themselves, get one in the color they want with the options they want, and get dealer financing for it. It has little to do with the condition of the car.
I think you're missing something pretty significant.
Depreciation on a car reflects the lower market value of a used car.
The reason your $110K car only sells for half the price after 3 years and a paltry 5500 miles is because if you're a rich person who can afford a $110K car, why on earth would you want to save 10% and get a used car? If you can afford a $110K car, you're not going to care much about saving $11K. This is why luxury cars depreciate so much faster than regular cars. $20K-30K cars don't depreciate so quickly, because it's much easier to find someone who's willing to buy it used just so they can save 20% or so off the new price.
The other factor in used car prices is financing rates. When you buy a new car these days, you can get really good financing deals, even down to 0% interest. Used cars do not have these deals; the interest rates are much higher. So if you can't afford to buy a car outright with cash (or just don't want to drain your savings that way), you can get a brand-new car for the same monthly payment and loan term as a used car. So why bother buying used?
Back to your comment about "walking away from $40,000": almost no one ever does this in reality. The depreciation reflects the true market value of the car, which is how much you can get someone to pay for it. If you go buy a $110K luxury car, you *will not* find someone willing to buy it from you after two months with only a small reduction in price. What gives you the idea that anyone would? The only way you'd unload that car is by dropping the price greatly, so that you can find some middle-class person willing to spend $60K or so on a formerly $110K car, because the people who can afford to buy it new aren't going to be interested. *That* is what the huge depreciation is reflecting.
So, no, depreciation is not a "financial gimmick".
it's the recent history where all the doctors in many hospitals saw the latest tech shiny and forced their IT departments to allow and support them on the network. It's only after this power play is completed that the clinicians realize that iPads are very poor devices for interfacing with medical records and aren't good for many other work related tasks either.
Huh? I'm an Apple-hater, but I'll happily admit that iPads simply do not have the level of problems with malware that Windows PCs do. The entire reason these hospitals are experiencing ransomware infections is because they're running Windows. That's it. If they stopped running Windows, they wouldn't have ransomware any time soon. And iPads are ubiquitous enough that if they were really that insecure, the malware writers would be going after them as they had with Windows, but you really don't hear of much malware on the iOS platform at all.
Apple and their iDevices suck for a lot of reasons, but malware isn't one of them. The hospitals would do well to switch to iPads.
This site's really gone downhill since ~2000. It used to be full of really smart people with extremely informative and insightful commentary. Now it's mostly full of trolls and jerks who think they're smarter and more informed than they really are. It's sad.
I'm not sure where all the really smart people went to. I kinda think they just left the industry altogether and are doing something completely non-tech-related now.
There's a decent number of really smart people on HackerNews, but that site's not much fun (and I don't think it's the same smart people from the golden days of Slashdot). Humorous comments are always, without exception, down-modded, as is any comment that offends the PC police there (and I say that as a liberal and a Bernie fan; apparently I'm not PC enough for them over there!). You can see some good commentary here and there, especially about programming topics, but it's an utterly humorless and dry place to hang out.
It does seem ridiculous to me that this would actually happen. However, as you point out, it's common with rental cars and hotel rooms, so "never say never". But concerts have traditionally been events where you pay and you get a ticket, and whoever holds the ticket is the one who's permitted admission (and the ticket may also guarantee a certain seat too). It's pretty hard to imagine this moving to the hotel-like model where they keep your charge card on file just in case you break the rules. For one thing, a lot of people do buy tickets with cash. And for another thing, the hotel one is justified in most peoples' eyes: if the guest is a a jerk and actually causes damage to the room, they need a deposit to deal with that; it's no different than having a deposit on an apartment to take care of damage. With the concert, there's no "damage" you can do really; the deposit is only so they can extract money for you if you break their rules about recording; basically they're treating you like a potential criminal. Who's going to agree to that? But then again, there's no shortage of "sheeple" out there: just look at all the iPhone buyers.
So, problem solved, right? Why is it all I ever read on places like this is that there's never any construction there anyway if they're now suddenly building a bunch of high-rises, despite a whole bunch of Slashdotters telling me here that I'm an idiot for even proposing such a thing because there's earthquakes there?
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly what I found too when we got another car for my wife. To get a price around $5k on a decent car (a good Japanese brand, not a shitty American brand), I had to look at cars with over 100k miles, plus I had to pay a bunch of money for Carfax. Also, we ended up spending a ton of time searching and running into a bunch of dead ends and one really really horrible Hyundai dealership.
When I needed another car and didn't have 3 months to hunt around for a used car, I went ahead and got a new one. Buying a new car (not a Hyundai!) was a totally experience. Also, you can get far better loan terms on new cars, frequently at or close to 0%.
Personally, my formula is to buy a good Japanese car new, maintain it really well, and keep it a long time. There's just too much of a chance of problems with new cars, it takes too long to find a good one, and there's not enough of a discount to make it worth it. The cars that usually have a big discount are ones that suck, like Chevys.
Here in the US, good luck getting a used car dealer to honor their "warranty".
You can get a "certified pre-owned" car from a high-end dealership, for one of the luxury brands, where you will get a good car with a strong warranty, but now you're looking at a whole lot of money for a used car; you might as well just buy a new one from one of the mainstream Japanese brands.
$700 to replace brake discs (not "disks" - those are things you use in a computer)? I could have done that for $50 with parts from Autozone.
Fuel injector cleaning is a total scam and not needed. Brake pads for an '07 Chevy (say, an Impala) cost about $20 online. Spark plugs $10-15. Tires are the big expense.
If you're actually interested in keeping your car expenses low, you'll figure out how to do these things on your own. Otherwise, you might as well just lease a car and get a new one every 2 years.
Pen and paper don't fail me in the middle of a deadline.
I keep reading variations of this theme in this discussion.
Am I the only one here who's able to plug in his phone every night?
I even have a spare battery for my phone in my backpack just in case, but I never need it, even on long rides or hikes where I'm running GPS tracking in the background. It's really simple: I plug in my phone at night when I go to sleep. Then it always lasts for the whole next day, with plenty of reserve.
I must be weird.
I saw the first JJTrek in the theater. I wasn't impressed. I wouldn't waste my $1.xx on renting any of them at Redbox, nor would I waste my time. I have better things to do with my time than that, such as re-watching old TOS or TNG episodes, or even watching campy old 70s sci-fi movies.
And I've seen fan-made stuff that looks better than the actual props used in the show. Ever see the real props they used? "Good enough for TV" doesn't have to be very good at all.
While TOS was actually filmed in real film, it was then broadcast with the very poor-quality and low-resolution NTSC TV of the day, so they had a lot of leeway: people weren't going to be able to tell the difference on the crappy little TV screens they had back then. Now that they're dug up the original film footage and digitized it, you can see the flaws much better, and this of course necessitated redoing the effects, which were all done for NTSC and came nowhere close to the 35mm film the live action scenes were shot on.
Another fun fact: notice how in TOS the ship has all kinds of psychedelic colors, even just for the paint schemes in the rooms? That wasn't just because it was the 60s; they did that because color TV was new, and they were trying to encourage people to buy color TV sets.
You're making more of this than there is.
With MS in ~1999, people didn't really have a lot of viable alternatives if they wanted to use a desktop computer with any commercially available software (desktop Linux was still really young then, and even Macs had recently come out with the iMac and still ran OS 9). They had a de facto monopoly.
Yes, Apple has a monopoly over the Apple store, but that only affects iPhone/iPad users. They're a minority of the market. It's no different than how BMW has a monopoly over genuine BMW accessories for BMW cars and over factory service for BMWs through BMW dealerships. If you think BMW's accessory and service prices are ridiculously high, that's not a problem: don't buy a BMW. You have plenty of alternatives to BMWs, and much cheaper ones in fact. The exact same applies to Apple. Just because so many hordes of people (but still a minority) have willingly chosen to subject themselves to Apple's walled garden doesn't mean we need government intervention to force them to treat their customers nicely.
I'm not claiming it's non-assholish; it definitely is. I just believe that if people don't like this behavior, they can choose to not buy Apple products. I sure as hell don't, because I do view them as assholes, and much bigger assholes than the alternatives. I'm not going to reward their behavior with my money. And unlike Windows for instance with applications, there's nothing that compels you to use Apple products; just about any app you want is also available on Android (except Bumble, gee darn).
They're not a niche player, but you're measuring wrong. There's only a handful of players in the market: iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry. Samsung is not a player at all, nor is Sony, etc. When someone makes an app for a phone, they don't make a Samsung app, they make an Android app and it works on all Android devices regardless of manufacturer. So Apple is still in second place. They aren't competing against Samsung, they're competing against Google. This is all about the app stores, not the handset makers.
Yeah, and why should I care? It's not my concern if a bunch of rich, spoiled brats get screwed for $3/month.
Microsoft was a monopoly at the time: they had well over 90% (IIRC, probably more actually) of the desktop market. That isn't comparable to Apple, which has less than 50% of the smartphone market in the US.
The lesson from the MS trial was that you don't have to have literally 100% of the market to be a monopolist and subject to anti-trust law. 95% is good enough.
Trying to compare that to the current situation with iPhones seems rather ridiculous. What we have now is basically a duopoly, with Apple iOS and Android each having roughly half the market, and Windows Phone and others being bit players.
Why would anyone willingly subscribe to SiriusXM?
I got a free trial subscription with my car, and tried it out, briefly. The sound quality was so horrible (even 32kbps MP3 sounds better) I laughed when they called me up trying to get me to renew after the trial period.
Yep, that's exactly what I have, a 0.9% interest rate loan for 5 years. You can't buy a used car with that kind of rate.
To be fair, I think Apple should prorate its App Store cut based on the total platform footprint of the service.
E.g., if Spotify is on 4 platforms (iOS, MacOS, Windows, and Android), then Spotify pays 1/4 of the standard rate on subscriptions.
I completely disagree.
Instead, I think Apple should multiply their rates based on the number of platforms an app is available on. e.g., if Spotify is on 4 platforms, and costs $10/month on the other platforms, Apple should charge iPhone users enough that it makes the total cost $40/month to have Spotify (so, $10/month for Spotify, $30/month for Apple).
It's not like Apple users are going to switch to another platform. Plus, it'll make them feel good that they're spending so much more money for the same thing than non-Apple users.
At some point, consumers need to take responsibility for their own choices. In the case of a true monopoly, it's true that consumers have little other choice, and even in the case of Windows you can make the claim that the presence of so much existing software on the platform, and the overwhelming marketshare, qualifies for similar treatment.
However, iPhone isn't even the market leader, not even close. Android is, by far. I really don't see why this warrants any attention other than "look! another way Apple users are getting screwed over! hahaha!"
I'm not worried about Ferrari owners getting the shaft with horrifically overpriced oil changes. So why should I care about Apple users getting screwed for $3/month?
Why should Apple be forced to break up? They're not a monopoly, and not even close. If you don't like their service, then don't buy an iPhone. Most smartphone buyers get Android phones of some kind; you're free to join them (as I have).
I don't like Apple either. My solution was simple though: I simply opted to not spend $800 on a phone from them, and instead got myself a nice used Samsung Galaxy for $100-something. If I get tired of that, I can go get a phone from Sony, or Motorola, or LG, etc. If I get mad about the crapware on it, I can try installing CyanogenMod. I have choices, something you don't have when you lock yourself into the Apple walled garden.
Why should I feel sorry for the rich minority who didn't make that choice?
A web page for a music-playing app isn't going to work very well. I agree that having an app for every little thing is really annoying, but music players are one place where they're really warranted.
He has a point though. Apple is not a monopoly in the smartphone space, they don't even have a majority of the marketshare.
If you don't feel that Apple's extra $3/month fee to have Spotify on an iPhone is worth it, and you don't feel that a company that operates this way should be rewarded, you can get yourself an Android phone instead. And apparently, you have!
Why should we be worried about people who willingly buy massively overpriced phones, from a vendor with a long history of this kind of behavior, and then get screwed over when they could have seen it coming? Do we worry about how Aston-Martin owners get screwed over with overpriced accessories or service or mis-features on their cars which make it hard for them to change their own oil? Why should we worry about the plight of luxury phone buyers who have to spend an extra $3/month for a service they can get on Android without that surcharge?
When we see this behavior by Google as well, then maybe we can start complaining. But at least on Android, you're not physically prevented from loading apps from places outside Google's Play store.
But are they big enough? All the numbers I've seen show Apple to be a rather small portion of the smartphone market, and that's just in the US. Outside the US, they're tiny. Of course, there's also data showing that iPhone users are much more likely to spend money on apps than Android users, but as a portion of the market itself, Apple is not dominant. They merely hold a very lucrative niche.
A car looses 25% off resale price as soon as it drives off the lot. I agree that this is a standard heavily influenced by the old industry that demanded a fat dealer markup
I completely disagree, and I can prove it.
Go buy a brand-new car. Now, go resell that vehicle on Craigslist. No dealer involved. You're not going to get close to the brand-new price for that car.
Resale price is what someone is willing to pay for the car, that's it. Dealer trade-in prices are lower because they have to make a profit, but private-party sales really show the true value (given that the seller can't really offer a warranty unlike a good dealer, which is one reason why used cars from better dealers cost more).
The reason you're not going to find someone on Craiglist willing to spend 98% of the new-car price for your just-off-the-lot car is because they can just go to the dealer and buy a brand-new one themselves, get one in the color they want with the options they want, and get dealer financing for it. It has little to do with the condition of the car.
I think you're missing something pretty significant.
Depreciation on a car reflects the lower market value of a used car.
The reason your $110K car only sells for half the price after 3 years and a paltry 5500 miles is because if you're a rich person who can afford a $110K car, why on earth would you want to save 10% and get a used car? If you can afford a $110K car, you're not going to care much about saving $11K. This is why luxury cars depreciate so much faster than regular cars. $20K-30K cars don't depreciate so quickly, because it's much easier to find someone who's willing to buy it used just so they can save 20% or so off the new price.
The other factor in used car prices is financing rates. When you buy a new car these days, you can get really good financing deals, even down to 0% interest. Used cars do not have these deals; the interest rates are much higher. So if you can't afford to buy a car outright with cash (or just don't want to drain your savings that way), you can get a brand-new car for the same monthly payment and loan term as a used car. So why bother buying used?
Back to your comment about "walking away from $40,000": almost no one ever does this in reality. The depreciation reflects the true market value of the car, which is how much you can get someone to pay for it. If you go buy a $110K luxury car, you *will not* find someone willing to buy it from you after two months with only a small reduction in price. What gives you the idea that anyone would? The only way you'd unload that car is by dropping the price greatly, so that you can find some middle-class person willing to spend $60K or so on a formerly $110K car, because the people who can afford to buy it new aren't going to be interested. *That* is what the huge depreciation is reflecting.
So, no, depreciation is not a "financial gimmick".
it's the recent history where all the doctors in many hospitals saw the latest tech shiny and forced their IT departments to allow and support them on the network. It's only after this power play is completed that the clinicians realize that iPads are very poor devices for interfacing with medical records and aren't good for many other work related tasks either.
Huh? I'm an Apple-hater, but I'll happily admit that iPads simply do not have the level of problems with malware that Windows PCs do. The entire reason these hospitals are experiencing ransomware infections is because they're running Windows. That's it. If they stopped running Windows, they wouldn't have ransomware any time soon. And iPads are ubiquitous enough that if they were really that insecure, the malware writers would be going after them as they had with Windows, but you really don't hear of much malware on the iOS platform at all.
Apple and their iDevices suck for a lot of reasons, but malware isn't one of them. The hospitals would do well to switch to iPads.
This site's really gone downhill since ~2000. It used to be full of really smart people with extremely informative and insightful commentary. Now it's mostly full of trolls and jerks who think they're smarter and more informed than they really are. It's sad.
I'm not sure where all the really smart people went to. I kinda think they just left the industry altogether and are doing something completely non-tech-related now.
There's a decent number of really smart people on HackerNews, but that site's not much fun (and I don't think it's the same smart people from the golden days of Slashdot). Humorous comments are always, without exception, down-modded, as is any comment that offends the PC police there (and I say that as a liberal and a Bernie fan; apparently I'm not PC enough for them over there!). You can see some good commentary here and there, especially about programming topics, but it's an utterly humorless and dry place to hang out.
Ok, I see.
It does seem ridiculous to me that this would actually happen. However, as you point out, it's common with rental cars and hotel rooms, so "never say never". But concerts have traditionally been events where you pay and you get a ticket, and whoever holds the ticket is the one who's permitted admission (and the ticket may also guarantee a certain seat too). It's pretty hard to imagine this moving to the hotel-like model where they keep your charge card on file just in case you break the rules. For one thing, a lot of people do buy tickets with cash. And for another thing, the hotel one is justified in most peoples' eyes: if the guest is a a jerk and actually causes damage to the room, they need a deposit to deal with that; it's no different than having a deposit on an apartment to take care of damage. With the concert, there's no "damage" you can do really; the deposit is only so they can extract money for you if you break their rules about recording; basically they're treating you like a potential criminal. Who's going to agree to that? But then again, there's no shortage of "sheeple" out there: just look at all the iPhone buyers.
I for one will not attend any such concerts.
So, problem solved, right? Why is it all I ever read on places like this is that there's never any construction there anyway if they're now suddenly building a bunch of high-rises, despite a whole bunch of Slashdotters telling me here that I'm an idiot for even proposing such a thing because there's earthquakes there?