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Comment by jppittma | Hacker News Reader

Do fan-club registration in person.

Run it like an airline, where your name is on the ticket and you don't get in unless it matches your ID. Either that or your ID is the ticket. Just bloop that big barcode on the back of your ID with your phone when you buy the admission, then let the guy bloop it again at the door when you go to the show. That would make some scenarios harder, like the trope about your boss handing you two extra tickets she can't use, but there's probably some way to bloop around that without giving the scalpers unfettered bloops.

The downsides for ID-verified entry are shared with ID-required voting.

Namely, if you are aware of intergroup variability in ID-having rates, is choosing it anyways a conscious discriminatory choice?

1/ attending a concert is not a civil right 2/ can't emphasize enough, but _get an ID_. While ID posession was used to discriminate against groups of people, the real problem here is "why doesn't everyone have an ID"?

Right, but I didn't say that attending a concert is a civil right. I also didn't say what the real problem was.

What I brought up was, knowing this, is still using ID discriminatory?

Is it? In the US, I'm not aware of any way someone can legally drive, be employed, have a bank account, or get a cell phone without having an ID. At the same time, as long as you were registered at birth, getting an ID from scratch is a little bit of legwork and probably less than $100, and that's probably subsidized if you don't have income. The number of people walking around without an ID and no way to get one has to be vanishingly small. I'm sure there's a certain fringe of people who are undocumented, on the run from the law, or otherwise encumbered in their ability to get one, but how far should we bend over to get a ticket fee from those people?

Edit: Dang it, the best answers always come after I close my laptop. "It would be discriminatory if the government didn't provide people a way to get ID. As a business owner, that's beyond the scope of my responsibility. Same as if someone showed up without $5 and wanted to buy a sandwich." ...is another way to look at it.

Who knows, if voting doesn’t motivate them, but concerts do, maybe it will cause more people to get IDs. Isn’t that a good thing?

Then they just pay homeless people to register. Whatever clever you can come up with, they will figure out a way around it.

They're going to pay thousands of homeless people to register for the fan clubs of how many artists? Nevermind the logistics of the hiring, the payment alone eats into the margin.

When you're rich, you can do that. Being rich, by definition, means having more options available to you.

That's really what money is - a transferable token to persuade other people to do stuff on your behalf.

If the scalpers pay homeless people 10% of their profits rather than taking 100% then that's still better than the current situation.

This gets more complicated as they may go after gig economy workers first. They're a perfect target: the scalper's deal would have better reward/effort ratio than Uber, DoorDash, Deliveroo, et al.; gig workers look "normal" in ways homeless don't, and are desperate for cash to keep them from becoming homeless.

At that point, would scalper's contribution be net positive? Net better than it was? I'm not sure how to answer that.

Thats ok as long as those homeless will show up with a ticked and ID at the gate to enter the concert.

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