1: from what i understand it can be hard to gain traction in ebay if you don't have an established account with some good reviews. With StubHub if you're going with the electronic option (which most people do) then the buyer knows that something at least resembling a real ticket has already been uploaded and they have some recourse if it turns out to be invalid.
And 2: discoverability in ebay seems rather poor. StubHub has listings for most big concerts already and has seating charts for most venues and will give you a fairly good idea of where each of the tickets for sale is located. (Honestly i've only sold tickets through StubHub so far, but it seems like the UI for buying tickets may be more useable than that of Ticketmaster itself.)
Of course you may be paying a higher fee to StubHub than ebay (though certainly not as high as TicketMaster) so i guess it depends on how in demand you think the tickets are and thus how hard people will be looking for them.
I tried reselling some tickets on Ticketmaster for a concert we couldn't make it to because it seemed easier to just do it through their website. They were up there for several weeks without selling. When i tried to drop the price of the tickets the week before the concert to try and get rid of them i discovered the Ticketmaster site wouldn't let me drop them below a certain amount (an amount that i believe was higher than what i'd initially paid for them.) Maybe there was some way to get around the artificial limit, but if so i couldn't figure out how. I'd say that maybe they wanted to insure a minimum level of fees for themselves, but if the ticket is priced too high to sell they're not going to get _any_ fee, so that seems counter-productive.
So i canceled that offer and switched the tickets over to StubHub, which had a much better UI and let me lower the ticket prices to whatever i wanted. (I ended up managing to sell them about an hour before the concert for about $200 less than i originally paid for them after getting into a negative bidding war with someone else =P)
I'd strongly recommend checking out StubHub and any other ticket resellers before resorting to TicketMaster, especially after hearing this news.
- Spinning Silver - Naomi Novik: A re-telling/twist on the Rumpelstiltskin story. A lot darker and more intense than "Uprooted", but still good.
- All Systems Red - Martha Wells: A story about "Murderbot", a security robot that's broken its conditioning but somehow never gets around to doing much murdering. Re-listening to with my SO because of the Hugos. Still good the second time around.
- The Fated Sky - Mary Robinette Kowal: Sequel to the very excellent "Calculating Stars" about an alternate history space program after a meteor impact in the 50s.
- Girl in the Green Silk Down - Seanan McGuire: Sequel to "Sparrow Hill Road", about a hitch-hiking ghost on the run from a phantom rider. Still in the middle of this one, but enjoying it so far, and i'm curious if it's going to turn into a long running series or not.
"Additionally, what's a book you finished recently that you found insightful, or funny, or both."
I'll pick "funny"
Either
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) - Dennis E. Taylor: A guy gets dragooned into being a space probe. It's got geeky cultural references like Ready Player One (but much more toned down and well integrated with the story) in a near future (relatively speaking) space opera plot.
or
All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault - James Alan Gardner: About an alternate earth where "creatures of the night" are at war with superheroes. The author does humor well, but a lot of it is situational humor about the ridiculousness of the situation and some of it is dark.
You are attributing conditions to villainy that simply result from greed.
They don't _want_ their customers to be brain damaged. In fact they'd be happier if no one was ever hurt riding their scooters. However they already know that people continue using their scooters even though people are getting hurt using them, some very seriously.
On the other hand if this law passes either they would have to provide helmets to go with the scooters (and find some way of preventing people from just walking off with them) or see a huge decrease in their business from people without a helmet declining to break the law by renting a scooter without one.
So a small concern about their customers' health is overridden by a much bigger concern about their own profits.
"The Waymo vans have trouble with many unprotected left turns"
I've said it before and i'll say it again. If they're having trouble making unprotected left turns, perhaps you should stop having Google Maps direct them to make unprotected left turns? And then PLEASE PROVIDE THAT UPDATE TO ME AS WELL!
Google Maps seems just fine for trips of moderate distance, but i've lost track of the number of times on shorter trips it has directed me to take side streets and then suggested that i make a left turn at an uncontrolled intersection onto a four+ lane road in Los Angeles in the middle of rush hour.
First you're claiming that "They treat this shit like a religion. They can cite verses and CO2 number etc. but cannot and will not accept that they could be wrong in any way."
But then you bring up: "In fact, 50 years ago (nothing on a global climate scale) scientists were worried about GLOBAL COOLING."
So are they wrong for not considering alternatives? Or wrong for considering alternatives?
And just for reference, although global cooling was considered by the scientific community there was no overall consensus about it. Some scientists brought up the possibility and newspapers blew it out of proportion because the idea of glaciers suddenly overtaking New York made good copy. Once some more scientists got involved and the hypothesis was checked the idea was abandoned. And look, since then temperatures have continued to rise instead of dropping. Here's a reference.
"Does someone really need to compile a list of these similar predictions from the past 40 years and paste them in every subsequent prediction for people to understand?"
Note that the first prediction was right on the nose, which is probably just a coincidence, given how little information they had to go on at the time. Of the eight other predictions five of them overestimated the amount of warming by 2016 by amounts ranging from 8% to 30%, while the other three _under_estimated the amount of warming, by amounts ranging from -14% to -28%.
Also note that two of the five that overestimated the amount of warming, in fact the two that were off by 30%, the largest amount, did so in part because they believed there would be more CO2 in the atmosphere now than there actually is. Why is there less CO2 than they predicted? Because although the amount of CO2 we release into the atmosphere is continuing to increase, the rate at which it increases has slowed down slightly. And part of the reason for that is because of the warnings of scientists like those writing these reports, so it's a little bit of a Y2K situation.
"You morons think energy companies are against this?"
We don't think, we know. Or at least we know they were in the past. It's well documented that the energy companies spent large amounts of money on lobbyists and PR trying to stave off any consequences for as long as possible. Sure, they're going to try to continue to make money now that they've (mostly) been forced to accept the truth, but they were much happier just continuing to collect money without having to pay for new infrastructure. (Building new infrastructure costs money. Those costs must be passed on to the consumer. Increased prices reduces demand. Basic economics.) Funnily enough, the rate at which the seem to be building new infrastructure seems to generally follow the rate at which renewable energy has become cheaper to produce than fossil energy.
This idea was a part of Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End". In it the government had the ability to trace and control all internet traffic, i believe by mandating that all routers have technology enabling that.
Ostensibly the government needed this ability to track terrorists. And the most fantastical part of the book IMHO was that the government did in fact only use it to track terrorists.
In a fantasy land where we could actually trust the government to impartially use such power only in a responsible way i'd be 100% behind this idea. Unfortunately, we happen to live in the real world.
We may end up in that situation anyways, but if we do i expect it won't solve as many problems as we'd like and we'll have to deal with a bunch of new abuses by the government itself. (And it's not like the government does a great job of using the tools currently available to solve problems on the internet as things are now anyways.)
I was going to say the same thing. I'm using a Sony Xperia X Compact right now and it's pretty good. I liked the 1st generation Moto X more, but Motorola decided to stop making good compact phones for some reason, so here i am.
Also, i like headphone jacks and bezels on my phone. If Sony sticks with getting rid of those or just shuts down the mobile division entirely i'm going to be in a very unfortunate position when i need to get another phone =/
You applied the term "mess" to the entire field, and one of the specific examples (one that you're clearly biased against) was of someone challenging an incumbent, and winning. That is exactly what you praised the up and coming Republicans for doing just two sentences prior.
You seem to be claiming that the incumbent was overconfident because he expected to win (in large part due to flawed polls) and you don't feel he put enough effort into the race. You're cherry picking one case from one side and criticizing it for the specifics while comparing it to the platonic ideal you've presented for the other side without giving any concrete examples.
So here's one counter-example. Four years ago the Republican House majority leader was unexpectedly defeated in the primaries by a new and more radical challenger in an almost identical scenario. "Republicans were so sure that Mr. Cantor would win that most party leaders had been watching for how broad his victory would be."
If your logic that a single such high-profile case represents a fundamental weakness in the party was true then the Republicans should have performed dismally in the 2014 midterms, but instead they made huge gains.
Unexpected upsets are a regular occurrence in politics (and sports, and pretty much everything else.) Attributing some meaningful significance to a single such event seems problematic and doesn't really align with previous cases.
Also, your attempt to communicate was rather poor, please write and proofread more slowly.
Republicans trying to push out RINO's are in the neighborhoods, asking what people want. They're challenging incumbents, that's good, and they're winning too.
But look at the mess with democrats [...] Some are simply ignoring challenges(one reason why Ocasio-Cortez won despite her pro-commie message)
So if a Republican challenges an incumbent by communicating locally with a message that resonates with people it's a good thing and part of the fight against corruption. But if a Democrat does the same thing it's a mess and really it only happened because the incumbent was incompetent and entirely despite the fact that they had a different message?
I had some sick twitter burns i was going to unleash against Musk about the whole submarine thing (i might have even got a Like or two!) but unfortunately i stopped to do some research before posting them and discovered that the story isn't nearly as one-sided as the media (both social and non) likes to portray it.
Long story (somewhat) shorter, other people were asking Musk to help and he initially said that the Thai government had things under control. Eventually he relented and worked on some designs and a prototype in consultation with experts in Thailand, who thought it might be useful in the current situation if it took longer to get the kids out than expected with their original plan, and if not might be useful in future rescue situations.
Once he got started on the project he was certainly public about discussing it, whether that was meant as a PR stunt or being open with the people who asked him if he could help is open to debate, but in either case he certainly caught a lot of flak for it. Finally some guy who had experience exploring those caves and used that experience to help the rescuers, but is not a search and rescue professional himself, criticized the "submarine" pretty harshly, and Musk blew up in a disproportionate response.
So again, Facebook is telling everyone else that it knows lots of information about them, but they're lying specifically to me and claiming that they don't in my case. What's their motivation? Why am i special?
I'm on Facebook. I have a profile. I just don't use it. I'd certainly believe Facebook is gathering some information about me from other people, but if so they haven't managed to correlate it back to my account yet. If i've actually tricked Facebook into thinking that i'm two different people, that may actually be even better?
After seeing the crazy stuff other people found when they did the personal info download thing from Facebook i tried it myself, and it was practically empty. So either:
1: Facebook is lying about what they put in the report and everybody else is colluding with Facebook by saying that their reports show a lot of data.
2: Facebook has individually singled me out because I'm special for some reason and is individually manipulating my report.
3: Facebook actually has almost no data on me because i post nothing on there (and practically never log in anyways) and outside of the occasional photo tag my friends say nothing about me on Facebook because they know i don't use it, so what's the point?
So given the alternatives of a massive conspiracy involving (at least) thousands of people or believing that i'm a unique special snowflake who's vitally important to Facebook for some reason, i'm going with "Facebook doesn't know anything about me."
I'm somewhat resigned to the fact that Google knows way too much about me, but at least I can take comfort in the fact that Facebook apparently knows almost nothing about me. I feel zero motivation to just volunteer information to them that they haven't been able to figure out for themselves already.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Nintendo was like, been there, done that :)
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You could, but...
1: from what i understand it can be hard to gain traction in ebay if you don't have an established account with some good reviews. With StubHub if you're going with the electronic option (which most people do) then the buyer knows that something at least resembling a real ticket has already been uploaded and they have some recourse if it turns out to be invalid.
And 2: discoverability in ebay seems rather poor. StubHub has listings for most big concerts already and has seating charts for most venues and will give you a fairly good idea of where each of the tickets for sale is located. (Honestly i've only sold tickets through StubHub so far, but it seems like the UI for buying tickets may be more useable than that of Ticketmaster itself.)
Of course you may be paying a higher fee to StubHub than ebay (though certainly not as high as TicketMaster) so i guess it depends on how in demand you think the tickets are and thus how hard people will be looking for them.
You're right, in retrospect that's an obvious incentive for them =P
I tried reselling some tickets on Ticketmaster for a concert we couldn't make it to because it seemed easier to just do it through their website. They were up there for several weeks without selling. When i tried to drop the price of the tickets the week before the concert to try and get rid of them i discovered the Ticketmaster site wouldn't let me drop them below a certain amount (an amount that i believe was higher than what i'd initially paid for them.) Maybe there was some way to get around the artificial limit, but if so i couldn't figure out how. I'd say that maybe they wanted to insure a minimum level of fees for themselves, but if the ticket is priced too high to sell they're not going to get _any_ fee, so that seems counter-productive.
So i canceled that offer and switched the tickets over to StubHub, which had a much better UI and let me lower the ticket prices to whatever i wanted. (I ended up managing to sell them about an hour before the concert for about $200 less than i originally paid for them after getting into a negative bidding war with someone else =P)
I'd strongly recommend checking out StubHub and any other ticket resellers before resorting to TicketMaster, especially after hearing this news.
Within the last month i've been reading:
- Spinning Silver - Naomi Novik: A re-telling/twist on the Rumpelstiltskin story. A lot darker and more intense than "Uprooted", but still good.
- All Systems Red - Martha Wells: A story about "Murderbot", a security robot that's broken its conditioning but somehow never gets around to doing much murdering. Re-listening to with my SO because of the Hugos. Still good the second time around.
- The Fated Sky - Mary Robinette Kowal: Sequel to the very excellent "Calculating Stars" about an alternate history space program after a meteor impact in the 50s.
- Girl in the Green Silk Down - Seanan McGuire: Sequel to "Sparrow Hill Road", about a hitch-hiking ghost on the run from a phantom rider. Still in the middle of this one, but enjoying it so far, and i'm curious if it's going to turn into a long running series or not.
"Additionally, what's a book you finished recently that you found insightful, or funny, or both."
I'll pick "funny"
Either
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) - Dennis E. Taylor: A guy gets dragooned into being a space probe. It's got geeky cultural references like Ready Player One (but much more toned down and well integrated with the story) in a near future (relatively speaking) space opera plot.
or
All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault - James Alan Gardner: About an alternate earth where "creatures of the night" are at war with superheroes. The author does humor well, but a lot of it is situational humor about the ridiculousness of the situation and some of it is dark.
You are attributing conditions to villainy that simply result from greed.
They don't _want_ their customers to be brain damaged. In fact they'd be happier if no one was ever hurt riding their scooters. However they already know that people continue using their scooters even though people are getting hurt using them, some very seriously.
On the other hand if this law passes either they would have to provide helmets to go with the scooters (and find some way of preventing people from just walking off with them) or see a huge decrease in their business from people without a helmet declining to break the law by renting a scooter without one.
So a small concern about their customers' health is overridden by a much bigger concern about their own profits.
.
"The Waymo vans have trouble with many unprotected left turns"
I've said it before and i'll say it again. If they're having trouble making unprotected left turns, perhaps you should stop having Google Maps direct them to make unprotected left turns? And then PLEASE PROVIDE THAT UPDATE TO ME AS WELL!
Google Maps seems just fine for trips of moderate distance, but i've lost track of the number of times on shorter trips it has directed me to take side streets and then suggested that i make a left turn at an uncontrolled intersection onto a four+ lane road in Los Angeles in the middle of rush hour.
I'm confused, i was told that you will never, ever catch a virus on an apple.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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Rome?
Don't you mean the biggest defense contractor _off_ earth?
First you're claiming that "They treat this shit like a religion. They can cite verses and CO2 number etc. but cannot and will not accept that they could be wrong in any way."
But then you bring up: "In fact, 50 years ago (nothing on a global climate scale) scientists were worried about GLOBAL COOLING."
So are they wrong for not considering alternatives? Or wrong for considering alternatives?
And just for reference, although global cooling was considered by the scientific community there was no overall consensus about it. Some scientists brought up the possibility and newspapers blew it out of proportion because the idea of glaciers suddenly overtaking New York made good copy. Once some more scientists got involved and the hypothesis was checked the idea was abandoned. And look, since then temperatures have continued to rise instead of dropping.
Here's a reference.
"Does someone really need to compile a list of these similar predictions from the past 40 years and paste them in every subsequent prediction for people to understand?"
Sure, we can do that. Here you go!
Note that the first prediction was right on the nose, which is probably just a coincidence, given how little information they had to go on at the time. Of the eight other predictions five of them overestimated the amount of warming by 2016 by amounts ranging from 8% to 30%, while the other three _under_estimated the amount of warming, by amounts ranging from -14% to -28%.
Also note that two of the five that overestimated the amount of warming, in fact the two that were off by 30%, the largest amount, did so in part because they believed there would be more CO2 in the atmosphere now than there actually is. Why is there less CO2 than they predicted? Because although the amount of CO2 we release into the atmosphere is continuing to increase, the rate at which it increases has slowed down slightly. And part of the reason for that is because of the warnings of scientists like those writing these reports, so it's a little bit of a Y2K situation.
"You morons think energy companies are against this?"
We don't think, we know. Or at least we know they were in the past. It's well documented that the energy companies spent large amounts of money on lobbyists and PR trying to stave off any consequences for as long as possible. Sure, they're going to try to continue to make money now that they've (mostly) been forced to accept the truth, but they were much happier just continuing to collect money without having to pay for new infrastructure. (Building new infrastructure costs money. Those costs must be passed on to the consumer. Increased prices reduces demand. Basic economics.) Funnily enough, the rate at which the seem to be building new infrastructure seems to generally follow the rate at which renewable energy has become cheaper to produce than fossil energy.
This idea was a part of Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End". In it the government had the ability to trace and control all internet traffic, i believe by mandating that all routers have technology enabling that.
Ostensibly the government needed this ability to track terrorists. And the most fantastical part of the book IMHO was that the government did in fact only use it to track terrorists.
In a fantasy land where we could actually trust the government to impartially use such power only in a responsible way i'd be 100% behind this idea. Unfortunately, we happen to live in the real world.
We may end up in that situation anyways, but if we do i expect it won't solve as many problems as we'd like and we'll have to deal with a bunch of new abuses by the government itself. (And it's not like the government does a great job of using the tools currently available to solve problems on the internet as things are now anyways.)
.
I was going to say the same thing. I'm using a Sony Xperia X Compact right now and it's pretty good. I liked the 1st generation Moto X more, but Motorola decided to stop making good compact phones for some reason, so here i am.
Also, i like headphone jacks and bezels on my phone. If Sony sticks with getting rid of those or just shuts down the mobile division entirely i'm going to be in a very unfortunate position when i need to get another phone =/
Canâ(TM)t we just call it "Earth"?
You can't call browser "Bob."
Be sure to drink your sarcophagus juice before the Blood Moon peaks!
Why is there no "-1 Wrong" moderation, especially when the citation provided explicitly disagrees with the statement in the post?
You applied the term "mess" to the entire field, and one of the specific examples (one that you're clearly biased against) was of someone challenging an incumbent, and winning. That is exactly what you praised the up and coming Republicans for doing just two sentences prior.
You seem to be claiming that the incumbent was overconfident because he expected to win (in large part due to flawed polls) and you don't feel he put enough effort into the race. You're cherry picking one case from one side and criticizing it for the specifics while comparing it to the platonic ideal you've presented for the other side without giving any concrete examples.
So here's one counter-example. Four years ago the Republican House majority leader was unexpectedly defeated in the primaries by a new and more radical challenger in an almost identical scenario. "Republicans were so sure that Mr. Cantor would win that most party leaders had been watching for how broad his victory would be."
If your logic that a single such high-profile case represents a fundamental weakness in the party was true then the Republicans should have performed dismally in the 2014 midterms, but instead they made huge gains.
Unexpected upsets are a regular occurrence in politics (and sports, and pretty much everything else.) Attributing some meaningful significance to a single such event seems problematic and doesn't really align with previous cases.
Also, your attempt to communicate was rather poor, please write and proofread more slowly.
Republicans trying to push out RINO's are in the neighborhoods, asking what people want. They're challenging incumbents, that's good, and they're winning too.
But look at the mess with democrats [...] Some are simply ignoring challenges(one reason why Ocasio-Cortez won despite her pro-commie message)
So if a Republican challenges an incumbent by communicating locally with a message that resonates with people it's a good thing and part of the fight against corruption. But if a Democrat does the same thing it's a mess and really it only happened because the incumbent was incompetent and entirely despite the fact that they had a different message?
Which IP/Content owners are you referring to? Every author i've seen discuss the subject thinks libraries are great.
I had some sick twitter burns i was going to unleash against Musk about the whole submarine thing (i might have even got a Like or two!) but unfortunately i stopped to do some research before posting them and discovered that the story isn't nearly as one-sided as the media (both social and non) likes to portray it.
https://www.quora.com/Whats-th...
Long story (somewhat) shorter, other people were asking Musk to help and he initially said that the Thai government had things under control. Eventually he relented and worked on some designs and a prototype in consultation with experts in Thailand, who thought it might be useful in the current situation if it took longer to get the kids out than expected with their original plan, and if not might be useful in future rescue situations.
Once he got started on the project he was certainly public about discussing it, whether that was meant as a PR stunt or being open with the people who asked him if he could help is open to debate, but in either case he certainly caught a lot of flak for it. Finally some guy who had experience exploring those caves and used that experience to help the rescuers, but is not a search and rescue professional himself, criticized the "submarine" pretty harshly, and Musk blew up in a disproportionate response.
So again, Facebook is telling everyone else that it knows lots of information about them, but they're lying specifically to me and claiming that they don't in my case. What's their motivation? Why am i special?
I'm on Facebook. I have a profile. I just don't use it. I'd certainly believe Facebook is gathering some information about me from other people, but if so they haven't managed to correlate it back to my account yet. If i've actually tricked Facebook into thinking that i'm two different people, that may actually be even better?
After seeing the crazy stuff other people found when they did the personal info download thing from Facebook i tried it myself, and it was practically empty. So either:
1: Facebook is lying about what they put in the report and everybody else is colluding with Facebook by saying that their reports show a lot of data.
2: Facebook has individually singled me out because I'm special for some reason and is individually manipulating my report.
3: Facebook actually has almost no data on me because i post nothing on there (and practically never log in anyways) and outside of the occasional photo tag my friends say nothing about me on Facebook because they know i don't use it, so what's the point?
So given the alternatives of a massive conspiracy involving (at least) thousands of people or believing that i'm a unique special snowflake who's vitally important to Facebook for some reason, i'm going with "Facebook doesn't know anything about me."
I'm somewhat resigned to the fact that Google knows way too much about me, but at least I can take comfort in the fact that Facebook apparently knows almost nothing about me. I feel zero motivation to just volunteer information to them that they haven't been able to figure out for themselves already.