Airlines can add more flights and bigger planes for more seats. Try doing that with a pop star.

I was responding to saloomy, who said "just make a law...".

That ain't retail. It's the futures wholesale market.

The fact that you don't list them doesn't prove their existence.

I'm aware of wholesale auctions and small exceptions. If you want, consider TicketMaster as a wholesaler.

Why would concert tickets need an auction any more than almost everything else? No auction for beans, none for gasoline, or haircuts. If they price them too high, they don't sell enough. If they price them too low, they sell out fast and learn to charge more next time, just as any other limited commodity does. If they can get more, they do, and raise the price next time. If they can't, well, that's life.

I don't think TicketMaster is making a fortune, because if they were, competitors would want some of the action. That's how markets work. If artists actually cared, they would sign up with alternative sellers and pull the rug out from under TicketMaster. They don't. Artists either don't care, or don't know. From the noise they make, they are hypocrites either way.

The actual real value of concert tickets for established artists is well-known by now. But artists want to pretend they support the little people, so they refuse to charge realistic prices, and act all miffed when the market establishes the real value people place on their tickets.

The simple fact is that more people want tickets than tickets are available. The only realistic alternative is long long lines and make people pay in time and hassle. But then others will charge high prices to stand in line as placeholders. Price caps are no more useful than Richard Nixon's gas price controls in 1973. People pay in dollars or time or barter of some sort. The market will always establish a more realistic price.

Or one could just let the market handle it. You can't stop scalping any more than Custer could. Prohibition doesn't work, it just creates black markets.

There were two theaters in San Francisco, the Richilieu? (Geary near Van Ness) and a second near the TransAmerica Pyramid. Great selection of old movies, mostly b/w, and great trailers for old movies. They eventually decided the second one just wasn't profitable enough, early 1980s, and had a final night of nothing but previews, several hours of them, the trashiest exploitation movies from the 1950s, glorious stuff. Then they interrupted it, lights came on to announce someone with a private copy of Vertigo had brought it in and did we want to see it? Apparently it was locked up in some copyright ownership dispute and could not be seen commercially, but since we hadn't paid for it ...

A fantastic night. I'd gladly do it again, nothing but hours of trashy ancient B and C movie trailers.

Last I heard, 3D printer and filament manufacturer AnyCubic was including some of these restrictions for printers like their Kobra 3 Max?
They were enabling it via their cloud printing functionality though. so setting the printer to LAN mode circumvented it for now. It may even be a feature they coded but left disabled while they wait to see how legislation pans out? But I recall some people in Facebook 3D printing groups being really angry about it when it was first discovered.

IMO, it amounts to more "feel good" legislation where some politicians want credit for making the nation safer. But in reality, it'll be ineffective because it can only work based on matching CRC hash values of known prints they want to restrict/ban. If people have such a print file in their possession and modify the dimensions a bit, it won't match any longer. And eventually, if they try to restrict too many items (say with AI trying to determine what is or is not a gun part?), they're going to start creating false positives that stop people from printing things they need to print.

Because OCT 31 == DEC 25.

I have never been so disappointed. Slashdot is going to the dregs.

On one hand? I think there's considerable evidence this AI bubble is going to pop; maybe in 1-2 years from now? If that's the case, the tech workers who manage to get paid training AI models still walk away with that money when it gets shuttered due to lack of funds.

On the other? I also get how distasteful it is to "train your replacement", especially when the replacement is just computer software.

I think much of this depends on how things *really* pan out. I'm not seeing big I.T. job losses due to AI implementations, so much as the regular economic pressures that drive companies to work with less staff. There's a lot of high-level/upper management talk about AI replacing workers. But it's more hypothetical than reality right now. People are still needed to put the right queries into the AI engines to get the desired results back out -- and that's often kind of an art or skill in and of itself.

On top of all of this, there really needs to be more of a realization that for many people? They're pretty ok with being "fat". The medical field wants to keep pushing obesity as a disorder or a disease. But a lot of people have no interest in going to the gym/working out or making a special effort to eat only "health foods". Many even prefer the look of an overweight person to an "ideal weight" person of similar height.

Like anything out there, you can go to extremes and then you're liable to suffer consequences.

But the medical field created a whole lot of peer-pressure to conform to a certain norm for weight - when without anyone labeling it all a "health problem", you'd have far more people out there who weren't so depressed about their body/looks. Also a lot less money wasted on diet fads and scam exercise equipment that doesn't really do much.

When a society has easy availability to food, it makes sense they'd collectively be bigger/heavier than people functioning in the hunter/gatherer situation our ancestors were stuck in. And again, you're going to have people who choose to risk shortening their lifespan if it means they get more enjoyment out of the time they're around. Enjoying tasty food and drink is a big part of that for many people. (The ones who only "eat to live" and don't care much about it are an exception here, but I'd say they're also a minority.)

I've run NextCloud for quite some time, and my frustration with it has more to do with the project not seeming interested in pursuing some of the things that could really increase its adoption and usefulness.

I'm not denying they need to find a workable solution for an open-source Office suite that integrates with it. Don't really care if they move to LibreOffice or they settle this dispute w/OpenOffice instead.

But why can't they support message boards? If you think about it, NextCloud has all the other pieces to work like a computer bulletin board system for the Internet era (as opposed to the modem dial-up days). But with no public message forums integrated, where you could control people's access by security level? It's just a non-starter.

The thing is though? The money going into any retirement plans of theirs is still money they had to earn first. The ones who "lose everything and have nothing left to retire on" aren't going to just vanish because you prevented them from investing in crypto or in some private equity firm.

These are, by and large, going to be the people who never put much into a retirement fund to begin with because they felt they needed all they could get from each paycheck for their current expenses. They opted out of the 401K plan they were offered, etc.

I don't see why I care about government trying to protect people from themselves with this one? I would never invest in crypto and very likely not private equity funds as part of a retirement plan. But that doesn't mean other people wouldn't want to. If you've got enough money already saved up in retirement funds and you believe you've found a window where it makes sense to risk, say, 20% of what you've got on something like crypto? It might double that money for you practically overnight. It also might just cause you to lose it all. But maybe 80% of your total was all you really needed to save in the first place?

ClipChump is the worst.... Many corporations stick people with that as the only (free and included w/Win 11) tool they've got to work with the occasional need to edit video. It feels like it's cloud-enabled for no reason except to say it "uses the cloud"!

It feels like a poor attempt to imitate Apple's iMovie except crippled with less functionality and a huge performance hit because some of the features only work via the cloud, plus it insists of storing files/folders in a personal OneDrive that syncs to the cloud. It acts like the audio portion of a clip is an afterthought, too. You can mute the existing audio or remove it from a clip, but it has zero for EQ'ing it. It doesn't even allow grabbing a still frame and putting it in the video for X number of seconds!