A lot of top tier artists do get a direct cut from the fees and high but not top tier artists often get payouts from the promoters cut of the fees. Artists below that are generally hosed.

I'm torn on this one. First, in general I take your stance on a lot of things regarding price. If it's not essential, and I use a broad brush to define essential, it's business and prices are prices. But, sometimes, there are exceptions and I think Ticketmaster is one of them and this is why. They didn't get here because they innovated or provided unique value they got here because they were playing exclusionary games targeting competitors and buying them out all while building extensive exclusive agreements that effectively lock out any real competition. Venues and artists have said we refuse this and we won't use it and Ticketmaster just crushes them. They can't use exclusive venues. Venues that do let them in will get banned from any future Ticketmaster event. And when Live nation and Ticketmaster merged they pretty much got between 70-95% control of every layer in the live entertainment stack. Multiple horizontal and a vertical monopoly.

Now, that being said. As much as the artists claim to hate Ticketmaster and they're as much of victim as anyone else Ticketmaster does provide bad guy as a service for them and that's where a good chunk of ticket fees go. The artists in order to give the appearance of fan friendly prices will take a chunk of the fees as a venue or event bonus. The artists get their fill but don't look bad and Ticketmaster takes a little something something extra for their trouble.

Isn't SAP the largest global supporter of SUSE? I think 90% of SAP workloads run on SUSE. Stateside I don't think I've ever seen SUSE used for anything but SAP.

I own the mid-range storage business at one of the big storage companies. The prices for media, flash and NLSAS, have been on a crazy run and I'm not sure when it's going to run out of steam. Last week I got notification from a vendor that there would be a 200%+ price increase effective immediately. They also said to expect 10-20% cost increases every month. Essentially putting us in a macro where we have more volatility monthly then we used to see annually. We've had to move to almost a market price model where prices are only valid 1-2 weeks. Last month I had to have a sit down with a very large customer and tell them the 8 figure price in an RFP, originally good for 60+ more days, needed a firm commitment within 24 hours or we would need to update it. In the worst of COVID supply chain and cost issues weren't as bad as they are now.

I personally struggle to see the value. I use some AI tools and it maybe saves me 2 hours a week, but, some many other people I work with are seeing 20-30% time savings. AI might be overinflated and needs to deflate a bit but I'm slowly moving to the this is the new normal stance.

I regards to AI impacting PC and phone. That's almost a given at this point. I would not be shocked if many second tier, in terms of volume not quality, laptop, phone, and tablet manufactures go bankrupt this year. I have one of the strongest buying powers in the industry and it's a massive struggle.

Consultants are being replaced by AI at a rapid rate. My organization leverages consultants for several things and they're all scared. We tried AI in researcher mode and it's not bad. I'll also add this about consultants they're better and more accurate than most people think. They're also no where as good as they think they are.

I've architected a lot of backend HW for Ed Tech companies but have never really been involved on the SW side, but I have seen the same story play out dozens of times in the past 20 years. Some SW comes out, learning assistance, management, or whatever and they make so much profit. But, they hit these walls either because they complement an existing system, run into another competitor, or just run out of mindshare. Then they either acquire or get acquired to fill the gap and load up heavily on debt. They have or are acquiring massive free cash flow which can easily finance the debt. They do the acquire be acquired thing a couple times then they hit a bump, then someone else steals the air out of the room, and instantly the free cashflow stops and the debt crushes them. Then some other company comes in doing the same thing, thinking they're the most innovative company around and it's really the Xth spin of the wheel and a matter of time before the acquire be acquired to bankruptcy cycle starts again.

Check out Kurasawa's Hidden Fortress and compare that to Star Wars. From what I've read in other places the real issue here isn't that it's just learning from previous works and creating unique derivatives it's that it spitting out lines and lines of almost 100% identical press so it's not being transformative, or at least enough to be considered fair use. Even if it's transformative there's apparently still a bigger hurdle in it being different enough if trying to make a competing product. This is what Thompson Reuters successfully argued.

The first 10-15 minutes is pretty good it's normally standup, bits, and spoofs. The next 3 and a half plus hours is just so who cares for me.

This is what kills me. I'm solid when it comes to visualization tools like Power BI and Tableau, so for one of the data feeds I saw that I had access to I created a couple dashboards, I did a 10 minute over view on what you could do then said have fun. The first email back was wow, this tool is great. It's so much easier to extract the Excel file from here then the app itself.

I work for a Fortune 100 company and most of my day is working with Excel. Every aspect of the business is ultimately sourced and shared through Excel. If you took Excel away our business would grind to a halt in a matter of hours.

This is exactly my experience at Walmart. If I'm buying more then a couple things it's a question of how many items are priced incorrectly not if any are. The errors are, not surprisingly, never in my favor.

They are $1.25 for most things but they do often have sections with things that cost more.

This is my experience as well. I had one cc with all of my recurring charges so I could easily spot check them. When they changed the laws for cc surcharges late last year I said whatever, until that first bill came it had over $100 in add-on fees. On a few small bills the fees were now almost as much as the bill.

In the past year I have written more checks then I have in easily the past 10 and maybe even past 20 years put together, going through multiple books of checks. After they changed the laws on credit and debit card fees it instantly became prohibitively expensive, at least for me, to continue using my cc. Looking at my property bill right now and it would require a $248.86 surcharge to cover fees if I wanted to pay by CC. I've also found more and more places won't take cash and the only options are CC or check with the CC having fees.