Has been pushing hard for decades to get those religious lunatics into a fervor right? The Republican party actively encourages religious extremism so that they can Farm those people for votes.

It's always about the same thing. Taking all the money and leaving voters with nothing. If you're going to rob somebody blind and do it year in year out like the Republican party does you have to keep offering them something in exchange for all the economic security you are stealing.

It needs to be something intangible since the Republicans are taking all the tangible stuff like money and property and food and medicine and healthcare and education.

And that's why you will see religious freedom bills that give people the right to leave their children unvaccinated risking the lives of everybody else.

They get all the money and you get to skip your vaccines or teach your kids the Earth is 6,000 years old or whatever lunatic nonsense that isn't real you insist is real.

Before 2000 the government paid for 70% of college tuition. By 2003 after several rounds of cuts it was 20%.

Meanwhile here's Donald Trump telling us we need more immigration and h-1bs because Americans are just too dumb. Seriously Google it. That's what he said.

I wish my country would stop proving him right...

The risk of creating a viable competitor is too big so they will do pretty much anything a government wants in order to avoid being kicked out of the country.

It's not about the profit they can make in the country it's about making sure that there is never a viable competitor that could enter into any of your other markets.

Ultimately there really isn't a lot these companies do that's special. The most we survived because they're the ones who when the market was developing survived via survivorship bias. When you're talking infrastructure including internet infrastructure you are generally going to end up with some form of Monopoly forming. At least if you're not extremely careful to enforce competition. And I don't think there's a country on planet Earth that does that

If we want to see true equilibrium pricing with market forces, how about something like this?

The event is June 1.
January 1, tix go on sale from the original promoter for $1000 each, and you get to pick whatever seats you want.
February 1, the remaining tix go on sale for $500 each, and you get to pick whatever seats you want from what's left.
March 1, the remaining tix go on sale for $250 each, and you get to pick whatever seats you want from what's left.
April 1, the remaining tix go on sale for $100 each, and you get to pick whatever seats you want from what's left.
May 1, the remaining tix go on sale for $50 each, and you get to pick whatever seats you want from what's left.
May 31, the remaining tix go on sale for $10 each, and you get to pick whatever seats you want from what's left.

This is effectively a regressive-taxation system, so should be loved by many slashdot regulars.
Those for whom the event is a fun luxury they can easily afford due to their high wealth, can buy tix early and reserve their favorite seat location. They pay more according to their ability.
Scalpers have no incentive to scoop up tix for two reasons:
1) the initial retail price is so high that there's no margin to make in reselling.
2) Unless a single scalper can afford to buy up an entire 30,000 seat arena at $1000 each, there WILL be seats left and thus prices WILL continue come down in the future. In other words, prices rise because of competition in the demand side. With this time-decay price structure, scalpers aren't competing with other scalpers (and fans) for the resale margins, but you are forcing scalpers to compete against their future selves. The tickets their bots harvest today WILL depreciate in value. There's no longer any point to harvest-and-hold tix.

Additionally, this will allow every participant - artists, promoters, venues, fans, casual observers on slashdot - to finally learn exactly what the real market value is for a given event. There will be an obvious bell-distribution graph where the most ticket movement happened. Everyone will actually have to decide both what price point is worth it for them AND what risk level they can tolerate if they wait until the next price drop and that's also everyone else's price point. THAT price point where the big collective moves happen -- that's a great approximation of your true equilibrium price.

As a benefit, this makes the top-dollar events more reasonable AND makes the smaller events more lucrative to the promoters and artists.
1) Prestige mainstream events like Beyonce and Swift will still always sell 80% in the first couple months, and then the medium-tail trickle to the nosebleed sections in months 3 and 4.
2) Less mainstream artists will still have their superfans who are willing to spend $1000 to ensure they get a ticket and get the exact seat they want so they can have their Very Special Connection with the artist who Sees Their Inner Soul. This increases the total revenue by creating a Premium tier above what that event would normally command even with scalpers. The fans who were only going to go if it was less than $50 will still have their chance to go cheaply.

That was the OP's point. Hence the "oh wait..."

In the blue States it's generally individual cops getting caught doing it. Albeit a lot but still individual cops.

In the red States it's coming down from the top that's the difference. It's because corruption at the top is more common in a red state than a blue state.

This is to be expected if you understand how left and right wing politics work.

In a red State you have a right Wing state. So you have people that are prone to hierarchical structures and obedience.

That's going to encourage corruption because the people at the top will view themselves as being absolutely in charge and the people beneath them will encourage that view. It's why Trump can get away with committing so many crimes and the public still loves him.

A hierarchical command structure versus a democratic command structure is going to lend itself to top down corruption more often and the corruption is going to be worse. There is just no getting away from that or the consequences of right-wing politics.

Are actively hiding their economic data. We are going to have a 1930s style economic collapse.

All the pieces are here. We are in the middle of a industrial revolution with massive amounts of automation and technological unemployment without any significant new employment opportunities on the horizon. Seriously sit down and write out what the jobs are going to be after automation and ai and machine learning rip through the economy. You can't just go and make cars after the buggy whip factory shuts down when the car factory is also automated.

Next we have a huge economic bubble where we are spending trillions of dollars specifically AI infrastructure spending and the massive bank loans that go with it.

And we have widespread drought resulting in crop failures and increasing food prices. Even if you don't believe climate change and the water cycle breaking is the problem the drought is still real.

This is everything that led up to world war I at world war II.

We have the technology to stop this but we don't have the education and critical thinking and social structures to stop it...

Seriously. I understand the bomb squad needs robots that's a good thing. But every year a crime goes down and every year we put more cops with better weapons and more weapons on the street.

I understand what's going on with all that immigration enforcement bullshit. There's a bunch of bitter old assholes who get off on seeing people slammed into the ground.

But is there really that many people for whom the pleasure of watching a couple of Mexicans get dragged into a black van by masked goons is enough to make them A-Okay with this bullshit?

I just had to get the new fancy license and they made me take my glasses off because they're using facial recognition now.

One of the funny things I keep seeing over and over again is confused white people in the middle class pulled over by cops and harassed the same way they're used to seeing "those people" harassed.

The place where it's really showing up is DUIs. In several red states with heavy duty police enforcement there is a ton of stories about people getting pulled over and arrested and losing their license when they were Stone Cold sober. There are a couple of big scandals where the local police were just told you need to get your arrest numbers up or else.

DUI is really popular for that because the cops can arrest you without cause or proof and it takes months before it comes out that you were innocent. Meanwhile your license is suspended.

The fact that they're doing this to the in group is a massive red flag. It's a huge shift in how things work.

They are objectively bad for the economy and they know it. People are starting to know it too no matter how much propaganda there is.

Google it. It is a fact that the Republican party is worse for the economy than the Democratic party. Trickle down economics doesn't work and never has.

We have been trained to get angry when we see anyone discussing the two political parties. So it's tough to have this discussion but it's a discussion we need to have.

Because without positive economic gains for 90% of us the Republican party has to give voters some reason to vote for them.

Yes homophobia and racism and transphobia will always be good old standbys but religion is fading in America. It's just not bringing the numbers in that it used to.

So they are pivoting to crackpottery with anti-vax being the big one.

So they fold corporation on paper, walk away from the loan and open up a new corporation that gets to use the facility.

Dude it's 2025, by now you should know how this game is played.

I forget which town but one of them immediately removed all the cameras when somebody did a foi request.

You're not going to find out where the billionaires are going because like Steve Jobs used to do they hide their license plates.

But your shitty little Republican mayor who frequents the local gay bar doesn't have the resources to do that. A

So we have had multiple decades of Court packing so you're headed by the heritage foundation, a right-wing think tank that made that their primary goal.

If you look into Amazon for example and wonder how they got so big you will find that they were just going around buying up all there competitors using investment capital. Most tech companies that's how they got big they just bought up competitors.

Facebook is in a unique situation. Nobody under the age of 18 wants to be on the same social media platform has their parents so every few years a new social media platform develops as a separate platform for the kids.

Every time that happens Facebook just buys that platform.

Tick tock was a problem because they couldn't just buy the platform since it was owned by the Chinese government. So they just pressured the government here to shut it all down and give them control.

Refusing to enforce antitrust law makes your life noticeably worse even if you don't use the services involved.

The problem is it's government regulation and its bureaucrats that enforce the law there.

We have been taught our whole lives that there is nothing worse than the bureaucrat. It doesn't help that as an American most of your interactions with the government are negative. Means testing for assistance programs is brutal and difficult so if you fall on hard times and need help fuck you. Most of us did never do need help still have to go to the DMV sometimes and wait in line frustratingly or we get pulled over by cops and that's our interaction with the government.

It is very easy to translate those frustrated emotions with a sabotaged government into a desired cut regulations that control corporate abuses that hurt you.

And that is way too complicated a concept for probably 80% of the population to understand...

It's not a product in the traditional sense. It's a tool that the upper elite are hoping to use to replace you so that they are no longer dependent on your labor or your consumer dollars.

It always strikes me odd that people ask the question if there are no consumers who will buy their products?

You think somebody with a billion dollars hasn't asked that question?

What if they come up with a different answer than the old one we're told Henry Ford did. (Fun fact Ford paid better not because he wanted consumers but because the work was extremely tough and he had a hard time getting employees)

What if the solution they come up with is to automate everything and anything so that they can limit their dependency to a handful of engineers and a handful of bugs that keep those engineers in line?

What if there's no place for you in tomorrow?

I don't think most people can face that kind of existential dread. It borders on cosmic horror

It's not just greenflation. Companies have realized that they can make more money focusing on the top 10% of consumers and just what the bottom 90 go to hell. If they had the slightest fear of competition then they wouldn't take that risk because a competitor might work their way up in the cheaper markets and then jump into the more profitable ones, but since we don't enforce antitrust law because we're busy freaking out about trans girls playing field hockey in the Midwest you can kiss that goodbye.

During incognito browser mode. So that's fun. As usual we found out as part of a lawsuit and settlement.