This is pretty much always the case with high profile heists like this. Organized criminals are usually smart enough to realize that selling incredibly famous stolen objects is basically impossible, and the people who steal them are too stupid to realize that.

This is utterly stupid but I think the average Trumpist won’t even know any of this is happening unless they make more ads that are basically the same thing but with a card saying “Trump has increased tariffs on Canada to prevent you from seeing the following ad.” Fox News has just about everything else you can imagine on their front page but no mention whatsoever about increasing trade tensions with our biggest trading partner. Canada should just lean into this. There is no benefit to cooperation, and this is stupid even by Trump standards but of course half the country won’t even know it’s happening because of their news ecosystem even if they do see the actual ads.

I recently went to two different airports and didn’t see this at either. I think local airports are just ignoring this shit.

You do realize that crypto isn’t the stock market and doesn’t require there to even be exchanges right?

Why? Dems have less than 50 votes and need 60. It’s not like she’s the tie breaker or anything. Plus she’s already talked extensively about the Epstein files and how they need to be released even if Trump is in them. Idk why dumb ass conspiracy theories like this are all over Lemmy.

I love that this easily quantifiable metric is so split along partisan lines.

This is completely irrelevant to the discussion because nobody mentioned selling all the tickets for the same price or selling them all at the highest price anyone would be willing to pay.

Who exactly is being extorted of they decide they want to spend over a thousand dollars on a ticket to see Taylor Swift? Someone has sold an item at a specific price, and someone else paid it. I’m not a fan of the practice, but if it were like food or shelter I would be a lot more sympathetic. This is a thing nobody needs and it’s not like they’re holding a gun to your head saying “Pay a thousand dollars for a Taylor Swift ticket or I shoot!” Extortion implies you don’t have a choice in the matter, but there is an extremely easy choice here- don’t pay and don’t go. That so many are paying implies that to them, the economic transaction makes sense and that is what they are willing to pay. Do you complain that jewelry sellers are extorting people by selling expensive gold jewelry for more than they bought it for? It’s a scarce luxury good and people are willing to pay what they are paying, and have the option to just not pay that. Does it suck? Yes. But if there are people willing to pay that much for tickets someone is going to find a way to make it happen, regardless of whether it is right or wrong.

I am not assuming competition. The fact of the matter is that people are paying these prices for tickets regardless of who is selling them. Nobody needs to go see Taylor Swift to live (in spite of how some people feel) and yet they are still shelling out for these absurd markups on resale tickets. That’s what I am saying here. People are willing to pay what these tickets are being sold for, so that is their value.

I get this argument for something people actually need but going to a Taylor Swift concert is the very definition of a luxury.

I mean from an economics standpoint if people are willing to pay higher prices on tickets being resold then they are underpriced. The price people are willing to pay is the “true” value of the thing. Personally I think concerts are too expensive even at list prices but artists are consistently selling out venues at these prices and even higher because people are paying more for tickets on secondary markets. Obviously there are people for whom seeing Taylor Swift is actually worth over a thousand dollars, and to be honest, if that’s how much it is worth to them there’s not much you can do to stop them from going, and I’m not sure I even want to. I might go see Taylor Swift for $40 a ticket just for the experience but is that really worth denying it to some super fan willing to pay 10x that? I won’t get nearly as much from the experience as they will, and it’s obviously not worth it to me.

In high oxygen concentrations it doesn’t take much.

On one hand I feel like the parents share some culpability in this for falling for the scam that killed their son, but I also think it’s insane that it’s even legal to run this dangerous scam clinic in the first place.

I never understood the idiocy behind “Huh people keep voting for Republicans instead of us, what if we were just Republicans lite instead of actually supporting things that poll better than Republican positions!” It’s like New Coke. In the 80s, Coca Cola did some research and found that at the time, most people preferred Pepsi to Coke, and released a “new and improved” version of Coke that tasted more like Pepsi. It was a complete disaster. People who preferred Pepsi continued to prefer Pepsi because well you can’t out-Pepsi the real Pepsi. But people who actually did prefer Coke completely hated New Coke because it didn’t taste like Coke. In trying to beat Pepsi by being more like Pepsi, Coke created a product that nobody wanted because it was just a worse version of Pepsi to Pepsi fans and a worse version of Coke to Coke fans. I feel like the Democrats are doing the same thing here. People who love Trump are not going to vote for Democrats no matter how much like Trump they try to be because you can’t out-Trump Trump. Even DeSantis failed at this trying to go even harder right than Trump because fundamentally this movement is about personal dedication to Trump rather than any ideology. So to Republicans these weak spined Democrats will still be worse versions of Republicans, and to Democrats they will be worse versions of Republicans, creating a party nobody wants. Democrats have been trying and failing at this strategy for the past decade and refuse to give up on it, even in view of the success of Mamdani in the primaries for NYC Mayor on a democratic socialist platform. At a certain point one has to think the Democrats are doing this on purpose to maintain the status quo while presenting the illusion of an opposition. Otherwise the leadership are some of the dumbest people in the world and have no place in leadership.

Yeah vtubers are a little different than a traditional cartoon character. If someone hates Homer Simpson and says he has sex with dogs when he’s not on TV that is obviously absurd, but if someone says that about a vtuber the implication is that this is about the real person who portrays the vtuber. IMO if something would be illegal to say about a regular streamer, it should probably be illegal to say about a vtuber. I am generally on the side of freedom of speech on these things, but I think for consistency’s sake the law should treat the two similarly.

US population~ 340,000,000

Websites will not cater to less than 0.5% of the population having weird laws. Unfortunately, the end result will just be that these sites will just be blocked in these states, which sucks for the people living in them, especially since at least 40% of them don’t even want this shit.

dead sea scrolls

You are conflating the dead sea scrolls with the Nag Hammadi library. The Dead Sea Scrolls do not contain any Christian texts, only Jewish texts from around the time of Jesus. The Nag Hammadi library contains a number of texts typically described as “gnostic” and some of these include teachings attributed to Mary Magdalene.

You’re imagining an argument and getting mad that I’m not making points in favor of said imaginary argument. .

It is, but that doesn’t mean that poor people don’t still eat more highly processed foods. Not smoking or using drugs is also way cheaper than doing those things, but both are more prevalent among poor people in the US.

I would say this is almost certainly skewed by income, with the poorest Americans getting almost all of their calories from ultra processed foods, and the share decreasing with income. I would be curious to see that spread because one of the more fucked up things about this is that there are a lot of people who eat this stuff exclusively, and this number kind of hides that.