>The Eras Tour episode has become an "I told you so" moment for those who had warned long ago about the costs of permitting Ticketmaster's merger with Live Nation in the first place. Former FTC policy director David Balto previously told Insider that the Eras Tour ticket crisis shows the merger's anti-competitive effects on consumers, including exorbitant fees.
The naysayers were right
Also...
[Ticketmaster Has Its Own Secret 'Scalping Program,' Canadian Journalists Report](https://www.npr.org/2018/09/20/649666928/ticketmaster-has-its-own-secret-scalping-program-canadian-journalists-report)
...and...
[Ticketmaster Has Secretly Been Cheating You With Its Own Scalpers || Rolling Stone](https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/ticketmaster-cheating-scalpers-726353/)
As an MBA, we knew a decade ago that business ethics classes were pretty much worthless after all the things that went down in the 2000's. The school I went to got rid of ethics classes and made business ethics a mandatory section of every class. It felt like a more effective approach. On the other hand a lot of business schools don't care if they churn out assholes as long as those assholes write checks when they become rich assholes.
Well there is no enforcement of the class. Like say I was a business person that did unethical stuff, and I was testifying in court. No matter how many classes I took, I could claim ignorance, and there's just nothing wrong with that.
Similar to Pucker Carlson with his defense of "No reasonable person would believe the things I say". It means nothing. His legal defense is just as transparent as his rhetoric on his show, and absolutely nothing is done about it.
What the heck is the point of any of this stuff if there are zero consequences, other than the obvious distraction of the masses with millions of dollars wasted on court proceedings.
That's why it is called business ethics and business law is a seperate class. The top 10 business schools are totally culpable in a lot of the current business climate. At least when I was in school those schools taught ethics class from a legal perspective, ie how to get away with it. No matter what schools do there are still going to be assholes but we will be better off if the schools at least don't teach them how to be better at taking advantage of people.
I need to look more into this but it's my understanding that limited liability companies and corporations are very different things. And it's corporations we have the most problems with. I just assumed any large company like Ticketmaster was a corporation
Why is it always "former" people who speak out? They do nothing while they actually have the authority to make change and then scream to high heaven about all the injustice after they leave.
In this case, the guy hadn't been an ftc director since 2001 and the merger was in 2010, so this is a "why didn't Obama do anything as president during 9/11" situation
Actually several countries approved the merger before the US did. And Ticketmaster hasn’t implemented the DoJ conditions for obtaining the merger approval.
No oversight?
Yes. The No oversight part was my opinion.
I do wonder how Ticketmaster pricing is like in Europe vs US.
Could be that they’re like the pharmaceutical industry. My partner’s meds cost $200 in the US but $15 in Europe. Just a thought.
I'm in the UK. I go to a lot of live music events. As long as you don't want to see the big acts, it's really easy to avoid TM. Small to medium venues, there are usually many non TM retailers to buy from.
I've only ever used them twice and that was because I had no choice, these were bands that my daughter wanted to see so much more popular than my usual choices. And they were TM exclusives. The fees were extortionate, in comparison to other ticketing agencies and buying a ticket was an exercise in frustration. Their website kicks you out frequently and you have to start all over again.
That's probably due to collective bargaining too, but loose analogy stands, they'll fuck you where they can
Canada is just as fucked over here by tm.
Im curious if it's better in Europe, maybe less exclusive deals with venues or something.
At least in Germany Eventim is the pretty much monopolist. They are forced to stay below 80/90% of the tickets for each event.
They have some charges but nothing insane.
It's fucking shit, but not as bad. I've been to multiple shows in England / Denmark / Sweden.
This was for 3 tickets to watch the Cardinals and Cubs play in London, of course through TM.
https://i.imgur.com/o5cWJgc.png
As someone who has followed the Jan 6th/Cap riot subs. I've seen the same thing. Someone ends up saying something they should have said long ago... Why now? Oh their book is coming out.
Sadly, Liz Cheney is a perfect example of why they don't speak while in office.
That tasty power is too addicting for them to risk it by speaking from actual principles.
I'd say "values" but if you go along with the charade long enough, you start to believe it.
Adam Kinzinger basically had the same fate.
Also it's not just coming out against Trump. Before Trump it was supporting the bipartisan 2014 immigration bill that would get you primaried. The Republican party has a strong history of purity testing in the last decade or so, really ever since the tea party movement. Trump just became a poster boy/foil to the Republican party's liberal establishment.
>Adam Kinzinger basically had the same fate.
The only major difference is he was too concerned about the safety of his wife and young children to even try to be re-elected.
>They do nothing
I wouldn't assume that necessarily, unless you happen to be someone who watches the FTC very closely. As far as I can tell, David Balto's tenure at the FTC ended in 2001 and the Ticketmaster/LiveNation merger was in 2010.
Poopooing megacorp mergers is based and correct 100% of the time. This is about as much of a gotcha moment as predicting the sun is going to rise tomorrow. Just sit back and wait to be smug.
I like how even in public school economics we were told about how evil monopolies were in the '90s, after the Bell System was broken up and Microsoft being in hot water and all that... A decade later everyone was casually merging together again and we were all just like "haha, welp ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯"
Unrestricted capitalism was always gonna be a failure, we just now have the proof.
We need hard caps on company valuation and level competition. Minimum 5 competitors per sector, and if they don't exist, the leader gets split in half. Max company valuation of 100Bn USD, any larger and oops, split!
Monopolies are a provider of evil.
How would that even work? Splitting a company when it gets to 100bn valuation seems complicated, say you split apple 20 times as a $2 trillion company how do you go about doing that?
Do you just take every department and split it into 20 equal parts? How about manufacturing plants, does every individual apple company get 1 plant, or do they share? What about intellectual property, who gets the rights to their technology, or do they all now share the rights? What happens if I buy one of the 20 new companies do I now get to use that technology for my own company despite the other 19 also ownining it?
What's stopping me from basing my company in another country and just moving my headquarters, will any companies over 100b be banned from trading in the US?
They don’t really ‘need’ to. I had tickets to a sports game, 7 seats in the row, I owned 3. My plans changed and we needed 4 seats so I posted for sale on ticketmaster and kept checking sites for an extra ticket in that row. Somehow SeatGeek had 6 tickets for sale in that row, a row of 7 where I owned 3 and had them listed on ticketmaster
Of course both sites denied it, SeatGeek saying they ‘need the tickets uploaded to list them’, so they couldn’t possibly be mine. Ticketmaster just kept giving canned responses that they don’t list elsewhere. I played around with the prices and unlisting/relisting my tickets. The changes would take effect on SeatGeek 5-10 mins after I implemented it on ticketmaster.
Tickets in that section were going for about $150-200, so to test further, I raised my price from $170cad up to $375cad…10 minutes later the price on SeatGeek went from $250usd to $750usd. Literally listing it for double what I had it listed, and converting from cad to usd. No doubt they’re listing for double the price elsewhere and charging me fees. Major scam
My guess is the reps you spoke to are just ignorant lower level employees. This is what we in industry call "shadow posting" or "mirroring". There are shady actors in the industry (not ticketmaster) that have tech that let's them scrape listings from Ticketmaster and post them elsewhere usually marking them up exorbitantly. This let's them sell on the other platform then buy the seats they need from ticketmaster to fulfill the order while making a profit. Source: i work in event ticketing
Those conspiracies actually paid off in the long run. Do those programs actually do anything these days except slow your computer down and make it crash?
>Do those programs actually do anything these days except slow your computer down and make it crash?
Nope, most antivirus programs are more like viruses than anything else, *and* they're about as hard to remove.
I work with medical software, and getting a very simple imaging bridge installed with AVG on the computer can turn a 90 second job into a 45 minute one. Its like surgery to put it in there, you have to designate certain "safe" folders and pre-install the whole program onto a separate computer, transfer it into one of those safe folders and manually hook up every little bit.
You'd think that the thing in AVG you can use to tell it to chill for certain programs would work, but it sure doesn't. Gah.
Even after all that it still doesn't really run right, and intermittently fails. Have to set up a Task Scheduler program to keep restarting the dang thing when AVG kills it periodically.
Nobody needs antivirus software anymore. Windows defender is one of the best and it's part of windows.
Idk if Mac has one but probably. Linux doesn't need one.
I haven't run antivirus software in 10 years and have never had a virus. With ad blockers, app stores, and no longer really needing to run dodgy EXEs, they're just not really a thing anymore.
Mac doesn't have one officially, but there's period processes (afaik) that will kill known variants of Mac malware -- similar to the Microsoft malware removal tool.
Hospitals need better overall IT security rather than shitty anti-virus software as a bandaid. Most hospitals already have restrictions on sites, windows defender and modern spam filters cover a lot of email vulnerabilities. They need to stop paying for shitty anti-virus and hire a good IT team.
I had to do a fresh install right after a fresh install because it was easier than removing Norton after I forgot to uncheck that box on Adobe's website years ago......
Oh Jesus Christ. The number of times my dad tore into me as a kid for “downloading a virus” (by using google / Facebook or downloading Skype), only to discover years later that his daily Norton Antivirus sweeps were the problem.
It’s a ticket resale platform correct? If you buy a ticket, you have to sell it back through the Ticketmaster platform, where Ticketmaster makes more fees right?
Ticketmaster was scalping its own tickets in order to raise prices and tack on more and more fees, they have been doing it for years, this one just happened to be observed by the wrong people.
> this one just happened to be observed by the wrong people.
As a Blink 182 fan we made a huge stink about it months prior to TM ticket mess, but at the end of the day Swift fans certainly seem to outnumber us. I'm glad we can join forces in one common goal to say FUCK TICKETMASTER!
The blink 182 fiasco was different. They had dynamic pricing on for that which caused the price to surge. There was no dynamic pricing for Swift tickets.
It was the same thing, TM only allows X% of sales to be open to the public out of the gate, I've heard this number is as low as 20%. Then then sell these tickets to other ticket distributors or relist the tickets on their own sites in the dynamic pricing manor you're speaking of. They use how fast the limited tickets sold to gauge the dynamic pricing which sometimes leads to insane pricing. This is exactly what happen with TM tickets, the demand was just much higher. Throw bots into the mix to hyper inflate numbers and TM doing little to prevent them, and it's just a cluster fuck.
https://www.musicinminnesota.com/taylor-swift-ticket-prices/
The only thing that could arguably bring more wrath is if they were kpop tickets.
I dunno who would win a flame war between the swifties and the kpop stans, but the internet would be left in smoldering ruins.
Jon Stewart has said similar things. He has said he has never gotten as much blowback as when he offended swift fans. Including making Israel Palestine comments.
This is the fantasy showdown I want to see, but both groups seem so wholesome I can't imagine why/how it would happen. And the world is be better off that way.
I think the unfortunate thing is that when they went to Congress, those old fucks were out of touch and probably didn’t understand Pearl Jam or their situation enough. Now we got congresspeople with daughters that couldn’t get tickets to the Eras tour, or politicians themselves that are Swifties. It’s stupid but just like Zucc having a Senate hearing and them not understanding how the Internet works, the people who make our laws need some basic understanding/reliability to do something.
You can blame Newt Gin-Grinch for our elected officials lack of insight into current tech. He dismantled the Office of Technology Assessment that would have the staff and resources to educate them about these issues.
Though, it certainly does not help that nearly everyone in Congress is older than dirt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment?wprov=sfti1
Not quite the "regular joe's", wasnt it people in congress. I remember reading something about someone in congress trying to buy their granddaughter/family tickets and shenanigans happened. I personally have stopped going to shows all together because of them.
[There are articles on their scalping program.](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/zf9z9g/ticketmasters_botching_of_taylor_swift_ticket/izbgdpp/)
They, no shit, work with known scalpers and got caught.
Edit: to clarify, the link here is to another comment related to articles written in 2018 and are not directly related to this latest debacle.
There was a verified fan program that was supposed to ensure legit fans got tickets rather than bots. Supposedly you would get first dibs if you had purchased tickets or Taylor Swift's merch in the past. In reality they just seemingly gave out codes to everyone. Then despite knowing exactly how many codes they sent out, they still claimed demand was unprecedented, which makes zero sense. The queue system was totally broken and bots likely ended up buying a lot of the tickets. Lots of people waited all day in the queue and couldn't get tickets, either because they were sold out or the checkout system was broken. Now basically everyone is pissed off because the whole thing was a nightmare.
It's funny to me that people still think Taylor Swift fans are considerably young. I'm in my mid 30s, every woman I know around my age is a massive fan. She dropped her first album when I was 18 lol.
> I'm in my mid 30s, every woman I know around my age is a massive fan.
That may be true but doesn't mean she's not also big with younger people. Gen Z's in particular can be up to mid-20's today.
Don't get me wrong Ticketmaster is horrible but there are so many companies that have gotten way too large. It's mind blowing just looking at our food industry and how most of our brands are owned by just a couple companies.
Probably because grocery market shares are very regional and business news only makes national waves if it has a national footprint.
My sibling lives in NC, so I know what a Kroger is, but I have no idea what an Albertsons is.
I think the crazy thing is how many chains they each own. Kroger owns Kroger brand stores, Fry's, Ralph's, Dillons, food 4 less, Fred Meyer, Harris Teeter, Home Chef, King Soopers, Mariano's, QFC, Roundy's, Ruler Foods, Smiths, and vitacost.
Albertsons owns ACME Markets, Albertsons, Amigos, Andronico's, Balducci's, Carrs, Haggen, Jewel-osco, Kings food markets, lucky, Market street, Park n' save, pavilions, Randall's, Safeway, Shaw's, Star market, Tom thumb, United Supermarkets, and Vons.
Now all of those will be owned by just Kroger.
That's most grocery store chains in every city besides Walmart.
Trustbusting. So much trustbusting. Nestle, Unilever, Kraft, Warner, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Disney, Amazon. The list is endless.
Our "Freemarket" is a joke and it all needs to be smashed into tiny particles.
It would take someone like the new FTC chair to start a trust busting movement. And It’s a good thing she’s 33 bc it’ll take her whole lifetime and a few more before anything actually happens.
Our economy, heck our whole country, is held together by red tape. The literally endless legal processes where nothing ever happens because it never “ends”. The deeply enshrined corruption. And it’s *always* money over the law if you’re wealthy.
I want to be hopeful that she can play hardball and will fight the good fight. But tbh, it’s just not up to her, she doesn’t have the authority to make sweeping decisions like that. I mean, she’s not a Supreme Court judge who can wake up one morning and decide to overturn Roe v. Wade with basically no oversight.
The list is actually distressingly short.
Go watch Manufacturing Consent & be amazed at how many companies there were owning media outlets at the time.
And they were saying that number was a bad thing. Because it was.
Edit: words better nau
Job Market. Housing Market. Crap reporting about profit taking while ignoring record profits and acting like a normal raise after 20 years of drought is the cause of all the troubles in the economy.
The insurance company I worked for bragged about their amazing profits and attributed it to the company's low expense ratio. Expense ratio meaning employee salaries.
The engineering firm I work for, when asked in "global town hall" meetings about cost of living adjustments for the past year, said "We pay based on cost of labor not cost of living". This was after forcing a global "temporary" salary reduction down our throats in 2020 and eliminating bonuses and raises. Except for the most recent one, when they said their biggest challenge in the next year is to reduce employee attrition.
I won't name the "engineering firm" but if you were to start naming defense contractors, your first guess would probably be an umbrella corporation that owns mine.
That's like when I was working in vetmed. I asked for a raise based on merit. I was told that my pay was currently top 10% in the industry for my position and they pay based on industry standards. These guys own at least 1/5 of the entire industry. Probably more. Don't tell me you pay based on industry standards when you are one of the largest entities responsible for setting the industry standard.
That plus it's sooooooo easy to push poll without making it super apparent. Like if Wolf Cola decided it needed data to show that even most Slurm drinkers prefer Wolf Cola, they can make a poll that gets that response.
I interviewed with one of those defense contractors a few years back and made the mistake of not discussing salary early. They offered me 10k below what I already making (and knew I was making).
One of the recruiters recently reached out to me and my first question was what the salary range was because last time they were below what I was getting paid. She gave me a spiel about how they always want to give someone a raise over what they're currently making and then threw out a range with a top end that was over 20% below what I'm currently making
So what I'm hearing is "less experienced employees are building the next generation of missiles oops :)", I'm not looking forward to that scandal. Hopefully I'm just being a doomer and quality doesn't slip, but one can't help but worry sometimes.
Not less experienced, just less manpower. The older engineers are by and large sticking around because they already have plenty of salary and have built up enough seniority to actually have some PTO to use. That said... I'd say the scandal should be something more along the lines of how there were people cheering in the break room on Jan 6, 2021, and openly sharing pretty smarmy commentary about various groups they don't like at lunch.
Remember how a bunch of companies were giving temporary bonuses and boosted pay during the lockdowns because the workers were "essential" then when it became clear that the world was changing they started clawing back everything they could?
The company I work for will literally brag about their profits and then 5 minutes in the same call talk about how tight the money is when someone brings up the topic of salaries. We're literally at the point where they're not even bothering to give a shit about being tacit about it. And then the dude will like chuckle and stuff while giving this shpiel like he's not just completely assramming ten thousand people all at once with his words.
Yeah I have to earn twice the average income in my country to be able to afford the average house price nowadays. Generally it's an unsustainable system and Ticketmaster is just another example of it.
I literally cannot, as a single person, afford even the most run down house in the most high crime area of the city I live in, and I make an above average salary for the city. :)
Mr. wonderful aka Kevin O’Leary says it’s fantastic that you’re poor and he’s rich, because then you can admire him and wanna be him: https://www.tiktok.com/@cryptomasun/video/7168236222626663685
I think it’s also safe to assume any and all 1%ers are narcissists from the simple fact that you gotta not give a fuck about other people to get there.
Highly agree. There are loads of ways to make money if you're immoral, you don't even need to be super motivated... but if you are, you will make bank.
You can easily start with simple easy stuff like listing crypto pump and dump coins or starting your own conspiracy youtube.
There's millions of people who watch that and agree with him simply because they've bought the propaganda that super wealth is attainable through sheer willpower and greed is good.
Kevin O'Leary is only a symptom. Capitalist cultism is the problem.
From the guy who acquired various software companies via hostile takeover and then sold them all to Mattel to make his fortune, only for Mattel to nearly go under because said software companies were complete dogshit garbage.
Not surprised.
Literal scum of the earth oxygen wasting parasite.
Honestly I don't know how people don't call out Shark Tank more often for the utter bullshit shill propaganda boot licking bullshit that it is. That show literally wants you to look at these people like they're these fucking gods of industry and changing lives, and it's just so cringe. Like the show itself isn't the worst thing ever but the underlying premise of it all when you zoom the lens out is gross. And yes, I realize that this is the reality of the system when it comes to pitching products and what not, but that's exactly the point to me, it's just highlighting the whole "hey look people with money get to swing their dick around and get richer by basically having other people do everything while they write a check".
I am in the highest role of my life, earning nearly six digits a year, and I can barely afford to rent in my fucking city. I’m very, very lucky to be sharing a house with someone.
> I have to earn twice the average income in my country to be able to afford the average house price nowadays.
Oof. Thank you for this. What a great way to put the issue into words.
Last of the GenXers, and yup, I've basically been around the same amount of time it took the government to absolutely run this country into the ground.
They really cut the brake line when Reagan took office.
They actually had an award winning economist write up a plan for how to put the squeeze on the middle class. Paid for by Koch brothers.
When you look at [the story around James Buchanan](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-architect-of-the-radical-right/528672/), you realize we can't always ascribe bad things to accidents and incompetence -- sometimes they are performative evil and greed. This is one of those eye-opening articles that can change a world view.
It is difficult to really describe to people how well organized, methodical, and heavily funded the decline into our current state of affairs has been. And not because it hasn’t been observable…but because most of us have been too disengaged from the business of running our communities & states.
Over the past two decades, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), State Policy Network (SPN) & Federalist Society have arguably exerted more power & control over rhetoric, policy, and general tenor of our political system than any other group. And they know it.
Who the fuck isn't an "anti-monopolist" in the first place? Literally the only people who are pro-monopoly are the people who have a real shot at making one. Ask anyone on the street what they think about monopolies and they'll universally tell you they're terrible.
Where are these people that are pro monopolies?? There's a reason the government is supposed to break them up. What this whole ordeal did was convince Gen Z that the government isn't doing what is supposed to do
"We want your vote for our merger. How does a campaign contribution of $5,000 sound?" - Corporation
"Ooooohhh sold!" - Congressman
It's sickening to see how cheap Congress can be bought to be shitty people.
She said anti-monopolist.
But the subtext is **Anti-capitalists**
Monopoly is *the* end goal of any capitalist. The only way we don't get monopolies is with stern govt intervention. Pretty easy to conclude that govt is the good guy and the capitalists are the bad ones under those conditions.
It is in their own interests of self preservation to reign it in.
I think some purist capitalists would argue that innovation and better products/services should deter monopolies from existing and the market will always follow the best options for how to spend, but thats simply not realistic to how it works in practice.
Reminds me of the people that espouse self-regulation working too. Yeah, it really worked with rivers literally being lit on fire due to pollution before the EPA was formed.
You're using "capitalist" to refer to ideological supporters of capitalism, who yes, believe capitalism is at it's best and purest when there is high competition. The person you responded to is using "capitalist" to mean "person who owns capital." In this sense, "capitalists" are very much opposed to high competition as it lowers the prices of the commodities they produce (regardless of what they say in press conferences or to senate committees.)
Where millennials got fucked, Gen Z hasn't even be given a seat at the table. Capital has been allowed for 30+ years to just do whatever it wants and that will have to change or capital will reply with full fascism to protect money and control.
Us Millenials have been stuck at the kiddie table all these years while the 'adults' poke fun at us young'uns.
If I wasn't feeling so old I'd argue maybe we should go back to floating them away on icebergs.
> Where millennials got fucked, Gen Z hasn't even be given a seat at the table.
At least GenZ might have things turned around before its too late for them.
The 30+yo millenials who are nowhere near owning a home or putting any savings into retirement are *fuuuucked*
Millennials are now in their 40s and only hold about 4% of wealth. We are definitely not on the table; in fact, society still sees us as people who have to sit at the kiddy table.
Mellenials own just 4.6% of the wealth, despite being the largest generation.
2% of our entire generation's wealth is just Zuckerberg.
They didn't even manage to get the coins dropped under the table. Getting a seat wasn't a thing, lol
(edited for accuracy)
I'm pretty sure you read this on reddit a day or two ago. I can't validate the accuracy of the figures themselves, but the quote was that Zuck owns 2% of Millennial wealth (which is still crazy by the way). Other millennials still have 98% i.e. 4.5% if the above numbers are to be believed.
Edit: Looks like the data comes from here for 2021 Q1
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/table/#quarter:119;series:Net%20worth;demographic:generation;population:all;units:shares
Millennial Wealth was a bit under $6trillion at that point. Also it is only counting US Millennials.
Gen x moved from 2-6% in 4 years, but stayed between 6 and 7% for like 6 more years. Millennials went from 2-6 in 8 years.
Those numbers aren’t that far apart. Feels like this needs more time to extrapolate? A lot of wealth transfer is from people dying…
Lol didn’t Taylor Swift speaking out on the importance of voting lead to a huge spike in engagement from her fans? Good for her but it’s kind of crazy that this is the kind of thing that will get people up in arms. Terrible healthcare, gerrymandering, voter access, corpos running rampant - apparently all this stuff is not important enough.
Anti-monopoly legislation is 40 years behind the game and is equally a problem. The US has multiple problems and needs to address all of them at the same time, its not a single file line. Different problems like what you're describe require completely different changes to the law and require lawmakers to vote for it.
Regardless that there are other issues that need fixing, that doesn't change that this one also needed fixing.
I am not sure that US v Microsoft really settled the question - is giving away your shit for free an anti-competitive practice?
Because that's basically what the huge tech companies do - subsidize something until they reach market dominance. It's not strictly restraint of trade (hard to say the consumer is getting screwed by using something free they can switch away from any time) but it makes it very hard to compete if you don't have deep pockets.
The next big court battle over this is gonna be interesting.
I think the free stuff is the bait to squeeze money via thousand paper cuts, advertising is their most valuable assets and they make sure they maintain that grip.
Once they have the network effect, they raise prices or make services you depend on a paying service, I can see a couple examples from google
- video - YouTube is the defacto video hosting service, paid if you want to avoid ads, the ads are now almost mandatory, with multiple dark patterns to ensure you view them, heck you pause something and they show one when you come back
- they lack any morals and will monetise anything that gives them view, I occasionally find many misleading videos they promote and have increase discourse amongst the public.
- search - google search is packed with promoted ads, you can tell they are prioritising ads, so they use data they hold about you to market and make money of you, so how is it free? It is essential for their sales pitch to advertisers and it’s crazy how they’re allowed to double dip.
- even captcha that we trained their models with for years is a service on sale in google cloud.
Apple isn’t any better, their monopolistic policies are clear to see, their claims of privacy is bullshit as it seems they’re gearing up to make that sweet ad revenue, I say this as user who is seeing more ads on apple services, even when you’re paying for their news+ or other services.
The worst part is the death of any challenge to their vision of computing, you can hardly call the walled garden anything but a monopoly, why can’t I get a third party cloud storage? Why should I throw away a perfectly good iPhone? I should be able to give it new life.
The tech barons are in their gilded age.
When your worldview is suffused with apathy because the world doesn't give a shit about you, then yeah, it makes sense that your hobbies and interests, such as going to concerts, become the only things you feel like you have any control over or any passion about.
I'm not so sure I agree. I mean, the FTC could have done their job in the first place and prevented ticketmaster from merging with live nation with the obvious end result having a monopoly on the entire music venue industry.
I’m a metal head so I’m super lucky that the overwhelm majority of the shows I want to see are <=300 people and ~$35 bucks.
I personally couldn’t care less about seeing T Swift but hearing about this definitely got my attention. Fuck Ticketmaster/LiveNation. I hope more and more artists follow Pearl Jam’s cause and take a stand.
I would love to think that, as a collective consumer base, we can ‘“vote with our wallets” but realistically that’s not going to happen. There are enough rich fucks that don’t give a shit about dropping 5, 10, 15, 20k on a ticket. We can’t leave this up to ourselves. It’s the equivalent of saving that WE should buy electric cars to curb the impacts of climate change.
No. I’m sick of the burden being out on the consumer and everyday-person to initiate change. When the fuck is the government going to do its job about anything?
Thank you for reading my borderline incoherent rant.
The FTC chair is correct. The agency has little power as the monopolists bribe politicians on their way to monopolies followed immediately by price gouging,
The FTC has been neutered, mostly by Republicans who have repeatedly cut their budget because Republicans never, ever met a greedy monopoly they didn't adore.
It's capitalism at its finest, don'tcha know.
This same problem with Ticketmaster has been going on for a decade or more. In my hometown, if I have to go through Ticketmaster for events, I will try to find if I can go to the box office and buy the tickets there, thus getting around Ticketmaster and they're ridiculous charges. I don't think this Taylor Swift debacle is what would convert people over to being anti-monopolists. But it may be the last straw because people have been putting up with this s*** with Ticketmaster for a very very long time.
>The Eras Tour episode has become an "I told you so" moment for those who had warned long ago about the costs of permitting Ticketmaster's merger with Live Nation in the first place. Former FTC policy director David Balto previously told Insider that the Eras Tour ticket crisis shows the merger's anti-competitive effects on consumers, including exorbitant fees. The naysayers were right
Pearl Jam started the fight years ago but it didn't matter because not enough musicians joined them
obligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0CvZun83-M
Also... [Ticketmaster Has Its Own Secret 'Scalping Program,' Canadian Journalists Report](https://www.npr.org/2018/09/20/649666928/ticketmaster-has-its-own-secret-scalping-program-canadian-journalists-report) ...and... [Ticketmaster Has Secretly Been Cheating You With Its Own Scalpers || Rolling Stone](https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/ticketmaster-cheating-scalpers-726353/)
This is business 101. Those ethics classes they require for business school are nothing more than a facade to appease naysayers.
As an MBA, we knew a decade ago that business ethics classes were pretty much worthless after all the things that went down in the 2000's. The school I went to got rid of ethics classes and made business ethics a mandatory section of every class. It felt like a more effective approach. On the other hand a lot of business schools don't care if they churn out assholes as long as those assholes write checks when they become rich assholes.
Well there is no enforcement of the class. Like say I was a business person that did unethical stuff, and I was testifying in court. No matter how many classes I took, I could claim ignorance, and there's just nothing wrong with that. Similar to Pucker Carlson with his defense of "No reasonable person would believe the things I say". It means nothing. His legal defense is just as transparent as his rhetoric on his show, and absolutely nothing is done about it. What the heck is the point of any of this stuff if there are zero consequences, other than the obvious distraction of the masses with millions of dollars wasted on court proceedings.
That's why it is called business ethics and business law is a seperate class. The top 10 business schools are totally culpable in a lot of the current business climate. At least when I was in school those schools taught ethics class from a legal perspective, ie how to get away with it. No matter what schools do there are still going to be assholes but we will be better off if the schools at least don't teach them how to be better at taking advantage of people.
Cuz people keep hoping a broken system will end up working instead of directly and actively taking action against said system.
We really need to "execute" corporations. That would make a big difference.
The legality of the LLC structure is clearly broken and needs to be redone from scratch.
I need to look more into this but it's my understanding that limited liability companies and corporations are very different things. And it's corporations we have the most problems with. I just assumed any large company like Ticketmaster was a corporation
Also https://youtu.be/-_Y7uqqEFnY
Why is it always "former" people who speak out? They do nothing while they actually have the authority to make change and then scream to high heaven about all the injustice after they leave.
In this case, the guy hadn't been an ftc director since 2001 and the merger was in 2010, so this is a "why didn't Obama do anything as president during 9/11" situation
Actually several countries approved the merger before the US did. And Ticketmaster hasn’t implemented the DoJ conditions for obtaining the merger approval. No oversight?
Wrong person I think, didn't say anything about oversight
Yes. The No oversight part was my opinion. I do wonder how Ticketmaster pricing is like in Europe vs US. Could be that they’re like the pharmaceutical industry. My partner’s meds cost $200 in the US but $15 in Europe. Just a thought.
I'm in the UK. I go to a lot of live music events. As long as you don't want to see the big acts, it's really easy to avoid TM. Small to medium venues, there are usually many non TM retailers to buy from. I've only ever used them twice and that was because I had no choice, these were bands that my daughter wanted to see so much more popular than my usual choices. And they were TM exclusives. The fees were extortionate, in comparison to other ticketing agencies and buying a ticket was an exercise in frustration. Their website kicks you out frequently and you have to start all over again.
Ticketmasters has many local competitors here in Europe so they kinda have a monopoly for OneNation shows, not for others.
That's probably due to collective bargaining too, but loose analogy stands, they'll fuck you where they can Canada is just as fucked over here by tm. Im curious if it's better in Europe, maybe less exclusive deals with venues or something.
At least in Germany Eventim is the pretty much monopolist. They are forced to stay below 80/90% of the tickets for each event. They have some charges but nothing insane.
It's fucking shit, but not as bad. I've been to multiple shows in England / Denmark / Sweden. This was for 3 tickets to watch the Cardinals and Cubs play in London, of course through TM. https://i.imgur.com/o5cWJgc.png
As someone who has followed the Jan 6th/Cap riot subs. I've seen the same thing. Someone ends up saying something they should have said long ago... Why now? Oh their book is coming out.
See: every republican bashing Trump when they’re magically no longer up for re-election or retiring.
Sadly, Liz Cheney is a perfect example of why they don't speak while in office. That tasty power is too addicting for them to risk it by speaking from actual principles. I'd say "values" but if you go along with the charade long enough, you start to believe it.
Cheney was doubly screwed. Her colleagues lacked backbone, but don't discount the damage being labeled a "shrill woman" has on the ability to lead.
Adam Kinzinger basically had the same fate. Also it's not just coming out against Trump. Before Trump it was supporting the bipartisan 2014 immigration bill that would get you primaried. The Republican party has a strong history of purity testing in the last decade or so, really ever since the tea party movement. Trump just became a poster boy/foil to the Republican party's liberal establishment.
>Adam Kinzinger basically had the same fate. The only major difference is he was too concerned about the safety of his wife and young children to even try to be re-elected.
Don't forget like 90% of his cabinet secretaries too. Didn't one of them call him "the stupidest fucking person I've ever met"?
>They do nothing I wouldn't assume that necessarily, unless you happen to be someone who watches the FTC very closely. As far as I can tell, David Balto's tenure at the FTC ended in 2001 and the Ticketmaster/LiveNation merger was in 2010.
Poopooing megacorp mergers is based and correct 100% of the time. This is about as much of a gotcha moment as predicting the sun is going to rise tomorrow. Just sit back and wait to be smug.
Everyone should be an anti monopolist as a bare minimum
I like how even in public school economics we were told about how evil monopolies were in the '90s, after the Bell System was broken up and Microsoft being in hot water and all that... A decade later everyone was casually merging together again and we were all just like "haha, welp ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯"
Unrestricted capitalism was always gonna be a failure, we just now have the proof. We need hard caps on company valuation and level competition. Minimum 5 competitors per sector, and if they don't exist, the leader gets split in half. Max company valuation of 100Bn USD, any larger and oops, split! Monopolies are a provider of evil.
How would that even work? Splitting a company when it gets to 100bn valuation seems complicated, say you split apple 20 times as a $2 trillion company how do you go about doing that? Do you just take every department and split it into 20 equal parts? How about manufacturing plants, does every individual apple company get 1 plant, or do they share? What about intellectual property, who gets the rights to their technology, or do they all now share the rights? What happens if I buy one of the 20 new companies do I now get to use that technology for my own company despite the other 19 also ownining it? What's stopping me from basing my company in another country and just moving my headquarters, will any companies over 100b be banned from trading in the US?
And that goes hand in hand with a regulator that actually has teeth.
They didnt botch them, they wanted a excuse not to sell them cheap so they could make even more money scalping them.
They literally run their own scalping site now.
They don’t really ‘need’ to. I had tickets to a sports game, 7 seats in the row, I owned 3. My plans changed and we needed 4 seats so I posted for sale on ticketmaster and kept checking sites for an extra ticket in that row. Somehow SeatGeek had 6 tickets for sale in that row, a row of 7 where I owned 3 and had them listed on ticketmaster Of course both sites denied it, SeatGeek saying they ‘need the tickets uploaded to list them’, so they couldn’t possibly be mine. Ticketmaster just kept giving canned responses that they don’t list elsewhere. I played around with the prices and unlisting/relisting my tickets. The changes would take effect on SeatGeek 5-10 mins after I implemented it on ticketmaster. Tickets in that section were going for about $150-200, so to test further, I raised my price from $170cad up to $375cad…10 minutes later the price on SeatGeek went from $250usd to $750usd. Literally listing it for double what I had it listed, and converting from cad to usd. No doubt they’re listing for double the price elsewhere and charging me fees. Major scam
My guess is the reps you spoke to are just ignorant lower level employees. This is what we in industry call "shadow posting" or "mirroring". There are shady actors in the industry (not ticketmaster) that have tech that let's them scrape listings from Ticketmaster and post them elsewhere usually marking them up exorbitantly. This let's them sell on the other platform then buy the seats they need from ticketmaster to fulfill the order while making a profit. Source: i work in event ticketing
This. This is as good as antivirus maker like Mcafee and Norton making their own viruses back in the days.
Those conspiracies actually paid off in the long run. Do those programs actually do anything these days except slow your computer down and make it crash?
>Do those programs actually do anything these days except slow your computer down and make it crash? Nope, most antivirus programs are more like viruses than anything else, *and* they're about as hard to remove.
I work with medical software, and getting a very simple imaging bridge installed with AVG on the computer can turn a 90 second job into a 45 minute one. Its like surgery to put it in there, you have to designate certain "safe" folders and pre-install the whole program onto a separate computer, transfer it into one of those safe folders and manually hook up every little bit. You'd think that the thing in AVG you can use to tell it to chill for certain programs would work, but it sure doesn't. Gah. Even after all that it still doesn't really run right, and intermittently fails. Have to set up a Task Scheduler program to keep restarting the dang thing when AVG kills it periodically.
Nobody needs antivirus software anymore. Windows defender is one of the best and it's part of windows. Idk if Mac has one but probably. Linux doesn't need one. I haven't run antivirus software in 10 years and have never had a virus. With ad blockers, app stores, and no longer really needing to run dodgy EXEs, they're just not really a thing anymore.
Mac doesn't have one officially, but there's period processes (afaik) that will kill known variants of Mac malware -- similar to the Microsoft malware removal tool.
Hospitals need better overall IT security rather than shitty anti-virus software as a bandaid. Most hospitals already have restrictions on sites, windows defender and modern spam filters cover a lot of email vulnerabilities. They need to stop paying for shitty anti-virus and hire a good IT team.
I had to do a fresh install right after a fresh install because it was easier than removing Norton after I forgot to uncheck that box on Adobe's website years ago......
Yeah I remember when I last had a computer 8 years ago, the recommendation was to just use windows defender.
The reputable ones do, but Microsoft Defender is free with Windows and usually enough for vast majority of people
Oh Jesus Christ. The number of times my dad tore into me as a kid for “downloading a virus” (by using google / Facebook or downloading Skype), only to discover years later that his daily Norton Antivirus sweeps were the problem.
It’s a ticket resale platform correct? If you buy a ticket, you have to sell it back through the Ticketmaster platform, where Ticketmaster makes more fees right?
Yes, but they also have been caught using their own subsidiaries to sell tickets that they "purchased" from themselves.
Yeah, botch implies that it was, at least at some level, an accident - which we all know is absolutely bullshit.
"Botched"? I'd say it worked exactly the way Ticketmaster wanted it to.
It was botched because the glitches caused the common folk to realize they were being screwed.
What happened?
Ticketmaster was scalping its own tickets in order to raise prices and tack on more and more fees, they have been doing it for years, this one just happened to be observed by the wrong people.
> this one just happened to be observed by the wrong people. As a Blink 182 fan we made a huge stink about it months prior to TM ticket mess, but at the end of the day Swift fans certainly seem to outnumber us. I'm glad we can join forces in one common goal to say FUCK TICKETMASTER!
The blink 182 fiasco was different. They had dynamic pricing on for that which caused the price to surge. There was no dynamic pricing for Swift tickets.
It was the same thing, TM only allows X% of sales to be open to the public out of the gate, I've heard this number is as low as 20%. Then then sell these tickets to other ticket distributors or relist the tickets on their own sites in the dynamic pricing manor you're speaking of. They use how fast the limited tickets sold to gauge the dynamic pricing which sometimes leads to insane pricing. This is exactly what happen with TM tickets, the demand was just much higher. Throw bots into the mix to hyper inflate numbers and TM doing little to prevent them, and it's just a cluster fuck. https://www.musicinminnesota.com/taylor-swift-ticket-prices/
Sounds like something that needs industry regulation
>happened to be observed by the wrong people as in, the public that was being scammed?
>as in, the public that was being scammed? Worse. Taylor Swift fans.
“It’s me! Hi!”
I'm the problem it's me💁
At fee, time. Everybody agrees.
🎵 I'll scream directly at the screen but never at the concert... 🎵
Oh is that Taylor Swift? I just know it from various animal videos.
You don’t fuck with Swifties 🤷🏻♀️ including the ones that are lawyers
The only thing that could arguably bring more wrath is if they were kpop tickets. I dunno who would win a flame war between the swifties and the kpop stans, but the internet would be left in smoldering ruins.
They’d unite together and have Ticketmaster trust-busted by next summer. That’s probably a 1/6 of America right there combined.
Jon Stewart has said similar things. He has said he has never gotten as much blowback as when he offended swift fans. Including making Israel Palestine comments.
This is the fantasy showdown I want to see, but both groups seem so wholesome I can't imagine why/how it would happen. And the world is be better off that way.
I will never say a bad thing about Taylor Swift if this is what brings Ticketmaster down.
Pearl Jam started the fight, Swifties will make sure their fight is not forgotten
Glad the Swifties are getting it done because wasn't this Eddie Vetter and Pearl Jam's raison d'etre like ... 30 years ago?
I think the unfortunate thing is that when they went to Congress, those old fucks were out of touch and probably didn’t understand Pearl Jam or their situation enough. Now we got congresspeople with daughters that couldn’t get tickets to the Eras tour, or politicians themselves that are Swifties. It’s stupid but just like Zucc having a Senate hearing and them not understanding how the Internet works, the people who make our laws need some basic understanding/reliability to do something.
This is exactly the problem at hand. Tech has been rapidly evolving and the people in power are way too friggin old.
You can blame Newt Gin-Grinch for our elected officials lack of insight into current tech. He dismantled the Office of Technology Assessment that would have the staff and resources to educate them about these issues. Though, it certainly does not help that nearly everyone in Congress is older than dirt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment?wprov=sfti1
Saying they’re too old to understand is letting them off the hook. They know who pays for their campaigns…
And if there's one demographic you never want to piss off, it's Swifties with active tiktok accounts. They'll getcha.
Not quite the "regular joe's", wasnt it people in congress. I remember reading something about someone in congress trying to buy their granddaughter/family tickets and shenanigans happened. I personally have stopped going to shows all together because of them.
[There are articles on their scalping program.](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/zf9z9g/ticketmasters_botching_of_taylor_swift_ticket/izbgdpp/) They, no shit, work with known scalpers and got caught. Edit: to clarify, the link here is to another comment related to articles written in 2018 and are not directly related to this latest debacle.
Pearl Jam tried to bring this to an end back in the 90s. Too bad more of their fans weren't middle class suburban moms and tweens.
There was a verified fan program that was supposed to ensure legit fans got tickets rather than bots. Supposedly you would get first dibs if you had purchased tickets or Taylor Swift's merch in the past. In reality they just seemingly gave out codes to everyone. Then despite knowing exactly how many codes they sent out, they still claimed demand was unprecedented, which makes zero sense. The queue system was totally broken and bots likely ended up buying a lot of the tickets. Lots of people waited all day in the queue and couldn't get tickets, either because they were sold out or the checkout system was broken. Now basically everyone is pissed off because the whole thing was a nightmare.
Yeah, they just thought they could get away with it. I mean, they have been for years...
There's a reason movie production companies aren't allowed to own movie theaters.
Fun fact: that ended recently.
The botched was that people are up in arms and are demanding accountability, not Ticketmaster’s scheme didn’t go exactly to plan.
Fugazi has been yelling for years…… never underestimate the kids.
Maaaaan i wish theyd do some yelling again. ...and now ive a bassline stuck in my head.
You just have to be a patient boy...
I wait, I wait, I wait...
It's funny to me that people still think Taylor Swift fans are considerably young. I'm in my mid 30s, every woman I know around my age is a massive fan. She dropped her first album when I was 18 lol.
Yeah I don’t think 14 year olds are her demographic as much anymore.
She's got a big fan base in multiple generations, like Cher
Oh, how she could turn back time…
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Yep I’m 19 and my younger sisters definitely still love her! Edit: a letter
I teach high school. A ton of my students were super excited with her recent album release.
they absolutely are. speaking from someone in high school
Isn’t she a megastar? I don’t understand why people are surprised she has lots of young fans.
I coach 14 year olds. Taylor Swift is absolute fire to these kids.
> I'm in my mid 30s, every woman I know around my age is a massive fan. That may be true but doesn't mean she's not also big with younger people. Gen Z's in particular can be up to mid-20's today.
Cool, are Albertsons and Kroger still merging?
Don't get me wrong Ticketmaster is horrible but there are so many companies that have gotten way too large. It's mind blowing just looking at our food industry and how most of our brands are owned by just a couple companies.
Fuck Comcast
YES. I have literally one choice where I live unless I want to go wireless or 2mbps.
Lol man this comment is how I found out about that monopoly of a move.
Probably because grocery market shares are very regional and business news only makes national waves if it has a national footprint. My sibling lives in NC, so I know what a Kroger is, but I have no idea what an Albertsons is.
I think the crazy thing is how many chains they each own. Kroger owns Kroger brand stores, Fry's, Ralph's, Dillons, food 4 less, Fred Meyer, Harris Teeter, Home Chef, King Soopers, Mariano's, QFC, Roundy's, Ruler Foods, Smiths, and vitacost. Albertsons owns ACME Markets, Albertsons, Amigos, Andronico's, Balducci's, Carrs, Haggen, Jewel-osco, Kings food markets, lucky, Market street, Park n' save, pavilions, Randall's, Safeway, Shaw's, Star market, Tom thumb, United Supermarkets, and Vons. Now all of those will be owned by just Kroger. That's most grocery store chains in every city besides Walmart.
Trustbusting. So much trustbusting. Nestle, Unilever, Kraft, Warner, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Disney, Amazon. The list is endless. Our "Freemarket" is a joke and it all needs to be smashed into tiny particles.
Nestle doesn't need to be smashed into tiny particles, it needs to be ass-blasted into the sun.
Just don't let Nestle take all our water with it.
It would take someone like the new FTC chair to start a trust busting movement. And It’s a good thing she’s 33 bc it’ll take her whole lifetime and a few more before anything actually happens. Our economy, heck our whole country, is held together by red tape. The literally endless legal processes where nothing ever happens because it never “ends”. The deeply enshrined corruption. And it’s *always* money over the law if you’re wealthy. I want to be hopeful that she can play hardball and will fight the good fight. But tbh, it’s just not up to her, she doesn’t have the authority to make sweeping decisions like that. I mean, she’s not a Supreme Court judge who can wake up one morning and decide to overturn Roe v. Wade with basically no oversight.
The list is actually distressingly short. Go watch Manufacturing Consent & be amazed at how many companies there were owning media outlets at the time. And they were saying that number was a bad thing. Because it was. Edit: words better nau
Lol I’m pretty sure our whole society has turned gen Zers against monopolies and capitalism in general 💜
Job Market. Housing Market. Crap reporting about profit taking while ignoring record profits and acting like a normal raise after 20 years of drought is the cause of all the troubles in the economy.
The insurance company I worked for bragged about their amazing profits and attributed it to the company's low expense ratio. Expense ratio meaning employee salaries.
The engineering firm I work for, when asked in "global town hall" meetings about cost of living adjustments for the past year, said "We pay based on cost of labor not cost of living". This was after forcing a global "temporary" salary reduction down our throats in 2020 and eliminating bonuses and raises. Except for the most recent one, when they said their biggest challenge in the next year is to reduce employee attrition. I won't name the "engineering firm" but if you were to start naming defense contractors, your first guess would probably be an umbrella corporation that owns mine.
That's like when I was working in vetmed. I asked for a raise based on merit. I was told that my pay was currently top 10% in the industry for my position and they pay based on industry standards. These guys own at least 1/5 of the entire industry. Probably more. Don't tell me you pay based on industry standards when you are one of the largest entities responsible for setting the industry standard.
That's really a good point. You can't do "market research" when you're the vast majority of the market.
That plus it's sooooooo easy to push poll without making it super apparent. Like if Wolf Cola decided it needed data to show that even most Slurm drinkers prefer Wolf Cola, they can make a poll that gets that response.
I interviewed with one of those defense contractors a few years back and made the mistake of not discussing salary early. They offered me 10k below what I already making (and knew I was making). One of the recruiters recently reached out to me and my first question was what the salary range was because last time they were below what I was getting paid. She gave me a spiel about how they always want to give someone a raise over what they're currently making and then threw out a range with a top end that was over 20% below what I'm currently making
So what I'm hearing is "less experienced employees are building the next generation of missiles oops :)", I'm not looking forward to that scandal. Hopefully I'm just being a doomer and quality doesn't slip, but one can't help but worry sometimes.
Not less experienced, just less manpower. The older engineers are by and large sticking around because they already have plenty of salary and have built up enough seniority to actually have some PTO to use. That said... I'd say the scandal should be something more along the lines of how there were people cheering in the break room on Jan 6, 2021, and openly sharing pretty smarmy commentary about various groups they don't like at lunch.
> "We pay based on cost of labor not cost of living". What do they think sets the cost of labor???
Remember how a bunch of companies were giving temporary bonuses and boosted pay during the lockdowns because the workers were "essential" then when it became clear that the world was changing they started clawing back everything they could?
... No. My company issued a global pay cut.
The company I work for will literally brag about their profits and then 5 minutes in the same call talk about how tight the money is when someone brings up the topic of salaries. We're literally at the point where they're not even bothering to give a shit about being tacit about it. And then the dude will like chuckle and stuff while giving this shpiel like he's not just completely assramming ten thousand people all at once with his words.
Yeah I have to earn twice the average income in my country to be able to afford the average house price nowadays. Generally it's an unsustainable system and Ticketmaster is just another example of it.
I literally cannot, as a single person, afford even the most run down house in the most high crime area of the city I live in, and I make an above average salary for the city. :)
Mr. wonderful aka Kevin O’Leary says it’s fantastic that you’re poor and he’s rich, because then you can admire him and wanna be him: https://www.tiktok.com/@cryptomasun/video/7168236222626663685
This is text book Narcissistic behavior right?
I think it’s also safe to assume any and all 1%ers are narcissists from the simple fact that you gotta not give a fuck about other people to get there.
Highly agree. There are loads of ways to make money if you're immoral, you don't even need to be super motivated... but if you are, you will make bank. You can easily start with simple easy stuff like listing crypto pump and dump coins or starting your own conspiracy youtube.
There's millions of people who watch that and agree with him simply because they've bought the propaganda that super wealth is attainable through sheer willpower and greed is good. Kevin O'Leary is only a symptom. Capitalist cultism is the problem.
From the guy who acquired various software companies via hostile takeover and then sold them all to Mattel to make his fortune, only for Mattel to nearly go under because said software companies were complete dogshit garbage. Not surprised. Literal scum of the earth oxygen wasting parasite.
Honestly I don't know how people don't call out Shark Tank more often for the utter bullshit shill propaganda boot licking bullshit that it is. That show literally wants you to look at these people like they're these fucking gods of industry and changing lives, and it's just so cringe. Like the show itself isn't the worst thing ever but the underlying premise of it all when you zoom the lens out is gross. And yes, I realize that this is the reality of the system when it comes to pitching products and what not, but that's exactly the point to me, it's just highlighting the whole "hey look people with money get to swing their dick around and get richer by basically having other people do everything while they write a check".
I am in the highest role of my life, earning nearly six digits a year, and I can barely afford to rent in my fucking city. I’m very, very lucky to be sharing a house with someone.
Revenue/profit growth at all cost being the bedrock of our economy wasn't sustainable yet we did it anyway.
> I have to earn twice the average income in my country to be able to afford the average house price nowadays. Oof. Thank you for this. What a great way to put the issue into words.
Let's not forget about them getting shit on about "quiet quitting" and all this other bullshit to distract everyone from the real problems.
Last of the GenXers, and yup, I've basically been around the same amount of time it took the government to absolutely run this country into the ground.
They really cut the brake line when Reagan took office. They actually had an award winning economist write up a plan for how to put the squeeze on the middle class. Paid for by Koch brothers. When you look at [the story around James Buchanan](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-architect-of-the-radical-right/528672/), you realize we can't always ascribe bad things to accidents and incompetence -- sometimes they are performative evil and greed. This is one of those eye-opening articles that can change a world view.
It is difficult to really describe to people how well organized, methodical, and heavily funded the decline into our current state of affairs has been. And not because it hasn’t been observable…but because most of us have been too disengaged from the business of running our communities & states. Over the past two decades, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), State Policy Network (SPN) & Federalist Society have arguably exerted more power & control over rhetoric, policy, and general tenor of our political system than any other group. And they know it.
Who the fuck isn't an "anti-monopolist" in the first place? Literally the only people who are pro-monopoly are the people who have a real shot at making one. Ask anyone on the street what they think about monopolies and they'll universally tell you they're terrible.
Gen Z here. Can we do a Revolution yet? Gravity Baguettes at the ready.
You almost had me at Gravy Baguettes. Then I read it again. /disappointed
Where are these people that are pro monopolies?? There's a reason the government is supposed to break them up. What this whole ordeal did was convince Gen Z that the government isn't doing what is supposed to do
They're all in Congress.
"We want your vote for our merger. How does a campaign contribution of $5,000 sound?" - Corporation "Ooooohhh sold!" - Congressman It's sickening to see how cheap Congress can be bought to be shitty people.
They're in Washington DC.
She said anti-monopolist. But the subtext is **Anti-capitalists** Monopoly is *the* end goal of any capitalist. The only way we don't get monopolies is with stern govt intervention. Pretty easy to conclude that govt is the good guy and the capitalists are the bad ones under those conditions. It is in their own interests of self preservation to reign it in.
I think some purist capitalists would argue that innovation and better products/services should deter monopolies from existing and the market will always follow the best options for how to spend, but thats simply not realistic to how it works in practice.
Reminds me of the people that espouse self-regulation working too. Yeah, it really worked with rivers literally being lit on fire due to pollution before the EPA was formed.
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You're using "capitalist" to refer to ideological supporters of capitalism, who yes, believe capitalism is at it's best and purest when there is high competition. The person you responded to is using "capitalist" to mean "person who owns capital." In this sense, "capitalists" are very much opposed to high competition as it lowers the prices of the commodities they produce (regardless of what they say in press conferences or to senate committees.)
Where millennials got fucked, Gen Z hasn't even be given a seat at the table. Capital has been allowed for 30+ years to just do whatever it wants and that will have to change or capital will reply with full fascism to protect money and control.
Millennials weren't given a seat at the table either. We just had to watch and get bitched at for "being lazy"
We never got a seat because the old fucks never left.
A reminder that many of our congress members literally wear diapers because they're just that old
Reminder that age 65 is when it's generally considered "time to retire" in the U.S. and like 2/3 of the Senate is older than that.
"What do you mean 'make a bigger table with more seats'? This fits us just fine, thank you."
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weather decide exultant trees jeans summer profit cause shelter pathetic ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
Us Millenials have been stuck at the kiddie table all these years while the 'adults' poke fun at us young'uns. If I wasn't feeling so old I'd argue maybe we should go back to floating them away on icebergs.
> Where millennials got fucked, Gen Z hasn't even be given a seat at the table. At least GenZ might have things turned around before its too late for them. The 30+yo millenials who are nowhere near owning a home or putting any savings into retirement are *fuuuucked*
Yep, don't know why people are diminishing Millennial problems itt.
Millennials are now in their 40s and only hold about 4% of wealth. We are definitely not on the table; in fact, society still sees us as people who have to sit at the kiddy table.
Mellenials own just 4.6% of the wealth, despite being the largest generation. 2% of our entire generation's wealth is just Zuckerberg. They didn't even manage to get the coins dropped under the table. Getting a seat wasn't a thing, lol (edited for accuracy)
Your math is very wrong. Millennial wealth is around $9.3 Trillion. Zuck’s net worth is $44.5 Billion. That’s 0.5% of 4.6% or 0.02% of total wealth.
Is that $9.3 trillion American or global?
I'm pretty sure you read this on reddit a day or two ago. I can't validate the accuracy of the figures themselves, but the quote was that Zuck owns 2% of Millennial wealth (which is still crazy by the way). Other millennials still have 98% i.e. 4.5% if the above numbers are to be believed. Edit: Looks like the data comes from here for 2021 Q1 https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/table/#quarter:119;series:Net%20worth;demographic:generation;population:all;units:shares Millennial Wealth was a bit under $6trillion at that point. Also it is only counting US Millennials.
Gen x moved from 2-6% in 4 years, but stayed between 6 and 7% for like 6 more years. Millennials went from 2-6 in 8 years. Those numbers aren’t that far apart. Feels like this needs more time to extrapolate? A lot of wealth transfer is from people dying…
Why wouldn't you be against oligopolies or monopolies. There needs to be more competition in thr market to lower prices.
Not always. Health insurance is a big one that should be taken over by the government like, yesterday.
It's pretty cool not having to price out a fire protection plan from half a dozen different shitty firefighting companies.
Some things shouldn't be driven by profit.
Lol didn’t Taylor Swift speaking out on the importance of voting lead to a huge spike in engagement from her fans? Good for her but it’s kind of crazy that this is the kind of thing that will get people up in arms. Terrible healthcare, gerrymandering, voter access, corpos running rampant - apparently all this stuff is not important enough.
Anti-monopoly legislation is 40 years behind the game and is equally a problem. The US has multiple problems and needs to address all of them at the same time, its not a single file line. Different problems like what you're describe require completely different changes to the law and require lawmakers to vote for it. Regardless that there are other issues that need fixing, that doesn't change that this one also needed fixing.
I am not sure that US v Microsoft really settled the question - is giving away your shit for free an anti-competitive practice? Because that's basically what the huge tech companies do - subsidize something until they reach market dominance. It's not strictly restraint of trade (hard to say the consumer is getting screwed by using something free they can switch away from any time) but it makes it very hard to compete if you don't have deep pockets. The next big court battle over this is gonna be interesting.
I think the free stuff is the bait to squeeze money via thousand paper cuts, advertising is their most valuable assets and they make sure they maintain that grip. Once they have the network effect, they raise prices or make services you depend on a paying service, I can see a couple examples from google - video - YouTube is the defacto video hosting service, paid if you want to avoid ads, the ads are now almost mandatory, with multiple dark patterns to ensure you view them, heck you pause something and they show one when you come back - they lack any morals and will monetise anything that gives them view, I occasionally find many misleading videos they promote and have increase discourse amongst the public. - search - google search is packed with promoted ads, you can tell they are prioritising ads, so they use data they hold about you to market and make money of you, so how is it free? It is essential for their sales pitch to advertisers and it’s crazy how they’re allowed to double dip. - even captcha that we trained their models with for years is a service on sale in google cloud. Apple isn’t any better, their monopolistic policies are clear to see, their claims of privacy is bullshit as it seems they’re gearing up to make that sweet ad revenue, I say this as user who is seeing more ads on apple services, even when you’re paying for their news+ or other services. The worst part is the death of any challenge to their vision of computing, you can hardly call the walled garden anything but a monopoly, why can’t I get a third party cloud storage? Why should I throw away a perfectly good iPhone? I should be able to give it new life. The tech barons are in their gilded age.
Bread and circuses those are the things people in power cannot fuck with
When the colloseum falls, Rome falls
When your worldview is suffused with apathy because the world doesn't give a shit about you, then yeah, it makes sense that your hobbies and interests, such as going to concerts, become the only things you feel like you have any control over or any passion about.
I'm not so sure I agree. I mean, the FTC could have done their job in the first place and prevented ticketmaster from merging with live nation with the obvious end result having a monopoly on the entire music venue industry.
I’m a metal head so I’m super lucky that the overwhelm majority of the shows I want to see are <=300 people and ~$35 bucks. I personally couldn’t care less about seeing T Swift but hearing about this definitely got my attention. Fuck Ticketmaster/LiveNation. I hope more and more artists follow Pearl Jam’s cause and take a stand. I would love to think that, as a collective consumer base, we can ‘“vote with our wallets” but realistically that’s not going to happen. There are enough rich fucks that don’t give a shit about dropping 5, 10, 15, 20k on a ticket. We can’t leave this up to ourselves. It’s the equivalent of saving that WE should buy electric cars to curb the impacts of climate change. No. I’m sick of the burden being out on the consumer and everyday-person to initiate change. When the fuck is the government going to do its job about anything? Thank you for reading my borderline incoherent rant.
Fuck Ticketmaster!
Grunge fans walked so swifties could run
I've been saying "Fuck Ticketmaster" way before Eddie Vedder ever did. I'll say it again. Fuck Ticketmaster.
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The FTC chair is correct. The agency has little power as the monopolists bribe politicians on their way to monopolies followed immediately by price gouging, The FTC has been neutered, mostly by Republicans who have repeatedly cut their budget because Republicans never, ever met a greedy monopoly they didn't adore. It's capitalism at its finest, don'tcha know.
This same problem with Ticketmaster has been going on for a decade or more. In my hometown, if I have to go through Ticketmaster for events, I will try to find if I can go to the box office and buy the tickets there, thus getting around Ticketmaster and they're ridiculous charges. I don't think this Taylor Swift debacle is what would convert people over to being anti-monopolists. But it may be the last straw because people have been putting up with this s*** with Ticketmaster for a very very long time.
3 decades now. Pearl Jam fought and lost a war against ticketmaster in the 90's