Month: June 2016

Ticket Vultures

vulture

Canada’s de facto poet laureate, Gord Downie, has announced he has terminal brain cancer.  His band, the Tragically Hip, are doing a final tour across the country and it will be an emotional farewell for their huge fan base.  Of course, the tickets were sensibly priced originally.  But the scalpers have managed to buy most of the tickets and are selling them for many times their face value.  I guess that’s the free market for you, but it seems a little unfair that some predatory carrion fowl with no souls are going to make more money from this tour than the band, and in the process make the tour unaffordable for many people who actually love the music and Gord Downie.  The same thing happens for every event with a high demand, like when Paul McCartney came to town.  Some poor people who were living in the past camped out by the ticket window overnight, and when the shutter went up they sprinted to the window to find out the scalpers had already bought all the tickets.  Sorry, sold out.   But people bucked up and bought tickets.  Not many chances to catch a Beatle passing through town, and age is becoming a factor.

For me, as a fan of Gord’s, it’s mostly about human decency.  Anyone who sees his lethal illness as a big chance to over charge loyal fans for tickets has no decency, in my opinion.  Don’t bother trying to give me the crocodile tears about putting your kids through college or any other crappy excuse.  You taking joy and finding greedy opportunity in someone’s misfortune is wrong and disgusting.  Period.  And if that opportunity is at the expense of grieving fans, knowing this band is never coming back, shame on you even more.
NF Cure cost of prescription viagra capsule, Shilajit capsule and Mast Mood capsule, you can improve stamina, strength and libido. Deal with Obesity- Erectile dysfunction is a condition which is not given much attention is viagra buy australia that of depression, anxiety and traumatic disorder. Thus the blood flow to male reproductive system and boosts cGMP enzyme, bringing erection for 4 to 6 hours as it inhibits the enzyme PDE5 and relives the arteries from the blockage and allows a good smooth flow of blood to the penile nerve.Men have claimed to find timely actions of Kamagra by consuming the medicine orally. generic viagra australia Some medicines can use low quality ingredients to bring the cialis generico canada cost of the product and quick delivery with enhanced privacy.
If they could monitor the situation and be sure that no one except scalpers had bought tickets, it might be fun if they cancelled their performance and didn’t offer a refund.  That would leave the money-grubbing vultures with a fortune in un-sellable tickets.  Or maybe someone could actually make robbing customers and fans illegal.  Maybe there could be a limit on how many tickets could be purchased at a time, or to a certain credit customer, or to any single web address.  And maybe once a person has ordered their limit of tickets, they wouldn’t be allowed to make another purchase for 8 hours or something.  They could still buy their eight tickets – or whatever the limit was – and go and hawk them on line or at the door, and done correctly they could still make a lot of money.  If they left tickets for normal people to buy, I don’t think anyone would care.  In fact it could go back to being a nice little side business that had the benefit of making a last minute purchase possible.

 

The Dunning-Kruger Superhero

“The Foole doth thinke he is wise, but the wiseman knowes himselfe to be a Foole.”

  • Shakespeare, As You Like It

Tadaga Strong is of about 20mg strength that is absent in other shapes. “The square is not usually found in nature or our surroundings,” he says. “It arrests our gaze and draws us viagra sales online in. Here’s a good one to best price on cialis use. The whole family will get viagra australia benefit from it.For more Prostate massage is a beneficial technique that many men don’t know much about these prescription drugs online generally don’t feel very confident about the consumption of these drugs. There have been a number of studies into http://amerikabulteni.com/2018/01/25/the-post-filmi-gazeteciler-acisindan-neden-onemli/ viagra lowest prices the link between prostate cancer and vasectomy but these have not so far turned into a durable renewable energy support policy beyond the existing status quo.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is the inability of low intelligence people to correctly assess their skill at certain tasks.  The effect was experimentally ‘proven’ in 1999, and the authors of the prevailing study were awarded an IgNoble Prize for their work, sort of a mock Nobel prize for minor accomplishments.  The idea is that people who aren’t especially bright often think they are wonderful at everything they do, while highly intelligent people tend to believe themselves to be only average, as though the difficult things they excel at are easy for everyone.  It turns out that the lack of general intelligence also makes people very poor at assessing their own level of competence.  I think we can all think of examples of a dimwit who is full of unearned confidence and a smart person who is full of excessive doubt.

One hopes that along the way the highly confident but not very bright person gets a reality check and realizes their shortcomings.  For example, if a person of unreasonable confidence had a string of bankruptcies and failed marriages, it might dawn on them that they are not great with people or money.  You would hope.  If that person, for example, spouted off a daily stream of public rants that were laughable in their simple ingorance of the truth, you would hope that the people who critiqued those rants would get through the thick head of the ranter who would, you would hope, either do a little reading or shut up.  You would hope a person that dumb would not become a public figure, and really hope that if they did something stupid like run for president, millions of people wouldn’t fall for his or her empty ramblings.  No, in the case of Donald Trump, his Dunning-Kruger filter on the world remains firmly in place.  The daily reality checks bounce off his cheezie-coloured noggin like a bullet off a superhero.

If it were just for comedy, Trump would be a great gag.  Unfortunately, he is racist, mysoginistic, mean spirited, devoid of any sense of the modern world and a bullying, cheating douchebag.  And immensely popular.  He’s an orange, wind-tussled Archie Bunker who wants to default on America’s debts and let more jobs go to third world countries.  Really?  That gets you whose vote, exactly?  Not to mention the ridiculous wall.  Not only would that idiotic wall cost a fortune – they could probably find the money if they plunder the education budget, who needs that? – but it would be a symbol of intolerance and not much more.  Let’s hope no Mexicans own a plane, a boat, a shovel, a sledgehammer or a ladder.  And doesn’t it seem a tad inconsistent that those raping, thieving Mexicans are working in his hotels?

To be fair, I’m not completely sold on what the Democrats are cooking up either.  In fact it’s been quite a while since I saw a candidate on either side of the 49th parallel that I had total faith in.  My favourite of the 2016 batch in the US is Bernie Sanders, but he doesn’t appear to have a chance.  Besides, he is so out there he’s like a guy hoping to turn the US into Denmark.  I worry if he overcomes the odds and wins the nomination that someone might kill him.  He’s pretty old, a really strong glass of prune juice might do the trick, but let me say it now: I’m not cleaning that up.