Very coincidental with this post as I just started looking into creating a home server for the first time and decided that mini PCs were sufficient for my use case (originally was going with Small Form Factor).
Just bought a Dell Optiplex 7060 Micro from this website for <300AUD. I heard they were pretty decent for used PCs. The price difference isn't too far off from the USD equivalent here.
Interesting - this looks like Beransa[1] (Librela) which is a monthly injection for canines that have osteoarthritis. My dog did not have any noticeable changes to pain after using this for 2 months so I've decided to take him off of it.
My cat has been in the feline equivalent (Solensia/frunevetmab) for about two years, and although it had a huge positive impact for the first 12 to 18 months, it seems to have suddenly completely stopped working in the last little while.
One theory is that the immune system eventually starts attacking the monoclonal antibody med itself, another is that as in humans, the OA progression might accelerate under the drug.
I also have mine on Pentosan which did have a noticeable difference for him so that's great. You could possibly talk to your vet about this, it's significantly cheaper than Beransa (110AUD/month) and for my dog it's biannual with a booster shot in between
I actually (anecdotally) heard a similar issue with Pentosan that it stops working after 12-24 months due to the immune system so you have to "time it" at an appropriate time in a dog's life. To be blunt, by appropriate I mean you'd want to start using it 12-24 before the dog is expected to pass and not at the first sign of osteoarthritis.
I'd also like to highlight another bad practice by Ticketmaster.
When you purchase a ticket from them and resell it on their marketplace, once someone purchases it, they(Ticketmaster) hold your funds and only give you the money ~7-14 business days after the event is over. They say this is to verify the validity of the ticket.
On the buyer side, you purchase the ticket from the marketplace and it gets added to your account immediately. (I think) You get the barcode some time ~1 week before the actual event begins.
The confusion for me? Ticketmaster owned the ticket and all logic relating to the validity of it. The logic to validate this shouldn't be complex at all. They OWN the ticket. They KNOW it's legitimate because it never left their database. Yet they double dip and hold both buyer and seller funds. Events can be close to a year in the future but the seller won't see that until after that event ends.
There's another good point in here. Why do they hold the ticket until just before the event? I bought tickets to a concert for my wife's favorite band. Then, my wife's work scheduled an event for that same week and she had to leave town. So, what I really wanted was a refund so someone else could buy the tickets. They don't do that of course. So, then I wanted to sell the tickets for face value... but ticketmaster didn't "deliver" the tickets to my account until the day before the event!
I watched for a month leading up to the event as the ticket prices plummeted while the scalpers were desperate to get at least something for their tickets before my ticket was even delivered to me.
As soon as they take my money, they should update the database to show that the ticket is mine. If I want to sell it, I should be able to do that immediately too.
But, from what I've read, that instant resale ability only belongs to their "partners" who resell a lot of tickets, and you need access to their "TradeDesk" tool to do it: https://tradedesk.ticketmaster.com
Just vote with your pocket and don’t buy tickets from them. I do that - yes I don’t get to go to major concerts but there are still so much more that is not on ticket master. I found a lot of new entertainment and was happy to pay $4 fee instead of whatever TM charges nowadays.
Granted, I live in NYC, which probably has one of the most vibrant local music scenes in the country. But it's not like nowhere else has local bands that play at small venues.
It feels like a lot of the people that complain about ticketmaster's monopoly have never branched out from Billboard chart artists.
Even the most 'hole in the wall' places around here have deals with LN/TM, short of a bar-band or niche-local joint.
One of the more 'fun' ways that LN/TM did shenanigans at the past I observed: Metal shows at smaller places in the Detroit area like Harpo's (famous place but known for the sketch area) or Token Lounge (literally a bar with a dance floor and stage, pretty fun tho) you'd have one of the local small/startup bands selling tickets, often -below- cost at the box office.
Why? If they sold enough tickets, they got to play as an opener. Yes some scammers would try to fake this, but I never saw anyone actually get 'taken'. And yes I'd buy them if I didn't already have them to help the locals out.
That said, the concerts at those smaller venues, despite being TM/LN, were in the 20-30 dollar range after fees. Not 'top billboard' type stuff per se but Children of Bodom, Lacuna Coil, and other 'popular but niche' bands in the 2005-2007 timeframe.
lol, people and bands have been complaining about it for 30 years and it’s only gotten worse. Yes, you could skip concerts for the rest of your life, I suppose, to make a point. But it’s not going to fix anything.
Complaining yes, but how many people are actually putting their foot down? As for bands, they may actually be profiting from this scheme where ticketmaster ensures higher prices while taking the blame. If they really cared enough they could chose not to deal with Ticketmaster. Sure, that would limit their choices in venues which could mean lower potential for profit. Probably not going to be a real issue for the the more popular groups.
And yes, if there are no concerts with acceptable terms (and that's really a hypothetical if) then don't go to any for the rest of your life. You make it sound like this is some kind of required part of the human experience when it is just one of many possible ways to spend your time. Even if you are really into music, concerts are just one way to experience it - and when it comes to audio quality, a fairly crappy one.
It's possible you can put your foot down, lots of venues will sell you paper tickets at the box office. It's inconvenient but they also don't charge TM fees sooo. It's what I do since they open the box office during any of their events. Just get tickets for the next few shows right there.
> Even if you are really into music, concerts are just one way to experience it - and when it comes to audio quality, a fairly crappy one.
This fundamentally misunderstands why people go to see live music and honestly maybe what people enjoy about music entirely.
The bands at the top are absolutely not profiting, they’re losing money over it. Instead of a healthy ecosystem of promoters willing to pay them market rates, they’re dealing with a monopsony that depresses earnings. They HAVE to go through TicketMaster venues, because TM has locked up 85% of large ones, which means they have to accept whatever fee the promoter (LiveNation, same company) is willing to pay them. That’s part of why AEG sued them, they are a giant international promoter who is effectively boxed out of the American market by TMs stranglehold on venues and vertical integration.
Venue owners are profiting. LN/TM can pay them a lot for exclusive rights thanks to their monopoly-inflated profits.
No they don’t, that’s not how the money works in concerts. The bands get paid a flat fee by the promoter. You can Google this if you don’t believe me but I know from working with concert promoters.
Why would Ticketmaster/live nation pay them at all? They don’t have to, the bands don’t have any other places to play and they make most of their income from live shows.
It doesn’t say it goes to the artists. It says artists can choose not to participate. It says most of the fees go to the venue, which is true, that’s how they get exclusivity.
Perhaps they give artists a little to encourage participation in some ancillary revenue, I don’t know. I’ve mostly worked non-TM venues. But I’m sure the promoter gets most of that too and it’s not a lot of the overall ticket sales.
I can tell you for sure, everyone but the venues feels they would get more without the monopsony. There is not a functioning market for concert promotion once you get to the 10,000+ seat level, and TM is actually even buying up the ones below that too.
Your only end run around it is the festival circuit since a lot of them are out in a field rather than a venue, but guess who is buying those up now also…
Also note how they say ticket master passes on fees to the promoter. That’s a clever way of phrasing because it makes it look like they’re not greedy, but the promoter is almost always LiveNation, which is the same company.
I am fairly sure that’s not true, and also that platinum tickets are a small percent of tickets.
Do you have a source for that statement? The article about it linked below does not back up either assertion. I’m pretty sure they’re dynamically priced by a TM algo, and I’d bet little of it goes to the artists.
That's not really possible, because they contractually require venues and performing artists to only perform at their venues
This kind of gross exclusionary contract should be illegal (it's kinda the same BS that Google does with Android OEMs - contractually force them to [1]), but for some reason antitrust avoided acting on the matter (including allowing acquisitions in the space) for quite some time
[1]
> Predicating the availability of any of Google’s apps, including the Google Play Store, on OEMs not taking advantage of the open source nature of Android on devices that will not include Google apps seems much more problematic than Google insisting its apps be distributed in a bundle. The latter is Google’s prerogative; the former is dictating OEM actions just because Google can.
https://stratechery.com/2018/the-european-commission-versus-...
Expecting the US government to properly handle monopolies and anti-trust issues is a fool's errand. It's like saying the US government should solve the issue of gun proliferation in the US: it's simply not going to, in our lifetimes.
I googled "us government anti trust wins" and found a few articles that point out some recent ones, e.g. Adobe and Figma in December 2023, and an Apple lawsuit in March 2024.
They now, having merged with LiveNation, have effective ownership of all major and semi-major venues around the country. They also aren't just doing concerts, they're doing sporting events and other live entertainment as well.
They aren't going anywhere. They are just too big, and too ingrained.
I did that for several years. I don't really consider it voting though because nobody is counting the votes -- they still sell out of tickets with higher profits each year.
This began a lot more on third party sites like stubhub due to Covid and the massive amount of cancellations; before most places paid out after the sale, and if the buyer wound up having an issue (due to the seller mistake, selling it multiple times, whatever) they would charge the seller and usually assess a penalty.
But when everything in the world was being cancelled I assume they didn't have all the money just sitting around to reverse and it was a ton of thrash to deal with. As someone who had bought tons of tickets and sold some, it was a mess. I had a ton of credit card refunds back, the third party sites had to reverse payments, etc.
Waiting until after the event is just less overhead. Guarantees the transaction happened without a hitch.
There are some POS and broker sites that still pay on transfer, but none of the "primary" secondary market does.
I’ve never dealt much with TicketMaster, despite them being a monopoly. So my questions here may just be out of naiveté:
1) Why would TicketMaster pay event organizers ahead of time, if the event might be shit and attendees may demand their money back? Rather than having to deal with a lot of chargebacks and making it their own problem with the banks, they might prefer to make sure the event goes off without a hitch and refund people while they still can. Rather than subsidizing the refunds they make the event organizer have to get (and pay for) financing instead, backed by their payout. They might also offer such financing.
2) I get that they hold event organizers hostage by making contracts with the venues for years, that might be an antitrust issue but it’s separate from 1.
3) Why would TicketMaster make scalping easy? Middlemen would just buy up all the tickets and then pump and dump the price, much like early crypto investors in a meme token or altcoin do. So they don’t “deliver” the ticket to you until just before the event, exactly for that reason.
With ChatGPT it’s now easier than ever to impersonate thousands of people at scale, with credit cards and everything. But I will admit, showing up to an event at least once confirms there is a human behind the account. But a first-timer buyer? Shouldn’t be able to resell, no.
#1 and #3 are related. They make scalping easy so they get all of their money immediately and can pay event organizers ahead of time. I personally think scalping should be straight-up illegal but business schools loove it and consider it an excellent example of helping with liquidity in a system and finding the true "willingness to pay" price of something.
It features a price discovery mechanism: you auction off M tickets to M people, the price goes up every time after M people buy and the oldest buyer is booted when the others buy, but can buy back in again. Buyers can set a “reserve price” to automatically bid up to that price.
No scalping, because tickets aren’t transferrable.
Similarly, you can disallow transfering of bearer token X but let the user sell it back to the central market maker and someone else buys it. Enforcing commissions on sales.
I guess it depends on your definition of scalper. It prevents mom and pop from reselling their unwanted tickets. If they stopped there and prevented all reselling I'd be fine with that even though I'd lose out on some money in this one case.
But then they literally built a whole platform (link in my last comment) for actual scalpers to resell tickets in bulk. So, they're not trying to prevent scalping, they're just ensuring that only their "partners" can scalp.
Every big corp holds money longer than necessary to maximize interest. It’s free money. We know TM. “Why wouldn’t TM do it” is what you should be asking proof for.
Rule of thumb when it comes to monopolies: always err on the side of rentierism. In fact, it should be incumbent on their defenders to prove (insert greedy activity) is not practiced by said corporation
>When you purchase a ticket from them and resell it on their marketplace, once someone purchases it, they(Ticketmaster) hold your funds and only give you the money ~7-14 business days after the event is over. They say this is to verify the validity of the ticket.
I imagine it's more about discouraging scalping, regardless of what they may say about it.
Maybe to stop people selling the ticket and still going to the event with a pre-printed one? Solving that would also be easy if they have a central verification system (just invalidate the ticket and issue a new one) but not if it is all p2p.
(disclaimer: I'm a complete outsider, last time I bought anything from Ticketmaster was a really long time ago).
They would need to solve that anyway in case 2 or more friends attempt to get in on the same ticket.
Not at all difficult - simply share screen a third device and display the rotating QR-code through e.g. zoom on individual phones. For additional trickery, try to split the group into joining multiple ticket scanning lines and timing the scan of the ticket to be as close as possible to eachother.
Possibly it's fraud prevention, in case payment for the original ticket was fraudulent and chargeback occurs after the ticket is resold on marketplace?
That does sound like a very reasonable thing to do. Otherwise you have a threat vector of steal card, buy ticket, sell ticket, pocket the cash, card owner disputes, now Ticketmaster has paid a stolen identity who took the money and ran.
Anything that can be used to monetize stolen cards will tend to be used for the purpose even if it's inefficient.
>When your mind is holding items in working memory, that means that it has less space to focus and execute effectively on the main task at hand.
>Just writing things down gives some resolution of that task/thought so that we can fully show up for our main thing.
Anecdotal but there was a time in my life not too long ago where I found myself stressed out because I had so many life admin tasks to do but would also have to remember not only the task, but what I had to do, when I could do it, how far along it was. I was unable to sleep properly and day to day tasks were being affected.
It sounds so bloody simple in hindsight, but simply writing them into a kanban style app removed a lot of this stress. Every time I remembered I had to do something new I would just add it to the board. I also have issues with starting these tasks so while it's never going to be finished, at least the tasks are there and not in my brain
When I was relocating internationally, it was keeping track of the task dependency structure that stressed me out. After doing X and Y do Z.
I ended up jotting down the tasks/dependencies in dot syntax to quickly get items recorded and out of my mind during the day, then at the end of the day updated rendered the whole depency graph to give the overview.
I had a similar problem. I now maintain a simple TODO note on my phone and organize the items by priority sections (Now, Soon, and Eventually). I check off the items once I’m done and remove them after a while. This does a few things:
- Relieves the stress of having to remember random stuff that comes up during the day
- Allows me prioritize my worries… the “Eventually” category usually consists of lower-priority things that would have low impact if I didn’t get them done soon (or at all in some cases)
- Gives me a sense of accomplishment when I check off an item
I like this better than the iOS Reminders app since I have more control over various things (with a huge disadvantage of it not being time/date-aware.
I use a similar method, but implemented in iOS reminders. I have different lists for the different categories. And now with a smart list I have created a category/list "this week" that lists actionable items with a due date within the next 7-days. [1] This is loosely based on GTD [2]
For personal tasks (not work), I use a todo list that emphasizes not having the task in view if I've decided it's not a candidate to do that day. (Such as by using the Start Date feature of some tools.)
I also try to cull the candidate tasks for the next day on the night before, bumping tasks so that I won't see them and have to consider them the next morning, wasting fresh brain.
I'm good at multi-tasking, but there's noticeable costs to that, so I try not to do it unnecessarily.
I've just got a tiny notebook currently with one task per page in big marker, for all those random one-off things to do. Just flip it to the task that needs to get done, and nothing else in sight.
How do you decide which task to do next? (Do you have to look at many tasks, and load enough of each task context into your brain to decide whether to do that one?)
I vaguely recall they did this in Australia and solar panel installers just increased the price by the government rebate anyway so it didn't actually make it cheaper.
I listened to a Hidden Brain podcast recently which told me to try and think of the amount of time we have left with any experience like meeting our parents, visiting X place etc. and it's supposed to make you appreciate the situation more and not to sweat the small stuff.
What you've wrote about time with our parents is sad but in a beautiful way.
Hey just wanted to say that I really appreciate this comment and it's an opinion I haven't seen shared before even though in hindsight it's obvious.
I personally have chosen not to have kids - one reason is doomer level but the other is time and independence. I have a dog that is a relatively (to kids) minor responsibility but in my day to day life feels like the biggest responsibility, I compare that to having a kid which I would say is a lot more and I wouldn't want to take on as I've already experienced a dog and that is as far as I'd go. But while you haven't changed my mind, you have negated a lot of my feelings towards a previously thought "lifelong responsibility"
I have a dog. I totally thought having a kid would be like having a dog. In the sense that I do a bunch of shit with my dog that I don't necessarily want to do and she is often a burden to things I want to do (mainly travel) but, in aggregate, is worth it. And if having a kid was that negative shit multiplied by some large x with similar or even higher positives, it would be a huge no go. Happily I got the dog a month before I got pregnant.
And it is not the same at all. So many things I do for my dog I do out of obligation. I do not often want to walk her. Once I'm walking her or going to the dog park or whatever, I have a nice time but I don't naturally WANT to do it.
In contrast, I want, like actively WANT, to do all sorts of absurdly unpleasant things for my eight month old. And society is set up to bring kids to all sorts of activities my dog can't go to --- despite my pup being sig more pleasant to have out and about than my baby.
I will say I think a sig portion is hormonal. I would say having a kid was a genuine metamorphosis for me. In contrast, I think my husband had more of a dog-like sense of obligation and is only recently enjoying the kid.
As sexist as it may sound, I'd suggest most women who are financially stable with good partners to have at least one kid because I am shocked, utterly shocked, by the fundamental shift in self I've experienced and, frankly, it's cool. Life is short. It's a cool, unique experience worth having.
But men? Unless they actively want kids, I'd suggest staying away from it --- the sacrifice to their relationships, lives, etc. seems sig harder to bear since they don't seem to have quite the same hit to their hormones. As my husband says, I take care of baby and he takes care of me. Who takes care of him? I try but baby comes first. That's a hard hit for a man not excited for kids (thankfully my husband is and remains so).
As the traditional formula goes, you take care of the household. Food, cleanup, chores, shopping, calling the repair guy, etc. Especially as you start getting more free time and school starts acting as a baby sitter.
Well another thought is that the only way to revert this so-called doomerist path is to choose to have and raise kids with empathy for others and with care towards the natural world they've inherited.
Because the people who don't give a shit ain't going to stop having them.
I have no data to support this but I'm willing to bet that the likelihood they do keep those values is significantly greater than the likelihood that they don't.
Having a dog is legitimately more than a kid 90% of the time if it's an indoor dog you treat like a kid. It's different, but constant and the dog never becomes self sufficient. It's also more challenging to travel with them.
I'm sorry I have had both kids and dogs. Dogs are WAY easier and less expensive than kids. On the positive side, kids are 1000% worth it and are with you for your lifetime. There is very little comparison between the two Why are kids compared with pets? . Would anybody compare a spouse with a dog ? Such comparisons are demeaning to both sides of the equation.
I have found dogs are more of a pain in the ass than kids. Having a dog is like having a kid that is stuck in the early toddler years in terms of effort IMO. Also far less rewarding, as a dog won’t really change much over time once it gets to adulthood fairly quickly.
If you could have a dog for some significant length of time, a kid will be no problem by comparison.
Dogs really need a job. They were domesticated to work along side us. Any owner should invest in training them.
Ironically, it is kind of the same with kids, kids really need a job and cultures that put the kids to work doing chores and things at an early age seem to raise better adjusted kids.
A big whitepill and motivation to have kids is to recognize that the Turkheimer laws are correct. If on net you like your own traits, whatever they are, and you want more of those traits to be present in the world, good news - having biological children is an almost surefire way to do so, even if you don't put a ton of effort into it.
Last time I looked into this trying to get PiHole working on my TV, I found an article that said some TVs give you the option to override the DNS but on the code side it just completely ignored the manual DNS change.
Depending how much control you have over your network, you can defeat this. I have my OpenWrt router configured to block all port 53 traffic unless it comes from the PiHole or router itself. You could also do redirects with masqing I suppose.
Fails if they’re using DoH, but older gear isn’t going to have that functionality built in yet.
I would if it was built well. There may be a bunch of companies offering something similar but without being in the industry I have to come to places like this to get real world anecdotes on whether it's reliable or not. That inherit distrust makes it hard to buy something like this - to differentiate between marketing and quality.
I like Apple TV. The one thing that consistently frustrates me is pressing the mic button at the wrong "screen" will take you out of your current app and bring you to the Apple TV+ search container. Yes, it's not hard to navigate back to where you were but it's quite simple to accidentally press the mic button at the wrong screen.
Just bought a Dell Optiplex 7060 Micro from this website for <300AUD. I heard they were pretty decent for used PCs. The price difference isn't too far off from the USD equivalent here.