> the artist/venue/etc. still make the same amount of money as if 100 individuals bought them and attended, but there are now 80 fewer people

No they won't. The venue now has 1/5th the people buying booze. They're gonna HATE that night.

Fair enough. Unfortunately, as the trials in the recent lawsuits against Live Nation has shown, the venues are stuck between a rock and a hard place because they risk losing the ability to book some of the top artists if they try to switch to a different ticketing platform. At least the way it works right now, the ones who are being partnered with in this promotion that's supposedly helpful in preventing scalping are the ones who are both least affected by scalping and in the best position to force everyone else involved to have to put up with the negatives.

> but I’m curious why the artists don’t double prices to cut out middlemen

That is essentially what they have done. Ticketmaster is basically "We take PR heat to make you more money".

The problem is your typical slots player doesn't have the discipline to stop after running their roll once. They turn the $100 into $90, then the $90 into $81, then the $81 into...

True to an extent, but records are great promotional tool, and rather expensive to make if you don't want it to sound like poop. Perhaps something like $10-25k on the very low end for something half-way "serious", and that's assuming you're not going all Chinese Democracy and can actually cut the thing in a week or so. Then it has to mixed, mastered, art prepared, etc.

Most small-medium time artists can't afford to front all the expenses. If no one buys the records, no record company will give the band an advance. Even if most records don't really generate any direct profit for the band, getting the production bankrolled is a pretty big benefit.

You wouldn’t want to use a regular toilet even if you could, given how tight water margins are. Urine you can reclaim, feces not so much.

Vacuum flush toilets are common on airplanes, trains, and ships and use a lot less water than a conventional toilet.

Frankly, as an asthmatic I'd be 100% onboard with everything. There are plenty of scent free deodorants that work just fine, btw.

Fair enough. Banning VOCs and carcinogens would also make barbecues illegal, or really the Maillard reaction in general though.

There’s a difference between something inherent to a process, and something added for basically for marketing reasons that has minimal/no positive effect in actual functionality.

Literally. It’s less than a week of profit for JD. Not income, _profit_.

Using AI and a human byline is 100% cheating.

Yeah I agree. Don't tell me you authored something when claude did the majority of the writing. Use claude if you want, but don't pretend you wrote the content when you didn't.

I also hate this style of plastic, pre-digested prose. Its soulless and uninteresting. Maybe I've just read too much AI slop. I associate this writing style with low quality, uninteresting junk.

Why the simutrans folks decided on a weird hardcoded frame rate (40fps) that looks janky as hell on every single display ever I will never understand. Unplayable. instant motion sickness.

It sounds to me like a product of the ‘90s. CRTs were still common, and they support essentially arbitrary fixed refresh rates. It wouldn’t have been a big deal at the time. It’s like how the original Doom runs at a native 35fps when you don’t use interpolation.

I haven’t played simultrans, but I wonder if it feels less janky on a 120 Hz or 240 Hz monitor, since both of those values are evenly divisible by 40. Compared to playing on a 60 Hz display or other non-multiple of 40 refresh rate monitors.

Actually, it's not 40, it's 25, even worse.

Ever heard of little games called Diablo 1 and 2? People spent billions of hours playing those on displays with framerates faster than 25 for 2 decades.

Came here to say this, was an instant bounce for me.