I had almost the opposite experience a few years ago.

I (after a few beers) found myself idly wondering about an electric folk band I hadn't seen or heard of for a good ten years, and looked them up to see if they were doing a new album or tour.

They'd played a final farewell gig the week before :/

Here in Western Australia, resale prices are capped at face-value plus 10%. IIRC the reseller platforms can still charge a fee on top, but IMHO it seems to have had the desired effect on ticket sales.

Unless it's something really, really popular, you don't have to be waiting the morning they go on sale. In fact you can usually pick up tickets for events a few weeks after they go on sale, or even longer. If they run out, there's often a small amount of resale tickets available for a bit more cash but not multiples.

Having come from the UK where you'd damn well better be online in the first 30 seconds or you're out of luck, and reseller sites fill up with tickets at high multiples of face value within minutes, it's a breath of fresh air. (I understand the UK is introducing similar resale price-caps soon)

Of course it may partly be that Perth people just don't go out that much. Either way it's really nice.

> I don't see why the venues and artists don't want to capture more of what people are willing to pay

Because artists don't always want to extract the maximum money possible from their fanbase?

Artists are not always rapacious capitalists. Sure, they want to make money from the show, but a lot of them also genuinely want to reach people who may not be able to drop hundreds of bucks on a ticket. Always selling to the highest bidder is a recipe for larger acts to only be accessible to the wealthy. And as surprising as it may seem, some of them have views on that sort of thing.

I think there's levels to it. I've seen what I would consider a big artist at a small venue for $20 plus tax, no fees. You could tell that show was a labor of love for the artist. But, I would never expect to pay that price going to a festival like Coachella, or even a local stadium show.

Actually, writing this comment got me thinking that maybe the larger the venue, the more expensive the ticket needs to be out of necessity. More hands in the cookie jar, and all that.

> Because artists don't always want to extract the maximum money possible from their fanbase?

I think that's both true and not. The larger truth is that trying to maximize the extraction during a single ticket sale is incredibly short-sighted of an artist. Having fans attend shows is a very effective way to grow your fan base and your brand, and that brings so much more lifetime value for an artist than you'd ever get from a single ticket sale (except for maybe on your retirement tour --and even then).

On the one hand, I want to say that’s cynical.

On the other, well, I just bought tickets to Iron Maiden’s “all the best bits” tour (who have to be getting close to retiring, one member already has) supported by Megadeth who are explicitly on their retirement tour.

And those were not cheap. No sir or ma’am.

There are also artists like the Cure though, and Robert Smith seems to have a genuine interest in keeping prices accessible.

It won’t cause supply to go down, the same amount of Bitcoin is produced whether it’s mined by millions of ASICs or a single 2008-vintage laptop.

There is an interesting missing link in the feedback cycle with Bitcoin though - the same amount is produced regardless, supply does not contract with demand.

Same on my K8. It’s holding down something and the light buttons.

It’s a godsend, all I want is dim-ish blue lights, but I’d keep coming back to it doing rainbow patterns and flashes that I’m sure some people love but I find really distracting.

It’s interesting to me that this makes it look old. Even slightly retro. Makes me think of early 2010s ultrabooks.

The best thing about the South Bank is that you can look over the river and admire the North Bank.

> Sam's design does feel cold, unnatural and broken, definitely not what brutalist living is about.

AFAICT Sam is in the UK, and that is most British people's lived experience of Brutalist architecture in the UK.

Outside of a few notable examples like the Barbican, many towns and cities in the UK were saddled with ugly concrete behemoths that were poorly designed and poorly maintained.

Many of us actually find it very frustrating when people lionize brutalist principles and talk about 'real' brutalism. If a movement is what it does, rather than what it says it aims to do, then brutalism is a movement that left Britain looking dull(er), grey(er), water-stained and with plenty of dark corners and weird spaces that smelled of piss and were havens for petty crime.

Sam's brutalist laptop stand is entirely representative of brutalism as it really played out in many places across the country.

Yup, and it's a demonstration that the US is unable to just impose its will wherever it wants, making the US look weaker.

Failure all around.

But no doubt Trump and his people will tell the world what an amazing success the whole thing was, and how they exceeded all their goals, whatever those goals might have been.