Interesting Links for 29-02-2012

[andrewducker]

• India is having a bumpy journey towards legalising homosexual relationships
  (tags: lgbt india )
• Cineworld installing vibrating seats. Would go well with porn, methinks.
  (tags: movies technology )
• Is this the most biased opinion poll question ever asked?
  (tags: lgbt polls opinion bias )
• The Great Ticket Scandal - many concert tickets go directly to resellers for a huge markup bypassing fans entirely
  (tags: music concerts fraud business )
• On Scotland being forced to join the Euro (it can't be)
  (tags: europe euro money scotland independence )
• EU law will not allow Scotland to be excluded just because it's not part of the UK any more.
  (tags: europe eu scotland independence )
• Who owns The Bank Of England?
  (tags: uk scotland banking indepdence )
• A chance in a generation to modernise the Lords
  (tags: uk politics democracy )
• Key SOPA/PIPA Post Censored By Bogus DMCA Takedown Notice
  (tags: censorship copyright law usa )
• Can Scotland be independent and keep sterling?
  Personally, I'm actually leaning towards having our unique currency. I suspect we'd drop by a bit, making us more competitive.
  (tags: currency money uk scotland independence )
• Men and women respond differently to stress
  (tags: stress gender psychology )
• KLM links Facebook to seat booking, making it even easier to sit next to tall blondes. Hurrah for in-air stalking!
  (tags: airplanes facebook socialnetworking )
• Against Big Bird, The Gods Themselves Contend In Vain
  (tags: religion egypt muppets )
• Labour set to back Lords Reform
  (tags: lords politics democracy uk )

Comments

[miss_s_b]

Bugger porn, we're SO ripe for a rerelease of The Tingler!

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think the most biased opinion poll ever would be:

Which statement do you think is the most accurate?
1) ...something about gay marriage...
OR
2) rabbits are over 50 feet tall and can secretly breathe fire

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

I absolutely think that an independent Scotland should have its own freely-floating currency.

Shared currencies and fixed currencies work when economic conditions are pretty much the same in the two economies, or when one economy is so small and so dependent upon the larger economy that lots of transactions would be carried out in the larger country's currency anyway.*

So would Scotland and England/Wales/Ulster be closely related economies with very similar conditions? Maybe at first, but after a few years of different tax policies and perhaps more importantly, oil price changes, they really wouldn't.


* Which is why some tiny Pacific Islands use the US dollar.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Women feel pain more than men, and also have more pain. As usual with such articles, there's nothing about the size of the difference between the genders, or how much of an overlap there is.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

That poll question makes me want to scream. The only saving grace is that I think they are only resorting to such tactics because they already know they have lost the argument.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I can’t get too excited about ticket touts re-selling tickets that they have bought for more money than they paid for them. Unless I can see evidence of a cartel. I can get pretty excited about people demanding that the free behaviour of strangers be regulated so that they don’t have to pay more to go and see a band.

No one is forced to buy tickets for events. The market strikes me as pretty open. It’s relatively easy to put on an event. There’s a lot of choice.

Large scale ticket touts can lose money. They are taking an punt on a market just like any organsiation whose principal business is to buy in bulk and then sell retail.

They provide some elements of service to people looking for tickets. I suspect they also provide a degree of credit to event organisers and take on some of the financial risk by buying at a fixed price and selling at market derived price.

(I would bet a small amount of money that the number of tickets * the price of the tickets sold to large scale touts approximately = the fixed cost of putting on the event. A question to ponder is who is best placed to bear the financial risk of movements in the market price of / demand for tickets. A firm who is good at combining venues, bands and stage crew or one who is good at trading tickets?)

What seems to be going is that people are confusing a number printed on the ticket (the face price) with what the ticket ought to be worth to people they don’t know.

I’d rather see the event organiser auction them. (But then they may decide that they would rather a high probability of a modest profit than the low probability of a large profit or a large loss.)

I’d like to see a co-op site set up to do low cost genuine fan-to-fan re-selling. But then I’m all about “to the worker, the just fruits of their labours.”

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Men and women respond differently to stress

The rest of the article was a bit surprising (about how stressed people view the upsides of issues more strongly than the downsides), but that bit was fairly obvious, at least how it was described looks exactly like the differences you'd expect between individuals who expect to be able to control their own destiny and those who expect to have to rely upon others - in short a fairly good reflection of societal expectations, and yet another aspect of how steroetyoically "feminine" behavior is more accurately described as the behavior of people who lack or at least do not expect to have economic and social power.