City of Austin Cancels SXSW March Events | Hacker News Reader

City of Austin Cancels SXSW March Events

sxsw.com

76 pointsceejayoz44 comments

I find it ridiculous that SXSW had to be forced by the City of Austin to cancel. If it were up to the SXSW organizers, who apparently care more about "the show must go on" than they do about people getting sick and dying, SXSW would still be happening.

The SXSW organizers are foolish for not cancelling earlier in the week when the major sponsors started to pull out. The writing was on the wall, clear as day, that it inevitably would be cancelled, but instead of taking the opportunity to gracefully cancel it themselves or use the time to start making alternate arrangements, they doubled down and had to be forced by the city to cancel and now have less than 1 week to figure out how to handle it. Not a good look.

From what I understand, they waited until the city of Austin ordered the event to be cancelled so they could collect insurance money.

https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2020-03-06/sxsw-c...

Looks like that was all just speculation and not true.

Didn't know this and this does shine a different light...

However, I'm guessing that it's better for the organizers to have the gov "pull the plug" than themselves since this will allow them to (potentially) renege on all the supplier contracts they must be have in order to put on such an event.

I'm pretty sure SXSW organizers are in direct contact with City officials.

Edit: Or indeed collect insurance as the other commenter points out

Based on their passive aggressive wording in SXSW's official announcement, it seems to me that SXSW did not want to cancel at all but are doing so reluctantly because they are being forced to by the city. That might just be a PR move, but personally I doubt it.

From what I've seen, the insurance thing is just a rumor/speculation going around reddit and Twitter. I haven't seen any official information about an insurance payout.

And you won’t. You can be sure lawyers and insurance companies were putting in long hours.

https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2020-03-06/sxsw-c...

Being Forced to Cancel by Gov Officials saves faces for everybody. The Hotels, Organisers, Participants, etc. And I am pretty sure there will be lots of interest from all parties involves, insurance is just one of them.

Everything else is just PR moves.

all such contracts have “force majeure” clauses so that’s not a problem.

I wonder how their contracts and/or insurance worked, e.g., if the organizers were hoping the city would step in and cancel as it would be financially better for the conference than if they voluntarily cancelled.

IANAL but probably. I saw some legal (by a lawyer) discussion of this the other day and his conclusion was that, while it depends on the specific contract, if you have no choice but to cancel something--the headliner band pulls out of a concert, the city makes you cancel for reasons outside your control--it's probably easier to collect than if you were just worried about going ahead with the event even in exceptional circumstances.

The latest episode of OA[1] has a segment that focuses on force majeure clauses and the enforceability of them around COVID-19

[1] https://openargs.com/oa366-your-guide-to-the-coronavirus/

A friend who is organising a large conference starting on Monday has told me that they can't cancel unless the venue or Government force them to as their insurance won't kick in and they'll be several million out of pocket. Many of the sponsors want to pull out and some have, but they don't get their money back for the same reason.

For those like myself wondering, this is close to a $400M revenue impact to Austin as a whole [1]. I expect rescheduling would only recover less than half of that, so it's no surprise it took them so long to make this decision.

[1] https://variety.com/2019/music/news/south-by-southwest-2019-...

It took a while to get there, but this is the right call. All the other big conferences have cancelled, holding this would have been terrible PR.

Question is: How far out does your conference have to be for you to not cancel right now?

I don't know, but I have to imagine the earlier you cancel the easier things are both financially and logistically.

Yep my friends are going to a music festival and late May with tens of thousands of people and I’m worried about that one. I feel like the epidemic will still be ongoing by then, but one hopes it isn’t.

New Orleans Jazz Fest is late April.

I just registered for AWS Reinforce (2 day security conference at the beginning of July). I did it feeling pretty good that the worst will have passed by then, but I'd lie if I said I felt 100% about it.

I'm going to put this comment out there and see how in fares in 10 months:

I think it's very likely what will happen with coronavirus is what happens with other pandemics: there are multiple phases, and the second phase is usually the worst. The initial phase usually isn't as severe; there are widespread measures to reduce the spread that bring numbers down after the initial onslaught, and it looks like coronavirus also has a seasonality factor that lessens its contagiousness during warmer months. Come next fall/winter, though, people have put their guard down and have somewhat of a "quarantine fatigue", and that's when the second wave just explodes as latent underlying cases spread extremely quickly.

I've been wondering about that too. I'm supposed to attend ng-conf from April 1st to 3rd.

Getting sick at conferences is so common that they have a phrase for it: "con flu". https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=con+flu. Glad this was cancelled, it would've been a bad outbreak.

I hear 'Con Crud' commonly used. Conferences are like speed dating with germs.

Meanwhile the City of Houston hasn't cancelled the huge rodeo and livestock show, with nightly concerts, that goes on through March 22

It really depends how many people are flying in from out of town for the event, otherwise the same logic leads to shutting down all schools and stores.

It's a show attended by 2.5 million people over 20 days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Livestock_Show_and_Rod... But it's already started so I guess it's happening.

We are starting to see COVID19 spread from those who haven't traveled recently.

https://www.businessinsider.com/four-us-coronavirus-cases-li...

The recent Houston area cases were from a group that traveled to Egypt recently; I'm sure at least one person in that group was interested in going to the rodeo, which averages about 2.5 million attending each year:

https://www.rodeohouston.com/About-Us/Who-We-Are/Attendance

... and we already have an increasing number (5+) of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the greater Houston area. I do wonder if we'll end up cancelling the Rodeo part way through.

No city wants to become the center of a health crisis. If they didn't cancel it there was going to be a shitstorm of bad press for the Austin leaders and the city in general. Millions of dollars will be lost, but the health of millions + the reputation of the city was at stake. That was the right call IMHO.

We have reserved a booth and planned to launch our SaaS product in SXSW. Hopefully they will refund. Probably a local positive coronavirus discovery forced the city. Just guessing.

My guess is they should and will, if not, call your credit card company and file a cancellation there for non-fulfillment of goods/services.

Edit: Sorry about your launch being cancelled, the Coronavirus is a bummer, but you/we are doing the right thing here in trying to curtail its reach.

Yes. We are fine with it. Correct decision by the city. Wish they could have done this little earlier. We would have saved some money - banners, t-shirts and other stuff.

More information from The Verge:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/6/21162247/sxsw-2020-cancell...

Last night my friend and I made the call to cancel our little trip focused on the film portion of the event for two reasons: 1. There is a lot of revelry in SXSW despite it being more of a conference than a festival and it did not seem appropriate to take part in that during a pandemic.

2. While we are both young-ish and healthy, it does not seem appropriate to participate in an event that would unquestionably increase the spread of COVID-19 knowing what it is doing to older folks.

Really, the city should have cancelled it days ago. It took all three major labels pulling out this morning to make this happen.

I believe the most substantial takeaway from the coronavirus so far has been how every government seems to be focused measures that support short term finances i.e. worker productivity and consumption rather than taking swift and far reaching measures to combat this virus.

That said, the next high-profile event I'm watching is Burning Man.

(comment copied from a duplicate post)

I thought the heat was supposed to kill the virus? Something the president mentioned, but sounds like they aren't 100% certain... Wonder if it got killed in the summer, if it'd come back in the winter again? Like a new flu?

It's spreading in Singapore, which doesn't have anything but heat. Average highs range from 86-90 year round.

Oh wow, that's disappointing. I was hoping once summer got here, it'd go away and people would forget about it. Sorta like Swine Flu, Zika and Ebola was supposed to kill us all but now we never hear about it.

Most Singapore buildings and its public transport system are fully A/C.

If scientists actually thought summer heat would kill the virus, that’d change.

Its disappointing, but at least sane.

There’s a great paper about the 1918 flu epidemic that shows how cities that continued on with things like mass gatherings saw a large uptick in deaths, while those that banned them and took other immediate interventions remained within the baseline.

https://www.pnas.org/content/104/18/7582

Tim Ferriss did a lot: https://twitter.com/tferriss/status/1234860126756012039

This seems pretty reasonable but I am curious for how long it will seem so, if we had better testing in place would it be better? If we had the vaccine (for sure) it would be better, but what do we as a society do in the interim.

Wow can't believe they actually did it

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