{"id":21766,"date":"2025-03-09T08:31:09","date_gmt":"2025-03-09T16:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=21766"},"modified":"2025-03-09T08:31:09","modified_gmt":"2025-03-09T16:31:09","slug":"big-doesnt-necessarily-mean-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2025\/03\/09\/big-doesnt-necessarily-mean-bad\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Doesn&#8217;t Necessarily Mean Bad"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Or nothing is forever&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>People have been e-mailing me this twenty minute anti-Vail YouTube video. Yeah! Let&#8217;s beat up on Vail! And while we&#8217;re at it, let&#8217;s beat up on Spotify! And Ticketmaster is why concert prices are so high!<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d say I sound like a Republican, but now the Republicans want to go back to the past just like these wanker Democrats.<\/p>\n<p>As for antitrust policy&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Have you used Google recently? Used to be you&#8217;d scroll down the page for an answer. Now AI generates one right up top and there&#8217;s no scrolling involved. And it&#8217;s getting damn good.<\/p>\n<p>And all those musicians who are starving, can&#8217;t we take care of them?<\/p>\n<p>I mean Trump is right when he talks about common sense.<\/p>\n<p>Skiing has never been cheaper.<\/p>\n<p>WHAT????<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s a fact. Equipment has not risen proportionately with inflation. Meanwhile, you can get a season pass for a multitude of ski areas for a grand.<\/p>\n<p>BUT YOU&#8217;RE PUTTING THE LITTLE GUY OUT OF BUSINESS!<\/p>\n<p>No, students of the game will know those areas were failing and closing long before the Epic and IKON passes. Why? BECAUSE PEOPLE WANTED TO GO TO THE BIG RESORTS!<\/p>\n<p>Where they complain about lines and then when you try to build a new lift they want to preserve the old days. Park City protested a new lift and Vail ended up moving it to Whistler. It was already built, ready to install&#8230;but Vail is the big bad wolf.<\/p>\n<p>Is Vail perfect?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve got complaints since Rob Katz handed over the CEO job to Kirsten Lynch, but&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Vail has invested heavily in lift infrastructure&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>BUT THE DAILY LIFT TICKET!<\/p>\n<p>Well, right now you can buy an Epic daily lift ticket for under a hundred bucks, as low as fifty in some instances. Sure, you have to buy it in advance (it&#8217;s not tied to a single day), but you have to buy concert tickets in advance&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>BUT REAL ESTATE, THEY&#8217;RE SQUEEZING OUT THE LITTLE PEOPLE!<\/p>\n<p>This is a problem, but it&#8217;s not Vail&#8217;s fault. As a matter of fact, Vail is the first ski conglomerate that is not real-estate based. You&#8217;ve got the same problem with Manhattan. Those with money buying up real estate. Address income inequality, don&#8217;t blame it on the wrong entity.<\/p>\n<p>But that&#8217;s America today. Misinformation.<\/p>\n<p>And everybody&#8217;s an expert. But the truth is there are people who&#8217;ve been in the trenches forever who know the truth and they&#8217;ve stopped fighting the falsehoods.<\/p>\n<p>Do you think Ticketmaster gets anxious with all this blowback? They know they&#8217;re taking the heat for the acts and they are the best at selling the most tickets simultaneously. And I doubt the antitrust suit is going to continue under Trump.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s what happens. The public is so out of touch that the targets of their hatred detach, they stop listening.<\/p>\n<p>You want change?<\/p>\n<p>Try to level the economic playing field of America.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s lower concert ticket prices! Leave all that cash to the secondary market! Or tie the ticket to the buyer who hates this, who wants flexibility\/the ability to resell.<\/p>\n<p>And Spotify! How dare you rescue the recording industry! All this b.s. about vinyl, it&#8217;s streaming that&#8217;s keeping the business alive and healthy, that caused a rebound.<\/p>\n<p>I got streamed and I made a pittance! Isn&#8217;t that terrible?<\/p>\n<p>Well, it&#8217;s just like the high daily prices of a lift ticket. You couldn&#8217;t plan in advance at all (very few people pay the daily rate, you can even buy online in advance during the season and get a discount)? You can&#8217;t make music people want to hear? This is kind of like Lake Wobegon&#8230;&#8221;where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of which, &#8220;A Prairie Home Companion&#8221; couldn&#8217;t survive without Garrison Keillor. They had to change the name and ultimately it got canceled. Shouldn&#8217;t Chris Thile be entitled to the same audience and the same compensation?<\/p>\n<p>This is the fallacious logic that has you demanding pay for artists whose music is not listened to.<\/p>\n<p>Once again, there are real problems in America. But when you pick the wrong target you ensure that nothing changes, because those with the ability to foment change ignore you.<\/p>\n<p>And change keeps happening. We thought Google search was forever&#8230;but now it doesn&#8217;t look that way. And if I want information on products I go to Amazon or the Wirecutter&#8230; Meanwhile, &#8220;Consumer Reports&#8221; is publishing less frequently, it&#8217;s fading.<\/p>\n<p>But no one can re-evaluate their beliefs. They feel one way. They want to be a member of the group, not the dreaded outlier.<\/p>\n<p>But not me.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Or nothing is forever&#8230; People have been e-mailing me this twenty minute anti-Vail YouTube video. Yeah! Let&#8217;s beat up on Vail! And while we&#8217;re at it, let&#8217;s beat up on Spotify! And Ticketmaster is why concert prices are so high! I&#8217;d say I sound like a Republican, but now the Republicans want to go back [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-5F4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21766"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21767,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21766\/revisions\/21767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}