FishFace

No I get they're racist fucks, but do they express disapproval when others go to court over defamation like this? Because the line above was not "the SVP are racist" but "they can't take a joke."

Actually Frankenstein is the Bell; the clock tower is called Mary Shelley.

Or something.

From etymonline:

The slang sense of "hit, sock" is 1941, originally Australian, probably from earlier slang clock (n.) "face" (1923).

So probably not.

It's a pretty safe bet that whoever came up with the term "clock" (the part of an electronic circuit) and "clock rate" (the rate it ticks at) had in mind the current common meaning of "clock", not an obsolete meaning.

Yeah we have a combined COVID and Ukraine inflation bomb after 14 years of underinvestment...

I mean look at Starmer's missteps compared to the missteps of all the Tory PMs. Somehow Starmer is less popular than all of them. I think it's therefore safe to say that his unpopularity is not mostly due to things he's doing wrong, because in spite of it all, he's still doing better than any recent Tory leader.

Hmm. Do you know that party in question has been doing that, or are you just assuming that they do based on association with those right-wing figures you know of who do?

Because the latter is... pretty bad.

No, that's why the Labour Left don't like him, which is a pretty small segment of the population. His unpopularity is unprecedented and reaches swathes of people who never heard what he pledged during the leadership election, don't care about "trans" and want fewer refugees.

You're right he's done little about the cost of living. But no-one would have; the only way to fix it is to "grow the economy" (as the mantra goes but which the government has little control over anyway) and wait for wages to catch up, which was always going to take years.

Services are crumbling because of 14 years of the Tories slashing investment into them due to a slavish adherence to austerity ideology at a time when balancing the books didn't bring us any benefits. Now when interest rates are high and borrowing expensive, we are fucked. Labour can't go back in time and un-fuck us, and they can't run an increased deficit without spiralling interest payments. What are they supposed to do? People talk about a wealth tax - in its most common form raising about 25 billion. An extra 25 billion would be great, but it would not fix the cost of living crisis, and it's the tip of the iceberg when it comes to reversing underinvestment and it is not possible to implement immediately (you'd need to set up a lot of apparatus to assess and collect the tax) so they'd still be woefully unpopular next year when everything is still shit and the wealth tax has never yet been collected.

That leaves them with broad-base taxes like income tax and VAT. Putting them up will genuinely help their finances and public services now but... is phenomenally unpopular.

I said ever since they came to power that they were screwed before they started. They've contributed to it with needless mistakes and U-turns they've pretended weren't, but none of that is more than a skin of mould over the turd of a situation we're in anyway. To round it off, the right-wing press won't print any of their successes (and there have been a few) and screams about everything that they can't fix.

Getting a new leader will probably not fix anything though. Starmer's incredibly unpopularity isn't because it's Starmer, it's because he's the Prime Minister and, worse than that, the Labour Prime Minister.

I recently saw my favourite band (over 1M monthly streams) and bought tickets days after they went on sale. I just waited weeks to book tickets to a band with 400k monthly listeners.

So I'm sure it's not just Taylor swift, but it is the biggest acts, and the ones who sell at under market prices.

None of this affects my actual point, which is that there is a cost to government intervention, and the cost of inaction is that people have to listen to recorded music, or see a different musician, to get their music fix, which is not a big deal. If I'd not been able to get tickets to those concerts, what would I have done? I dunno, something else.

Buying a CD or streaming is not "the same" but it is still participating in culture. As is "going to a cheaper concert by a less popular artist" which you didn't mention. As are all the million other cultural outlets that are much cheaper or free: a museum visit, seeing a film, watching an amateur theatre company perform, heck, watching TV or going to a pub quiz is participating in culture - you obviously mean something very specific but unless you can explain why it is uniquely served by these big-name events like instant sell-out concerts and sports games there is just no reason to prioritise them. In general no two cultural experiences are "the same" but that doesn't mean the government needs to step in to enable every single kind. Watching TV is not "the same" as watching The Proms in the Royal Box - no doubt an amazing cultural experience - but we're not saying the government needs to enable that, are we? So we all understand that it's not important to enable everyone to participate in any bit of culture that they might want to.

In a nutshell: how is it more - not just different - "participating in culture" to see Taylor Swift than to see Heriot (random band I picked off AllMusic... not the same genre) at a local venue? Why is it important enough that the government gets involved with keeping prices down, when it doesn't do the same for million more important things?

Tracking via cookies means gathering personal data, the exact thing GDPR regulates. GDPR says that data must not be collected except on one of a few lawful bases, one of which is consent. Article 7 clause 4 of the GDPR says:

When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether [...] the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.

to me this reads like: "consent does not count if you need to agree in order to access a service" and that they imagined consent as being, "yes, you can have my personal data to serve me personalised ads, because I'd rather have personalised ads than generic ones," which some people (probably not many here!) do think. However, it's only expressed as "account shall be taken" when determining whether consent was "freely given" and the lawful basis does not specify that consent must be "freely given," which is where I imagine these kinds of gaps creep in.

My point is not the best seat but a seat.

So for you, the government should step in to regulate the price of concert tickets for basic seats, but not for the best seats. How many regular seats should be sold at below market value at each venue? All of them? What about when the venue upgrades 90% of their seats to "premium" seats and takes those out of the lottery sale and sells those for market value - is that OK? Are you satisfied if just two seats per performance are lotteried? Per tour?

These are all political decisions now. Some civil servant is being paid to make them as a full-time job, and everyone's taxes are paying for it. Why is that a good use of public money? Shouldn't we instead put that money towards paying a civil servant in the department of health, or the foreign office, or justice? Or towards paying a nurse or police officer? All so that the correct number of people can experience Taylor Swift in a concert instead of on spotify, and watch a football match in a stadium instead of at the pub?

but then explain why you would.

I think I've been clear that there is no line in entertainment where the government should be involved in price regulation. What line do you think I have drawn?

The U.S. is a great example of why. It is cheaper to get 2 tickets to Ireland plus concert tickets and board then to see the same group in L.A., CA. There are every few regulations stopping ticketmaster from scalping the ticket on stubhub, a ticketmaster subsidiary.

How is that different from Ticketmaster selling the ticket for a higher price in the first place?