DesertCreosote

My degree was in economics (though I didn’t stay in the field and moved into information security instead). Econ 101 is basically a bunch of thought experiments that are designed to get people thinking about very broad economic concepts, but it’s all very, very abstract and largely doesn’t apply to anything connected to reality.

In higher levels, it starts to resemble reality, though my professors constantly reinforced the lesson that there are multiple ways to interpret data and that no matter how complicated you make the model you’re using, it’s still a massive oversimplification of the real world.

Unfortunately, people take intro micro/macro and think that’s what economists actually think when in reality they’re essentially learning about the very, very general oversimplifications. The amount of math it takes to start going through the actual models gets overwhelming, and it’s unlikely a first or second year undergrad would be able to handle it unless they’d already taken calc 1 and 2, and ideally some additional statistics classes.

There’s also been a massive shift in the last decade from theoretical models to much harder quantitative experimentation, so the field as a whole is trying to be less theory-driven and more data-driven. I sometimes wish I’d found the math more enjoyable, because it’s been very exciting to see some of the results coming from experimentation.

Sounds perfect for a pie shop.

Menu:

• Priest
• Greengrocer
• General (served with and without his privates)
• Piccolo player
• Locksmith

Coming soon:

• Beadle
• Judge

Do you have a better solution?

We know it’s rigged. We’ve known it’s rigged for decades. Until the system is changed so the states with tiny populations don’t have an outsized influence on things, it’s not going to get fixed.

Saying “peaceful protest isn’t enough” is also hand waving away what happens when protests aren’t peaceful. You’re essentially saying “people need to hurry up and volunteer to be brutally killed to change things,” and no matter how patriotic somebody may be that’s a pretty tough sell.

We’re not delusional. We see how bad it is. There are a lot of people protesting and taking action every single day across the country, but it’s harder to see a) because they don’t get much coverage from the media, and b) because while the total number of people protesting is quite large, they’re spread out across the entire nation and that’s hard to capture in a picture. Add into that the surveillance networks working to identify and punish those people, and there’s an additional chilling effect which reduces the overall visibility of those protests.

I didn’t assume you were saying she was the greediest person in the world. You said she should pay her staff more and charge her customers less, and I pointed out that she pays her staff more than anyone else would, and that the prices people pay for her seats and merch are often highly inflated by scalpers, not by her.
And even if she paid all her cash money to her staff and gave her products away for free, she would still be a billionaire off of her catalog and name.

You responded with a very dismissive comment about rapists, which was both insensitive towards victims of sexual assault and a complete failure to engage with the conversation. That’s why I said it was made in bad faith.

“He was a very gentle rapist”

That’s not exactly a good-faith argument. You said she should pay her staff more and charge less for tickets. I provided a counterpoint to that.

Going back to the original question that you were asked, should she have retired when she started to approach $1 billion in net worth?

I will point out that the ownership rights to her music, which she purchased with the money she made from The Eras Tour and now owns completely, is probably worth close to $1 billion in valuation alone. Even if her entire liquid net worth was taxed from her, she’d be a billionaire on paper just by virtue of her music catalog & the value of her name.

I’ve seen this viewpoint a lot lately, and while I absolutely agree that tickets to her shows are expensive, when my wife bought tickets to the Eras Tour she was able to get them on the primary market for about $300 each for very good seats. The secondary scalping market was selling the same seats for between $2,000-$4,000 depending on the show, and people were buying them at that price. From a supply and demand perspective, Taylor Swift was absolutely selling those tickets below their true market value.

As for paying her crew more, she also paid out $197 million in bonuses to her crew across the tour. That’s about 10% of tour revenue in bonuses. Not profits, revenue. I’ve been tangentially involved in the entertainment industry since college and have multiple friends directly involved, and I’ve never heard of any other performer giving that much in bonuses to their crew.

Additionally, she donated to food pantries in every city she performed in. While the amounts she donated to each food pantry have not been released, people have worked out that it was likely at least $20k/pantry, based on the number of meals the pantries said they would be able to provide with it. That’s at least $1 million across all the cities, which is obviously not enough, but is far more than most other entertainers do.

I know she gets a lot of flack because she’s so visible in our culture, but in terms of how bad billionaires are, she’s significantly better than a lot of others who fly under the radar. There are over 3,000 billionaires today, according to Forbes, and I’m pretty certain most of them made their money through much worse methods than singing songs and selling overpriced merch to fans. 😛

Normally I would agree with you, but given how much they care about privacy (as indicated by what they write about and talk about on their podcast), I don’t think tracking is what they’re after in this specific case.

And they know that the signup won’t completely block AI, but it does help.