littleJeck

I have a similar experience where I live. Taking a scooter only saved me a dollar or two on my trips over a ride share. It even took me longer to scoot over rather than what the ride share would typically take too, so it’s just really not worth it.

Also so many horrendous riders when I’m cycling in the road.

I could imagine the Dutch auction would only change the strategy of scalpers, besides being a massive money grab for artists, venues and ticket master.

The strategy for scalpers now appears to be get in as fast as possible and buy as many tickets as they can. But if we can assume the event will sellout completely and there is sufficient demand (e.g. Taylor Swift which I think I read would need to do 900 concerts to meet the initial demand) then scalpers could still win. Scalpers would just need to set a desired amount of tickets to buy and attempt to buy them at the last possible moment. They will get the tickets for the cheapest price for the event and could then sell them for a markup.

I think people would buy the scalpers tickets since they may have been waiting to see how low the prices can get, or they are able to obsess over remaining ticket numbers like a bot could and just missed out.

The only benefit I could see to the Dutch auction is it increases risk to scalpers by making them pay larger prices and get the last pick of seats, but only for events with allocated seats. So maybe instead of half the tickets for an event being scalped, they may only have the risk appetite for 10% of the tickets.

Australia has a few “major events” laws aimed at preventing the worse of scalping. They mostly require that any reselling not be more than a fixed percentage of the original resale price (I think it’s 20% from memory). While not perfect, it does prevent the insane ticket prices.

This is all managed through an offical resale partner with ticket tek and ticket master. You can only transfer tickets officially though the site, with options to do it for no (or low) charge if you’re sending it to a mate.

I’ve used the service quite a bit, picking up tickets on the day of an event. I’ve had some wins buying tickets for ~30% of the original price, but also plenty of times paying slightly over the original price or I’ve missed one event as there were no available tickets. It’s just something I’ve come to expect for the flexibility it provides.

I think the majority of people use this service rather than trying a third party as it’s official, easy for the seller and no one wants to support insane scalpers.

The only problem I’ve seen with the system is events can elect to not allow reselling on the platform till the event is sold out. This can prevent people recouping their losses if they can’t attend the event, and stops me from potentially getting a small deal.

In Australia we can use a phone number or email address to transfer money. It’s near instant transfer and even comes up with the full name of the person you’re sending money to.

Little cumbersome since I never bothered to get peoples phone numbers till recently.

> Now I²C is a particularly sloppy protocol

I know this pain as an embedded software monkey. So many edge cases unthought of and no method to gracefully fail. Not to mention you always find some fault with the I²C implementation on the SOC or slave device you want to talk to.

I’ve spent weeks debugging bus lockup problems only to find erratas for the silicon, or find this particular chip needs an extra 100ms to startup than others.

It’s the one communication protocol that o always have problems with. Nothing else has caused me as many headaches.