Kurt Pankau Dot Com

🍿 There'll Be No More Tears In Heaven... Yesterday AMC Theaters announced that it was going to introduce tiered pricing based on seating for their movie showings that took place after 4 P.M. Most tickets would remain the same price, but the front row would be reduced and some of the more sought after seats in the middle would be raised. The average ticket price would go down, but negligibly. Now, as someone with a degree in Economics, I think this makes a lot of sense. AMC already does some price discrimination with show times and their Stubs memberships, and now that theaters have mostly embraced assigned seating, something like this was going to come down the pike sooner or later. Because the simple fact is that some seats are more valuable than others--as any concert goer can attest. So, from an economic perspective, this is a smart move for the theater and one that doesn't hurt movie-goers. The internet, however, lost its collective shit. Arguments vary. One I frequently h...

👔 I Owe My Soul to the Company Store... There's a phrase that gets bandied about in center-left socioeconomic discourse: "There is no ethical consumption under Capitalism." It's an expression of frustration--and often outright dismissal--at one's inability to make sound ethical consumer decisions due to a lack of choices provided by the market. It's a popular enough sentiment that the better part of the third season of The Good Place  was dedicated to it. And it stems from a real dilemma. Most people are basically good most of the time, but we live in a society that inhibits us from acting on our goodness. Nobody goes to the store thinking "Imma exploit me some Indonesian child labor!" We just want a good deal on tennis shoes. So with this essay I would like to explore some of the mechanisms behind this dilemma and relate it to our current political climate and perhaps point out some very obvious solutions. First a little groundwork. The term "...

💱 We are the dollars and cents and the pounds and pence... So the cryptocurrency market appears to have mostly crashed-- thank farking gourd! I'm taking for granted that crypto and NFTs are almost* all scams, and if you're unsure of why I would think that, I will point you to the definitive explainer on the subject: Dan Olson's sublime video essay Line Goes Up: The Problem with NFTs . * The token counter-example is HNT, which is used to create a market for bandwidth on the Helium network--that is, it's actually being used as a currency rather than purely speculation. Instead of going into the details of why it's a scam, I instead want to talk about why scams like this arise in the first place and why we're inevitably going to see more of them. So strap in, because this is a long one. Actually I'll just skip to the end here: rich people are hoarding too much wealth. That's the cause. That's it. With the corollary that rich people--or hell,  most  pe...