mattmaroon

Well, I don’t think I’ve gotten to mc-festival scale yet so I don’t know. I’ve got a few festivals in the 25k attendee range, which is big but I have vended at some that are and order of magnitude bigger. The biggest fest I do, Circleville Pumpkin Show, gets 400,000 people, is so old it had to skip a year for WWI, and is very much the opposite of a corporate festival.

But I’ve also done the MLB all-star game, and subcontracted through a few major f&b firms and those started off as corporate as they come.

I don’t think I’ve yet been involved in one that became corporate after starting off small but I’ll let you know if I get there.

Mine are food-focused.

It’s more than just that (though I’m sure that’s part of it).

The thing about festivals is they have real economies of scale. For instance sponsors value getting in front of 25,000 people really highly, but they don’t value a 2,500 person festival at all. (I’m speaking general audience, in some niches a high quality small crowd is still worth money.) The portapotties get cheaper when you’re ordering however many come on one truck. The dumpster and tent companies don’t charge you any more for a 3 day rental than a one day. Etc.

So to make the business model grow you grow the festival. But soon you’re running a big security budget, so you look around for who in your area does security fit really big events. There are two firms. Ok you pick one.

Now the city wants to talk about your sanitation plan. Ok who does sanitation as a service here? OK there’s one company. Who can provide me a few 40 yd dumpsters and retrieve them on Sunday night? Ok there are like two willing to do that. Who rents large tents that has a fire permit in your city and can bring out a forklift because we’re on hard surface so we need 500lb cement anchors according to my city fire department. Ok there’s one vendor.

How do I feed 25k people? Well who does f&b for large events. Oh there are a few and they’re bidding on me. Guess I’ll go with the highest bidder among the few big national f&b firms. (My festivals are food festivals and I can handle f&b for 25,000 eaters no problem because I have run many large food truck festivals and I know who is good but most promoters cannot tell the good food operators from the bad and there are so many of both.)

So what happens is you’ve got all these pieces and you get to a level where just practical reasons as well as municipality rules make you choose between a handful of basically interchangeable vendors. And those vendors all do a good job and aren’t price gouging (they’ve got plenty of labor cost too) but they kinda all look the same.

Interesting. I’ve been debating starting a social media channel teaching people how to do it.

Everyone does. That’s why publishers put care into cover art.

“I’ve come to believe that part of today’s problem of social alienation is a problem of too many free riders.”

I started planning street festivals a few years ago. It’s now a lucrative and growing business for me. The demand for events at all scales vastly outstrips supply, and I think growing social isolation is part of the reason.

The free riders might seem like a problem to someone who just wants there to be events, but it is a huge opportunity to us who throw them.

I assume that of all of them as a basic security precaution.

Fair point. But they still have more potential customers than any other individual ISP. Lack of potential customers is not their limiting factor.

Their potential customer base is literally everybody because they are the only ISP that can cover the entire globe. Everybody’s potential customer base is technically limited because there are only so many humans, but they have the least limited potential customer base of anything that exists.

It’s cute he thinks Jeff Bezos thinks about this. Whoever made this decision has probably never met anybody who has met Jeff Bezos.

Good old HN.

Me: they’re great but their tech sucks

You: their tech is good

Me: it can’t do basic stuff

You: ok you’re right but they’re great

I can tell you I’m a member of both, but I frequently let my Costco lapse but never Sam’s. Just because it isn’t killing the golden goose doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile to fix.

Ok, load the app and search for Heinz ketchup and tell me what it would cost to go get some in store.

You can’t. You can only get delivery pricing. They don’t have the basic functionality every store has had for a decade.

Go to self check-out and grab a scanner for your heavy items, which they sell many of. You can’t, they don’t have them, you have to wait for the attendant to get to you with it. (They’re generally good at their job but it’s still annoying if you’re in a rush.)

Sam’s Club is as good as it gets tech-wise, in-store and out. They even have AI that allows the exit door receipt checker to skip checking people so you don’t get stuck in a line waiting for someone to verify you paid for everything.

Costcos give a scanner to the person running the self checkouts, not to the customer, so you have to wait for them to come over. They are very attentive usually but still. (Perhaps this isn’t the case at all of them but I’ve seen it several times in various states.)

Their website/app makes it impossible to just see what’s in store at what price. Go search for coca cola and I see the price to have it delivered (much higher than in store) and a link to instacart. No pickup options or even prices.

On Sams Club’s website I can see that in store price and order it for pickup.

Again, Costco could keep the things we all like and just have basic 2018 functionality, it isn’t hard.

I bet you’re real fun at parties.

Costcos tech stack is frankly unconscionably bad. It’s the one way in which Sam’s Club crushes them.

There’s no reason they couldn’t do basically all of the good things mentioned in this article plus have a functional website, let me scan and pay with my phone in store, have a handheld scanner at each register, etc.

Came to say this, it would be hard to handicap this one. Shopping tends to be clustered, so if I’m methodical, I can go fill a car load with a lot of stuff and that might be more economical and environmentally friendly than the vans. But if I’m not, I could certainly see how it would be worse.

I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying it averages out to being better or worse.

If you don’t think fireworks are explosives you’re buying the wrong ones.

Right and my point is that whether or not it’s a bad investment makes absolutely no difference to the people who own the shares because the price is divorced from that. SpaceX shares only have to stay irrational for six months for this rule change to have had no effect.

2. You’re misreading that. They do it before the rebalance date, not before it is added to the index. Rebalances only happen every 3-6 months generally, so they definitely are buying it over a period of time, not all at once, specifically so they don’t move markets.

The aggressive ignorance (not my term, I’ve got a better one) is that multiple times this guy just didn’t even respond to the actual point. See his first response to me where he just restated the thing I was clearly replying to, rather than addressing my actual argument, which is that all those people would’ve ended up with the same amount of SpaceX shars at the same time, even if the rules had not changed. He just restated the argument I had already just rebutted, then he did the same thing in this branch.

It does not matter that SpaceX is in the index sooner. The future in six months or 12 months would look the same in either case.

Tesla’s P/E ratio is currently 365. They have less than 1% market share, and declining, weak profits, products that seem to be suffering from weak updates and brand harm due to Elon’s politics, and competitors outpacing them from all sides.

Toyota’s P/E is under ten. They’ll make more money selling cars this quarter than TSLA will in ten years.

TSLA prices have never been within an order of magnitude of reasonable. They’ve been publicly traded for so long that some of the people legally driving them weren’t born when they IPOed. They’re not a startup and haven’t been in a while.

The way you don’t actually address the points people make or even seem to understand them, but rather just keep restating what was already said, makes you a pretty good proxy for the exact view I was talking about, so thanks!

Everybody is upset about the rule change, but to be honest, they would’ve just ended up in the same position a few months later. Elon has kept Tesla’s market cap at 5-10x what any reasonable investor would think it should be for the better part of a decade. It’s not like SpaceX is going to tank in the next 3 months and they’ll be left holding the bag. It’s not like it wasn’t going to end up in every index in a year.

And to be clear, I’m not saying it’s a good thing. I just don’t think it matters so much.

AI has just made it worse, both directly (search doesn’t function like standard search anymore but also nowhere near ChatGPT) and by comparison.

I can go ask Gemini questions that require it to get information from several emails at once like “which x vendor had the lowest price”. Im assuming it can do the same with my texts or, if not yet, it will soon. I had zero such faith with Apple.

I will wait until the fall and see if this looks like the germ of something actually useful before deciding if I’m going to switch.

Yeah it went from bad to worse somehow.

I switched from android to iOS 7 years ago and I’ve actually been debating going back just because of how bad iOS is at AI. And every other facet of my life, I am finding ways for it to save my time on an almost daily basis. And yet on iOS, just finding something from a text Message is still a nightmare.

Siri seems to rarely get better and sometimes actually get worse.

I don’t think earnings have much to do with any of Elon’s projects’ market caps.

No.

Yeah I wouldn’t argue that it’s a good valuation but it may achieve it.

Oh I was wrong, they were forced to go public. At the time any company with $10 million in assets and 500 investors had to go public. Perhaps I misremember them trying to stay private and failing.

But the point remains, it would have been unheard of for a company 1/10 the market valuation of these companies to be private, so the public market is missing a lot of the growth phase now.

The index fund thing seems to me to be an overhyped nothingburger. The seasoning period would just delay the inevitable when a company is launching with a trillion dollar valuation.

The big story is that that is happening at all. It wasn’t that long ago when Facebook had to get special permission from the government to stay private until they got to $100 billion.

The issue here is that public investors are missing out on so much upside.