I mean, it comes back to Dunbar’s Number. We care much more for individuals in our immediate circle than for “people” in the abstract.

There’s a spot in Houston’s Chinatown with a big gallery of claw machines. I think my success rate was better than 50%. Even got two at once on one try. But when its $2 to play and you’re winning toys that are worth less than $1…

Incidentally, they have a desk at the front where you can trade back your winning toys in bulk for bigger prizes. But they’re all random dodads you could get on Temu for a few bucks each. Like, you can turn in twenty stuffed animals for a cheapo touch pad. Basically a fancy kind of Chuck’e’Cheese ticket, when considered in bulk.

But if you’re looking for a dog’s chew toy or a way to bloat your 2-year-old’s stuffed animal war chest? Hard to beat the value in bulk.

Arguing in general is pointless.

To borrow a scene from “Thank You For Smoking”, it isn’t pointless but it is performative. The reason to argue is to get in front of a neutral or uninformed audience and state your case better than your opponent. Your goal is not to change your opponent’s mind. Your goal is to change your audience’s mind.

The DebateBro gambit is to raise personal exposure. The more you can get on TV and reiterate your views convincingly, the more people hear them and are swayed in your favor. You’re a salesman and the Debate is your opportunity to gather a crowd and entertain a public through conflict. But the goal is to sell your ideas to the crowd, not the target of your conversation.

I’ve found that arguing with conservatives isn’t about arguing with an individual. My father-in-law is a staunch libertarian, we go back and forth all the time. His positions change. My positions change. Yadda yadda.

But then the conversation ends, he gets back in his car, he turns on the Talk Radio, and he gets an earful of information and ideology that I never hear. And I throw on my leftie podcasts, getting a perspective he doesn’t hear. When we meet up again, we’ve had our brains saturated in information and ideas totally alien to one another. So the brief conversation we had a week ago doesn’t move our political alignment in any meaningful way.

It almost works better without the quote

Hecate

If we’re bringing in mythical feminine icons, you can’t top the OG Mother-Maiden-Crone.

“What crazy kinda Spanish is this a-rab talkin?”

“Uh, that’s Aramaic, sir.”

“Ara-what-now? Tell’m to speak English, like in the Bible.”

The famously competent Dr. Doom, who put scalding hot metal directly onto his face because he was in such a rush to become a cool mask guy?

The Monarch has more "W"s under his belt than Doc Vic.

she’s basically real

The actress is real and sincere and just about as naive. But she was parodying Hillary Clinton, who was in reality deeply cynical and corrupt and malicious.

One of them came within a hair’s breath of the Presidency and it wasn’t Amy Poehler.

All week I’ve been sending these to my coworker, currently hip deep in AI propaganda, at the Microsoft Power Platform conference in Vegas.

I’ve had more than a few friends do very well in O&G, riding through a downturn, getting a fat severance, taking a prolonged vacation / working in a smaller company for a few years, then getting hired back when the original company rebuilds.

Schlumberger, in particular, has been through this cycle twice. Exxon has done it on and off for a century. My own firm is the reconstituted remains of Enron, now highly profitable thanks to its stake in the Permian Basin.

Lots of these companies have people who know each other and have worked together for decades.

Regulatory capture is a motherfucker

Big artists are contractually getting a cut of those crazy high resell prices and fees.

Unless their managers are exceptionally savvy, they’re not. They get a base rate on ticket sold. Then the broker can operate as seller and re-seller of the allotment of tickets. So Ticketmaster sells tickets to Ticketmaster, guaranteeing Beyonce a sold-out performance. And then Ticketmaster resells the tickets at auction rates to the general public.

Every big artist could do verified fan presales like the second round of Eras tour shows

Swift had the leverage to cut exceptional deals by promising to expand the size and scope of her performances in exchange for a better rate of return. That’s because her audience is large enough and the venues are small enough that there’s functionally no upper limit on ticket sales beyond her ability to do sequential performances.

For very obvious reasons, most artists don’t get this kind of treatment.

To be fair, only the richest artists can self produce a US nation wide tour.

It isn’t a matter of artist wealth so much as the point of market saturation. If you roll into a town with 50,000 fans and the biggest venue only seats 500 people, you can keep throwing sold-out shows, week after week. This is effectively how successful baseball (up to 162 games/year) and basketball (82 games/year) franchises operate.

But if you can’t guarantee a sold-out crowd, you’re effectively paying the venue for the privilege of performing. As more small venues shut down and bigger venues consolidate, artists find fewer places to profitably perform their craft. Its been a rule in the industry for a while that you make money on tour by selling merch (t-shirts, albums, signed drum sticks, whatever) rather than tickets. Ticketmaster complicates this math by effectively promising to buy out the venue (by selling tickets to itself) at a markdown, then auctioning off the tickets at a markup. That shrinks the audience, which shrinks the pool of people buying the merch.

Its a vicious cycle that’s been collapsing the live music industry for over a decade.

It’s an open market.

Libertarians who don’t understand monopsony are a dime a dozen.

Do you think Beyonce is going to be happy with her tickets selling for $50 capped?

Beyonce will just as happily take 50% of a $50 ticket as 5% of a $500 ticket. But she draws big crowds, which means the venues she can play are limited to the giant (municipally subsidized) stadiums. These stadium owners have conditional arrangements with Ticketmaster as a vendor for a whole host of business and political reasons. So Beyonce can’t perform in Houston at a location that seats over 10,000 without negotiating through Ticketmaster.

Since so many of these stadiums are publicly subsidized, one might argue that the public has an interest in regulating (or, if we want to go balls-to-the-wall socialist, owning and operating) the locations. At that point, the state or federal government might even have an interest in building and operating an exchange for booking venues and buying/selling tickets. And all of this could be done at-cost, which might allow the public to enjoy the benefits of entertainment venues without paying an enormous rent to private landlords.

But why kill the golden goose? The only people who really benefit from such a system are the worthless fucking proles, who don’t really matter and who can all get fucked. Social power brokers benefit immensely from the wealth these choke points in the entertainment economy create and from the exclusive access to popular artists that this leverage provides.

It’s not something a single artist can fix. You’d need some kind of mass movement of artists organizing and auctioning their labor as a collective unit, rather than a bunch of freelancers and independent labels competing with one another for space in an increasingly monpolized marketplace.

Ticket Ghost of Ticket Future: “Don’t buy from Ticketmaster”

Me, in the Present: “Okay, but I still want to go to the concert”

Ticket Ghost: “You’re going to feel weird in ten years, when you find out what Kanye gets up to. But you do meet someone at the event to hook up with, have an on-again off-again relationship for three years, the sex is amazing but you’re on totally different career tracks. You end up seeing other people, and now you live in the same neighborhood and your kids are friends. Which is nice but also a bit weird at parties.”

Me: “Wow. That’s… a lot to take in.”

Ticket Ghost: “Sorry, bro. I tried to warn you two weeks ago not to take those edibles because they’d give you psychic premonitions, but you hadn’t taken the edibles yet so you couldn’t listen…”

Me: vomiting sounds as I clutch the toilet

If you’re the only hater and everyone else likes working in the company

If everyone hates that one guy, they’re probably an asshole. If you’re the one guy that hates everyone else, you might be the asshole.

• Stick around for at least five years and you’re the guru who knows everything, so you’ve got job security

• Change jobs every five years, because managers love to offer “experienced hires” more than the current actually experienced staff

The Two Genders

Labor of love, I suspect