#so many companies are monopolies

[ghwosty]

I just think it's good to occasionally remind people what the word monopoly means. No reason..

[pharawee]

Studio Wabi Sabi announced today that they will close down their artist management department and from now on focus on production.

Artist management will continue as usual until the end of established contracts (and there's currently a lot of artists on Wabi Sabi's roster ... they haven't even updated their website yet).

Several artists have already terminated their contracts and jumped ship over to gmmtv:

I don't know what this means for... literally all of my faves (who are at this point still with Wabi Sabi) but I hope Bas, Earth, Benz, Art, Tor and Oat will quickly find new managements too. Bas doen't even have one (1) finished Wabi Sabi Project under his belt (the Fourever Project pilot trailer not counting). 😭

[inkykeiji]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cpdb0_EKiK1/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

oh my god the actual love of my LIFE my #1 Daddy my Original Daddy <33333 ughhhhhhhh watching this makes me so fucking angry n upset at disney for what they did with the sequel trilogy though because it completely shits all over anakin as a character, like it's fucking disrespectful to him and his story. it voids all of his actions, it makes his death all for naught. fuck disney.

[pagesofkenna]

literally none of these comments are actually engaging with the actual point the original OP was making, which is that 5e (a product owned by the Hasbro company) isn't the thing that facilitates great improvised stories and roleplay with no need for combat: it's skilled game masters who do that

I generally love Brennan but he went on this baffling rant in a fireside episode of the Worlds Beyond Numbers podcast about how he likes 5e because it has a great social system that doesn't get in the way of the kind of story he wants to tell—which is really only possible because, as an experienced improvisor and storyteller, he has made the executive decision to ignore almost the entire 5e product, using only a relatively small aspect of it for that game (basic character building plus skill checks). and that's fine! it's like playing a homebrew boardgame using a chess set, which honestly sounds really fun and i might design that!

but my main point here is that combat is baked into the 5e product. character creation and advancement revolves around combat. the ruleset was balanced for combat (i.e., the character classes are intended to be equally useful in combat). the first two arcs of the Worlds Beyond Number podcast have leveled the characters up to... 2? because combat utility (i.e. character advancement) is so unimportant to the 5e product when you're not doing the thing it's primarily designed to do, i.e. combat

If you have a hard time improvising low-combat games in 5e, using pre-written modules can be great to get you to understand how to incorporate combat better; what they're generally not going to do is help you learn how to run a high-roleplay low-combat game (though some materials, generally not the ones commissioned by Hasbro, can!)

there are, on the other hand, other products that are designed to help game masters run high-roleplay low-combat games! this is the what all those annoying 'try something besides dnd!' people are trying to say: it's not 'dnd sucks' but 'these other games are good at other things, and will help you figure out how to do those things better than trying to force them into dnd will'

if you don't mind running combat and the 5e product is working fine for you, great! to extend the original OP's metaphor, it's one recipe and maybe it's a recipe you really like. but if you're trying to avoid meat, taking a meat recipe and just not using meat won't yield the same kind of results as trying out a new vegetarian recipe

Op disabled rbs but they’re right and more people need to read this a few times over

[transhuman-priestess]

“wait, the calculator company makes bombs now?”

No, the bomb company made so many bomb microchips they were able to flood the calculator market and then drive prices up because they have a monopoly.

[hashtagloveloses]

so you’re saying half the world was shut down by too many companies using 1 single company’s software so that when it pushed out a faulty update it shut everything down bc of a monopoly. and the update was shoddy because the company, much like a lot of tech companies, tried to replace human workers with bullshit generative AI

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #19

May 17-24 2024

President Biden wiped out the student loan debt of 160,000 more Americans. This debt cancellation of 7.7 billion dollars brings the total student loan debt relieved by the Biden Administration to $167 billion. The Administration has canceled student loan debt for 4.75 million Americans so far. The 160,000 borrowers forgiven this week owned an average of $35,000 each and are now debt free. The Administration announced plans last month to bring debt forgiveness to 30 million Americans with student loans coming this fall.

The Department of Justice announced it is suing Ticketmaster for being a monopoly. DoJ is suing Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation for monopolistic practices. Ticketmaster controls 70% of the live show ticket market leading to skyrocketing prices, hidden fees and last minute cancellation. The Justice Department is seeking to break up Live Nation and help bring competition back into the market. This is one of a number of monopoly law suits brought by the Biden administration against Apple in March and Amazon in September 2023.

The EPA announced $225 million in new funding to improve drinking and wastewater for tribal communities. The money will go to tribes in the mainland US as well as Alaska Native Villages. It'll help with testing for forever chemicals, and replacing of lead pipes as well as sustainability projects.

The EPA announced $300 million in grants to clean up former industrial sites. Known as "Brownfield" sites these former industrial sites are to be cleaned and redeveloped into community assets. The money will fund 200 projects across 178 communities. One such project will transform a former oil station in Philadelphia’s Kingsessing neighborhood, currently polluted with lead and other toxins into a waterfront bike trail.

The Department of Agriculture announced a historic expansion of its program to feed low income kids over the summer holidays. Since the 1960s the SUN Meals have served in person meals at schools and community centers during the summer holidays to low income children. This Year the Biden administration is rolling out SUN Bucks, a $120 per child grocery benefit. This benefit has been rejected by many Republican governors but in the states that will take part 21 million kids will benefit. Last year the Biden administration introduced SUN Meals To-Go, offering pick-up and delivery options expanding SUN's reach into rural communities. These expansions are part of the Biden administration's plan to end hunger and reduce diet-related disease by 2030.

Vice-President Harris builds on her work in Africa to announce a plan to give 80% of Africa internet access by 2030, up from just 40% today. This push builds off efforts Harris has spearheaded since her trip to Africa in 2023, including $7 billion in climate adaptation, resilience, and mitigation, and $1 billion to empower women. The public-private partnership between the African Development Bank Group and Mastercard plans to bring internet access to 3 million farmers in Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria, before expanding to Uganda, Ethiopia, and Ghana, and then the rest of the continent, bring internet to 100 million people and businesses over the next 10 years. This is together with the work of Partnership for Digital Access in Africa which is hoping to bring internet access to 80% of Africans by 2030, up from 40% now, and just 30% of women on the continent. The Vice-President also announced $1 billion for the Women in the Digital Economy Fund to assure women in Africa have meaningful access to the internet and its economic opportunities.

The Senate approved Seth Aframe to be a Judge on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, it also approved Krissa Lanham, and Angela Martinez to district Judgeships in Arizona, as well as Dena Coggins to a district court seat in California. Bring the total number of judges appointed by President Biden to 201. Biden's Judges have been historically diverse. 64% of them are women and 62% of them are people of color. President Biden has appointed more black women to federal judgeships, more Hispanic judges and more Asian American judges and more LGBT judges than any other President, including Obama's full 8 years in office. President Biden has also focused on backgrounds appointing a record breaking number of former public defenders to judgeships, as well as labor and civil rights lawyers.

[corellianhounds]

One of the biggest failings of more and more Star Wars live action shows is that they fail to take into consideration the implications and consequences of a lot of things, and we end up not having a cohesive sense of cause and effect, or the cause and effect is strange or contradictory. It really just boils down to bad writing.

Boba Fett is in a sedentary location going by his own name, wearing his original armor and flying his original ship, and he’s making no effort to hide himself. He took over one of the most infamous locations in Hutt Space and staked his claim to it. It’s incredibly easy for people to find him, and that includes who-knows-how-many hundreds of past enemies with a bone to pick with him

Fennec may feel compelled to assist him because he saved her life, but that debt isn’t one she has to be happy about, especially considering he IS remaining sedentary rather than staying on the move. Their location is conspicuous and they both have histories and reputations of working for the Hutts, a clan of crime lords known for subjugating and targeting the people of Tatooine specifically. They are incredibly easy to find and are sitting ducks for anybody that might take issue with their presence, especially if Boba Fett straight up says he’s a crime lord (which is a separate complaint I have in itself)

Not only are they sedentary, but Fennec is in all black under two stark Tatooine suns. It’s impractical AND it’s conspicuous, AND they keep taking off their helmets to talk to people and introducing themselves by name and reputation. Boba using his name and armor and reputation makes theatrical sense (though he shouldn’t have been taking his helmet off at all), he’s showing that it’s really him and he really is back from the dead, but Fennec was a sniper and an assassin, both occupations of people known for doing dirty work from afar and living their lives in secret from the shadows. How much MORE of a target can you paint on your backs??

The archetype of the assassin/ninja that Fennec falls under has been historically depicted in all black for theatricality’s sake, but smart criminals whose modus operandi is stealth aren’t going to be dressed in anything that sticks out— They’re going to be dressed like common folk. They’re especially not going to reveal their faces in conjunction with their names. Boba logically should never have shown any of the cards in his hand to anybody, and Fennec should have never shown her face in public unless she was in plainclothes and disguised on whatever stealth/spy/recon Boba needed her for. Keep her as the arrow in your quiver as hidden as you can, and only have her dressed in the all black for night missions or open combat where her cover has already been compromised. You’d think a media company known for how much value they place on merchandising would have come up with some more costume designs for her this season.

Everything the writers had Boba’s character do makes her a target. They don’t have an army within the palace walls ready and able to back them up. They’re two people. They have one droid and two Gamorrean guards, and that’s it. Why are you going around town with your guns in hand saying who you are and what you’re known for doing if not for it to be an intimidation tactic and to draw attention to yourselves? You don’t have the manpower or firepower to back you up, so yeah it’s no wonder everyone and their mom tries to pick a fight with you. You either explicitly invited that conflict on purpose (which as a writing choice was stupid to have either of these characters do), or you did it precisely to be an intimidation tactic (in which case nobody has reason to respect you despite the fact you didn’t want to “lead through fear”), or the writers screwed up and wrote your character without any thought beyond what they thought might be “cool,” making you one of the dumbest criminal in Star Wars, all things considered

You have the audacity to swagger around town making sure everyone knows who’s in charge and claim you’re there to “rule with respect”? Rule WHAT? You said yourself you’re a crime lord, ergo the people you’re ruling are CRIMINALS. Why should any of these common folk like or respect you? Why would they at all think you care for their well-being? They are the exact people who are going to be the most affected by whatever reign of terror you blatantly implied you were going to impose over them. The writers making Boba a crime lord and then trying to make him seem like a hero for the little people is stupidly contradictory, and every action they had him take made him seem inept at BEST because everything he does isn’t deliberate or thought-out.

These actions and these lines of dialogue actually have to mean things, and to not even take a cursory glance over what your characters are doing or what their motives are for doing them is amateur writing at best. So you wrote some scripts. So what. The story is terribly told and these characters and the show deserved better.

If you want to establish a reputation as a peaceful leader ruling through respect (and also keep your armed resources on a need-to-know basis) you don’t introduce your dressed-like-a-ninja lieutenant in the first place, and you definitely don’t introduce her as “Master Assassin Fennec Shand” by name.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What the fuck is a PBM?

TOMORROW (Sept 24), I'll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!

Terminal-stage capitalism owes its long senescence to its many defensive mechanisms, and it's only by defeating these that we can put it out of its misery. "The Shield of Boringness" is one of the necrocapitalist's most effective defenses, so it behooves us to attack it head-on.

The Shield of Boringness is Dana Claire's extremely useful term for anything so dull that you simply can't hold any conception of it in your mind for any length of time. In the finance sector, they call this "MEGO," which stands for "My Eyes Glaze Over," a term of art for financial arrangements made so performatively complex that only the most exquisitely melted brain-geniuses can hope to unravel their spaghetti logic. The rest of us are meant to simply heft those thick, dense prospectuses in two hands, shrug, and assume, "a pile of shit this big must have a pony under it."

MEGO and its Shield of Boringness are key to all of terminal-stage capitalism's stupidest scams. Cloaking obvious swindles in a lot of complex language and Byzantine payment schemes can make them seem respectable just long enough for the scammers to relieve you of all your inconvenient cash and assets, though, eventually, you're bound to notice that something is missing.

If you spent the years leading up to the Great Financial Crisis baffled by "CDOs," "synthetic CDOs," "ARMs" and other swindler nonsense, you experienced the Shield of Boringness. If you bet your house and/or your retirement savings on these things, you experienced MEGO. If, after the bubble popped, you finally came to understand that these "exotic financial instruments" were just scams, you experienced Stein's Law ("anything that can't go forever eventually stops"). If today you no longer remember what a CDO is, you are once again experiencing the Shield of Boringness.

As bad as 2008 was, it wasn't even close to the end of terminal stage capitalism. The market has soldiered on, with complex swindles like carbon offset trading, metaverse, cryptocurrency, financialized solar installation, and (of course) AI. In addition to these new swindles, we're still playing the hits, finding new ways to make the worst scams of the 2000s even worse.

That brings me to the American health industry, and the absurdly complex, ridiculously corrupt Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), a pathology that has only metastasized since 2008.

On at least 20 separate occasions, I have taken it upon myself to figure out how the PBM swindle works, and nevertheless, every time they come up, I have to go back and figure it out again, because PBMs have the most powerful Shield of Boringness out of the whole Monster Manual of terminal-stage capitalism's trash mobs.

PBMs are back in the news because the FTC is now suing the largest of these for their role in ripping off diabetics with sky-high insulin prices. This has kicked off a fresh round of "what the fuck is a PBM, anyway?" explainers of extremely variable quality. Unsurprisingly, the best of these comes from Matt Stoller:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-lina-khan-pharma

Stoller starts by pointing out that Americans have a proud tradition of getting phucked by pharma companies. As far back as the 1950s, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver was holding hearings on the scams that pharma companies were using to ensure that Americans paid more for their pills than virtually anyone else in the world.

But since the 2010s, Americans have found themselves paying eye-popping, sky-high, ridiculous drug prices. Eli Lilly's Humolog insulin sold for $21 in 1999; by 2017, the price was $274 – a 1,200% increase! This isn't your grampa's price gouging!

Where do these absurd prices come from? The story starts in the 2000s, when the GW Bush administration encouraged health insurers to create "high deductible" plans, where patients were expected to pay out of pocket for receiving care, until they hit a multi-thousand-dollar threshold, and then their insurance would kick in. Along with "co-pays" and other junk fees, these deductibles were called "cost sharing," and they were sold as a way to prevent the "abuse" of the health care system.

The economists who crafted terminal-stage capitalism's intellectual rationalizations claimed the reason Americans paid so much more for health care than their socialized-medicine using cousins in the rest of the world had nothing to do with the fact that America treats health as a source of profits, while the rest of the world treats health as a human right.

No, the actual root of America's health industry's problems was the moral defects of Americans. Because insured Americans could just go see the doctor whenever they felt like it, they had no incentive to minimize their use of the system. Any time one of these unhinged hypochondriacs got a little sniffle, they could treat themselves to a doctor's visit, enjoying those waiting-room magazines and the pleasure of arranging a sick day with HR, without bearing any of the true costs:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/27/the-doctrine-of-moral-hazard/

"Cost sharing" was supposed to create "skin in the game" for every insured American, creating a little pain-point that stung you every time you thought about treating yourself to a luxurious doctor's visit. Now, these payments bit hardest on the poorest workers, because if you're making minimum wage, at $10 co-pay hurts a lot more than it does if you're making six figures. What's more, VPs and the C-suite were offered "gold-plated" plans with low/no deductibles or co-pays, because executives understand the value of a dollar in the way that mere working slobs can't ever hope to comprehend. They can be trusted to only use the doctor when it's truly warranted.

So now you have these high-deductible plans creeping into every workplace. Then along comes Obama and the Affordable Care Act, a compromise that maintains health care as a for-profit enterprise (still not a human right!) but seeks to create universal coverage by requiring every American to buy a plan, requiring insurers to offer plans to every American, and uses public money to subsidize the for-profit health industry to glue it together.

Predictably, the cheapest insurance offered on the Obamacare exchanges – and ultimately, by employers – had sky-high deductibles and co-pays. That way, insurers could pocket a fat public subsidy, offer an "insurance" plan that was cheap enough for even the most marginally employed people to afford, but still offer no coverage until their customers had spent thousands of dollars out-of-pocket in a given year.

That's the background: GWB created high-deductible plans, Obama supercharged them. Keep that in your mind as we go through the MEGO procedures of the PBM sector.

Your insurer has a list of drugs they'll cover, called the "formulary." The formulary also specifies how much the insurance company is willing to pay your pharmacist for these drugs. Creating the formulary and paying pharmacies for dispensing drugs is a lot of tedious work, and insurance outsources this to third parties, called – wait for it – Pharmacy Benefits Managers.

The prices in the formulary the PBM prepares for your insurance company are called the "list prices." These are meant to represent the "sticker price" of the drug, what a pharmacist would charge you if you wandered in off the street with no insurance, but somehow in possession of a valid prescription.

But, as Stoller writes, these "list prices" aren't actually ever charged to anyone. The list price is like the "full price" on the pricetags at a discount furniture place where everything is always "on sale" at 50% off – and whose semi-disposable sofas and balsa-wood dining room chairs are never actually sold at full price.

One theoretical advantage of a PBM is that it can get lower prices because it bargains for all the people in a given insurer's plan. If you're the pharma giant Sanofi and you want your Lantus insulin to be available to any of the people who must use OptumRX's formulary, you have to convince OptumRX to include you in that formulary.

OptumRX – like all PBMs – demands "rebates" from pharma companies if they want to be included in the formulary. On its face, this is similar to the practices of, say, NICE – the UK agency that bargains for medicine on behalf of the NHS, which also bargains with pharma companies for access to everyone in the UK and gets very good deals as a result.

But OptumRX doesn't bargain for a lower list price. They bargain for a bigger rebate. That means that the "price" is still very high, but OptumRX ends up paying a tiny fraction of it, thanks to that rebate. In the OptumRX formulary, Lantus insulin lists for $403. But Sanofi, who make Lantus, rebate $339 of that to OptumRX, leaving just $64 for Lantus.

Here's where the scam hits. Your insurer charges you a deductible based on the list price – $404 – not on the $64 that OptumRX actually pays for your insulin. If you're in a high-deductible plan and you haven't met your cap yet, you're going to pay $404 for your insulin, even though the actual price for it is $64.

Now, you'd think that your insurer would put a stop to this. They chose the PBM, the PBM is ripping off their customers, so it's their job to smack the PBM around and make it cut this shit out. So why would the insurers tolerate this nonsense?

Here's why: the PBMs are divisions of the big health insurance companies. Unitedhealth owns OptumRx; Aetna owns Caremark, and Cigna owns Expressscripts. So it's not the PBM that's ripping you off, it's your own insurance company. They're not just making you pay for drugs that you're supposedly covered for – they're pocketing the deductible you pay for those drugs.

Now, there's one more entity with power over the PBM that you'd hope would step in on your behalf: your boss. After all, your employer is the entity that actually chooses the insurer and negotiates with them on your behalf. Your boss is in the driver's seat; you're just along for the ride.

It would be pretty funny if the answer to this was that the health insurance company bought your employer, too, and so your boss, the PBM and the insurer were all the same guy, busily swapping hats, paying for a call center full of tormented drones who each have three phones on their desks: one labeled "insurer"; the second, "PBM" and the final one "HR."

But no, the insurers haven't bought out the company you work for (yet). Rather, they've bought off your boss – they're sharing kickbacks with your employer for all the deductibles and co-pays you're being suckered into paying. There's so much money (your money) sloshing around in the PBM scamoverse that anytime someone might get in the way of you being ripped off, they just get cut in for a share of the loot.

That is how the PBM scam works: they're fronts for health insurers who exploit the existence of high-deductible plans in order to get huge kickbacks from pharma makers, and massive fees from you. They split the loot with your boss, whose payout goes up when you get screwed harder.

But wait, there's more! After all, Big Pharma isn't some kind of easily pushed-around weakling. They're big. Why don't they push back against these massive rebates? Because they can afford to pay bribes and smaller companies making cheaper drugs can't. Whether it's a little biotech upstart with a cheaper molecule, or a generics maker who's producing drugs at a fraction of the list price, they just don't have the giant cash reserves it takes to buy their way into the PBMs' formularies. Doubtless, the Big Pharma companies would prefer to pay smaller kickbacks, but from Big Pharma's perspective, the optimum amount of bribes extracted by a PBM isn't zero – far from it. For Big Pharma, the optimal number is one cent higher than "the maximum amount of bribes that a smaller company can afford."

The purpose of a system is what it does. The PBM system makes sure that Americans only have access to the most expensive drugs, and that they pay the highest possible prices for them, and this enriches both insurance companies and employers, while protecting the Big Pharma cartel from upstarts.

Which is why the FTC is suing the PBMs for price-fixing. As Stoller points out, they're using their powers under Section 5 of the FTC Act here, which allows them to shut down "unfair methods of competition":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The case will be adjudicated by an administrative law judge, in a process that's much faster than a federal court case. Once the FTC proves that the PBM scam is illegal when applied to insulin, they'll have a much easier time attacking the scam when it comes to every other drug (the insulin scam has just about run its course, with federally mandated $35 insulin coming online, just as a generation of post-insulin diabetes treatments hit the market).

Obviously the PBMs aren't taking this lying down. Cigna/Expressscripts has actually sued the FTC for libel over the market study it conducted, in which the agency described in pitiless, factual detail how Cigna was ripping us all off. The case is being fought by a low-level Reagan-era monster named Rick Rule, whom Stoller characterizes as a guy who "hangs around in bars and picks up lonely multi-national corporations" (!!).

The libel claim is a nonstarter, but it's still wild. It's like one of those movies where they want to show you how bad the cockroaches are, so there's a bit where the exterminator shows up and the roaches form a chorus line and do a kind of Busby Berkeley number:

https://www.46brooklyn.com/news/2024-09-20-the-carlton-report

So here we are: the FTC has set out to euthanize some rentiers, ridding the world of a layer of useless economic middlemen whose sole reason for existing is to make pharmaceuticals as expensive as possible, by colluding with the pharma cartel, the insurance cartel and your boss. This conspiracy exists in plain sight, hidden by the Shield of Boringness. If I've done my job, you now understand how this MEGO scam works – and if you forget all that ten minutes later (as is likely, given the nature of MEGO), that's OK: just remember that this thing is a giant fucking scam, and if you ever need to refresh yourself on the details, you can always re-read this post.

The paperback edition of The Lost Cause, my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this month!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/#some-men-rob-you-with-a-fountain-pen

Image: Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[evermoredeluxe]

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Grand Total: A Record $2 Billion

By Ben Sisario

For the last 21 months, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has been the biggest thing in music — a phenomenon that has engulfed pop culture, dominated news coverage and boosted local economies around the world.

Now we know exactly how big.

Through its 149th and final show, which took place in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Sunday, Swift’s tour sold a total of $2,077,618,725 in tickets. That’s two billion and change — double the gross ticket sales of any other concert tour in history and an extraordinary new benchmark for a white-hot international concert business.

Those figures were confirmed to The New York Times for the first time by Taylor Swift Touring, the singer’s production company. While the financial details of the Eras Tour have been a subject of constant industry speculation since tickets were first offered more than two years ago — through a presale so in-demand it crashed Ticketmaster’s system — Swift has never authorized disclosure of the tour’s numbers until now.

The official results are not far from the estimates that trade journalists and industry analysts have been crunching for months. But they solidify the enormous scale of Swift’s accomplishment. Just a few months ago, Billboard magazine reported that Coldplay had set an industry record with $1 billion in ticket sales for its 156-date Music of the Spheres World Tour — a figure that is just half of Swift’s total for a similar stretch of shows in stadiums and arenas.

Every date on the Eras Tour was sold out, and spare tickets were scalped at eye-popping prices — or traded within the protective Swiftie fan community, often at face value.

According to Swift’s touring company, a total of 10,168,008 people attended the concerts, which means that, on average, each seat went for about $204. That is well above the industry average of $131 for the top 100 tours around the world in 2023, according to Pollstar, a trade publication.

The biggest single night’s attendance was in Melbourne, Australia, on Feb. 16, 2024, with 96,006. And Swift’s eight nights at Wembley Stadium in London, which she played more than any other venue, drew 753,112 people — about as many as live in Seattle.

As gigantic as they are, the figures revealed by Swift’s company are only part of the overall business that has surrounded the tour. They exclude her extraordinary merchandise sales, for example, a product line so in demand that Swift opened stadium sales booths a day early in some markets to sell T-shirts, hoodies and Christmas ornaments to fans, ticketed or not.

And they do not count the secondary market of online ticket resellers. According to StubHub, the Eras Tour was the biggest-selling tour in the platform’s two-decade history, and last year it outsold Beyoncé’s shows by a factor of five. Another ticketing company, Victory Live, said the average price for resold tickets to the Eras Tour’s three Vancouver dates was $2,952. (Swift earned nothing from resold tickets.)

Beyond its numbers, the Eras Tour has been a mega-event that elevated the already-super-famous Swift to a new level, making her an epochal symbol of cultural saturation on the level of the Beatles in the 1960s or Michael Jackson in his ’80s prime. Swift’s every onstage utterance, outfit swap or offstage sighting was thoroughly documented, on social media and in the mainstream press, with news outlets big and small rushing to capture Swifties’ clicks. Online, fans tracked every tweak to the three-hour-plus set lists.

As the story of Swift’s tour took shape, it seemed to contain its own eras within it. First, in November 2022, came the ticket fiasco, when Ticketmaster was overwhelmed by what it said were 3.5 billion online requests for tickets, many from scalpers’ bots. The furor over those problems led to a Senate Judiciary hearing in January 2023, at which lawmakers from both parties openly called Ticketmaster’s corporate parent, Live Nation, a monopoly. (This year, the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against Live Nation, calling for a breakup of the company.)

Then came the tour and the folkways that developed around it, like fans trading hand-assembled friendship bracelets. After the tour’s stop in Kansas City, Mo., a public flirtation between Swift and Travis Kelce, the star tight end of the Kansas City Chiefs, developed into a full-on romance, with the pop star and the football hunk sharing a field-level smooch after the Chiefs defeated the San Francisco 49ers at Super Bowl LVIII in February. The photographers definitely did not miss it.

In October 2023, she released “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” a nearly three-hour concert film, released through a direct distribution deal with AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest theater operator. It sold about $93 million in tickets during its opening weekend, and ended up with $261 million in worldwide grosses, according to Box Office Mojo. The next step was a streaming deal with Disney+. A 256-page hardcover tour book, released last month through Target stores, sold 814,000 print copies in its first two days on sale.

As the tour moved to Europe in 2024, it narrowly avoided what could have been a major catastrophe when a terrorist bomb plot was uncovered before three planned shows in Vienna. Those events were canceled and never rescheduled.

Although Swift has largely avoided the news media during the tour, over time she has pulled back the curtain a bit to reveal some of how it came together. To prepare herself for the physical demands of the show, she trained for six months, with a cardio regimen that included singing the entire set list while running on a treadmill, she told Time magazine.

“I knew this tour was harder than anything I’d ever done before by a long shot,” the magazine quoted her as saying. “I finally, for the very first time, physically prepared correctly.”

The music video for “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” from her latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department” — her third release over the course of the tour, including two rerecorded versions of older albums — has behind-the-scenes clips confirming some of the stagecraft mechanics that fans have carefully cataloged on social media, like how she “dives” each night through a “hole” in the stage (onto a soft cushion held by crew members) and how she is ferried backstage in a dummy janitor’s cart.

The tour concludes just as Swift celebrates yet another win: “Tortured Poets” has returned to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart for a 16th week, with help from vinyl and CD sales of the 35-track “Anthology” edition of the album, which Swift released on Black Friday, also through Target. “Tortured Poets” is by far the biggest-selling album of the year so far.

Swift is up for six awards at the Grammys in February, including album of the year for “Tortured Poets” and both record and song of the year for one of its singles, “Fortnight.”

At a recent tour stop in Toronto, as the tour neared its end, Swift teared up as she delivered valedictory remarks to fans.

“My band, my crew, all my fellow performers,” she said, “we have put so much of our lives into this, and you put so much of your lives into being with us tonight and to giving us that moment that we will never forget.”

[wumblr]

the burger company is spending over 29 cents per citizen in a public relations charm offensive in attempt to apologize for the escherichia coli outbreak that lost the presidential election by nixing the blue candidate's burger diploma ceremony while the red candidate shut down a burger site for a photo opportunity, which has so far been more offensive to the public sensibility than that time the burger monopoly game lottery turned out to have been almost exclusively defrauded by insider mormons. this is believed by many paleontologists to have been a form of ritualistic supplication to the country's patron god, which is the advertising industry

[bluerthanvelvet444]

ᯓ★⋆˚𝙿𝚎𝚝𝚎𝚛 𝙼𝚊𝚡𝚒𝚖𝚘𝚏𝚏 𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚍𝚌𝚊𝚗𝚘𝚗𝚜⋆｡˚ ⁀➷

(Peter Maximoff x fem!reader)

tags: sfw and nsfw.

warnings: none.

character count: 7k.

this was a request!

ᯓ★⋆𝚂𝙵𝚆⋆｡⁀➷

He LOVES playing games with you.

Peter was often bored, being locked in his mother’s basement led to doing the same things over and over again. This is why he loved playing games with you, no matter if they were board games or card ones, he was utterly fond of the idea of games ending in many different ways and sometimes taking different turns, never knowing if a game could last minutes or hours. He would throw game nights with candies and junk food. He really liked playing Cluedo, especially roleplaying the whole thing, he would get SO into the character, many times taking it personally when he was accused of being the murderer, always doing accents and creating a whole backstory (even if not needed). He believed it was “funnier” this way…but really, he was just a dork by nature. He enjoyed Monopoly too, although getting into the character in this game would often lead to him getting SO mad when things started to go bad for him. He claimed he was “the best gamer of all times” but in reality was actually pretty bad, especially with strategy games since he tended to act impulsively without logic. Many times you had to let him win to avoid cocky tantrums and just getting his ego hurt.

He is constantly spoiling you with gifts.

His main goal in life was owning the "Twinkie" company being the best boyfriend you could ever ask for. So whatever you desired, he gave you.

“Look how cute this is Pet-” You started while pointing at the picture of what you wanted, and before you knew it, Peter left your room at the highest of speeds just to come back in the blink of an eye with the thing you were just talking about in his hands.

“Gotcha.” He winked with a cute smirk.

“Peter! You didn’t have to. You probably spent so much for this…” You said, feeling guilty.

“Who said I paid for it?”

He takes you anywhere you want.

You mentioned wanting to go to the beach? He took you there in no time, not even letting you put your swimsuit on.

You dreamed of going to Paris? Sweep. Two seconds and you were taking a picture under the Tour Eiffel while he was holding a baguette and had a fake mustache on.

In the little time you started dating him, you already visited more places than you did in your entire life, and your bedroom was full of polaroids of you two around the world. This counts for concerts and other things too. He’s basically a free VIP pass.

He always matches your mood.

If you wanted to go to the cinema and watch a movie, he would sneak you two in the theater, stealing popcorn and all types of soda.

If you wanted to party hard and just forget about everything for a night, he would throw the BIGGEST party in the x-men’s mansion, just for you.

If you wanted to stay home and relax, he would grab a comfy blanket and a few snacks, cuddling up against you. Either spooning you or being spooned.

He hypes you up no matter what, he’s your biggest fan.

You were out shopping with Peter, so you took the chance to try some dresses on. You were in the changing room, looking at your body in the mirror. Many thoughts were flowing in your head, you didn’t know if you liked or hated it. Peter slightly peeked from the curtain.

“Babe are ya don- HOLY SHIT!” His eyes widened at the sight of you.

“Do you like it?” You asked while still looking in the mirror.

“Like it? Ya asking me if I- if I like it?! Are ya out of yer mind?! I dont like it! I love it!” He opened wide the whole curtain.

“Mh…I don’t know if this really fits m-” You were cut off by Peter suddenly grabbing your shoulders.

“Fits you?! FITS YA?! Babe.Ya need to get this right now. It was made for you- Holy shit! It looks like it was tailored to you!” He grinned widely.

“i don’t kno-Peter!” You exclaimed as he picked you up in his arms.

“YER STUNNING. Gorgeous! Breathtaking! Damn! Yer really my girl? I’m the luckiest bastard in the world!” He carried you in his arms out of the changing room.

“SHE’S MY GIRLFRIEND! HEY YOU! YES! SHE’S MY GIRLFRIEND! I’M THE LUCKIEST BASTARD IN THE WORLD! WHOOOOO!” He shouted excitedly to the whole store while you covered your burning cheeks and begged him to stop.

He likes watching you put on your makeup, occasionally attempting to put it on you, too.

His tongue poked out of his mouth as he tried to blend the foundation on your skin.

“Why’s this taking so long?!” He huffed.

“Peter, that’s an eyeshadow brush.”

“Oh.”

ᯓ★⋆˚𝙽𝚂𝙵𝚆⋆｡˚ ⁀➷

He’s horny 24/7.

Because of his speedster genes everything his body did was faster than normal. It was sooo easy to get him hard. You could’ve been either provoking him or doing nothing.

You were laying on the bed, your boyfriend spooning you from behind. You pressed your back against him, earning a groan from him. Thinking you accidentally hurt him, you turned to face him, just to find a visible grown bulge in his pants.

“I barely touched you…” You teased.

“S’the speedster genes…” He whined.

He’s such a switch.

You were sitting between his legs, your back pressed against his chest. His fingers slipping in and out of your entrance with unholy sounds.

“Mh…Just like that, babe…takin’ it so well…” He purred in your ear, causing loud moans to slip out of you. He kept speeding his fingers more and more, bringing you closer and closer to the edge. Not wanting to finish alone, you suddenly changed positions, straddling him and stroking his length from his pants.

“A-ah…please babe…” He was already a subby mess under you, whining and begging you for more.

He’s open to all types of sex with you.

Fast? His name is quickie for a reason, his body will be blurred by how fast he will be.

Slow? Mhh…It will be torture for him but, sure, anything to pleasure you.

Loving? He could be hugging you from behind, gently thrusting in you and whispering sweet words and moans in your ear.

Rough? Absolutely. He’ll have you screaming his name as loud as possible. Oh, and prepare for a loooong night, the speedster genes help a lot with his sex drive.

No toys!

One thing he will never accept is you using sex toys. Why on earth would you use a miserable piece of plastic to please yourself when you have him?

He can be a vibrator, a dildo…everything! And a good one too. Whenever you need to feel good, just give him a call! He will drop everything just to have fun with you. Don’t tell Professor X that.

Quickies in public are more common than you think.

With him being always horny, he often found himself staring at you for longer than usual, which sent heat waves straight to his core, even in public.

“Babe…” He started with whispering your name in your ear, his body pressing against yours from behind.

“I need you…” He whined, subtly rubbing his hard-on against your ass. You questioned him, reminding him that you were in public.

He quickly brought you inside a public bathroom. His hands desperately grabbing your body.

“Please…I’ll be quick…” He groaned against your neck, sucking the skin gently. As soon as you agreed, you found yourself pressed up against a wall and his clothes immediately coming off.

➴➵➶➴➵➶➴➵➶

taglist: @cxndiedvi0lets @angeldollw @marchsfreakshow @dangeroustaintedflawed @yandereunsolved @newwavesylviaplath @happy74827 @evpeters87 @dont-look-behind

a/n: hiiii!!! my first headcanonssss...tried to put more dorky canon peter. hope you like them!!🩶🩶

all rights reserved!!

[heechwe]

one more night | 𝐦𝐣𝐡

୨୧ pairing: myung jaehyun x fem!reader ୨୧ word count: 2.1k ୨୧ genre: smut ୨୧ tags: forbidden romance, friends(?) with benefits, ceo!jaehyun, ceo!reader, spanking, degradation, oral (m receiving), fingering, unprotected sex, creampie. ୨୧ synopsis: You tell yourself it will be the last time you commisserate with the enemy every time you leave him. But, like magnets, you always come back to each other in spite of every instinct telling you to walk away. ➸ Request from spider anon via this ask! I hope you love it like I do! Shoutout also to my friends @lovetaroandtaemin and @loserlvrss for beta-reading and dealing with my ass writing this story ilysm 🤍

Any excuse to run across Jaehyun reminds you why you’re such a good liar. Both in life and in business, it’s a good skill to have in order to hold a lot of things together. Jaehyun isn't one to conceal much of anything, though. Maybe that’s why you both can’t stand each other sixty percent of the time, your rigidness the perfect clash with his care-free nature. The guy holds a title you worked for forever while he seemed to earn it with the flick of his wrist. 

Your families didn’t share fuzzy feelings either. Your parents and his on paper seemed to be a match made in heaven, your hotel monopoly the counterpart to a chain of popular restaurants in the city. But it was anything but, unfortunately. The lack of similar business interests and practices as well as their disproportionate dispositions made it a pain to get together every time there was a dinner party or business convention with both of your companies on the ticket.

Like tonight, the expo for the new release of stocks for many companies is another standoff between your respective parties. You have to hold yourself back from sharing any words of encouragement or conversation that paints Jaehyun and his company in a good light without being rude. In truth, you could care less about the hotels right now, flitting your gaze to the ballroom doors to see the one person who drives you insane.

You refuse to admit the red dress you’re wearing is meant to show off your neckline just for him. You did not put on an extra spritz of perfume that he likes to make his head spin. You don’t wish the executives you’re talking with right now would walk away so you could find the man himself.

Of course he saunters in the room when he lingers on your mind, walking past the many gray suits without much care for his late entrance. His three-piece suit exaggerates the lines of his body in a way that irritates you and turns you on in the same breath. He shakes the hands of the stakeholders with a shit-eating grin and glides near you with a hand on the small of your back, determined to shake your resolve without saying a word.

It’s his nature to get under your skin with something as simple as the light graze of his fingertips. He loves to see you flustered until you’re begging and pleading, the actions completely against your normal character. You’ll never bow down to any man or woman in the world to get what you want, but for Jaehyun, he seems to be the only exception to the rule.

Of course, you’ll never admit that, playing it off as simple carnal desire and nothing more. You deny the heat pressing into your body the longer his hand lingers on the back of your dress, his thumb and forefinger playing with the zipper.

He says your name as he toys with your emotions further, the rest of the company around you going back to their casual conversations about trips abroad and business deals. “We need to discuss the merger. We can excuse ourselves for fifteen minutes, don’t you think?”

Sanctimonious prick.

He can barely hold himself together by the time you make it off the elevator together and walk in the direction of the room. He strings you up against the hallway wall, his hand immediately hiking up your skirt and his lips clinging to your neck.

“You love this. You love messing with my head,” he grunts, taking your underwear in his fingers and dragging them down your legs. He could give a shit less if anyone were to leave their room to find the scene playing out in front of them. In his mind, three days has been torture. Any more and he would’ve exploded.

He has to make it known how much pain he has been in, and he has every intention of returning his torment with the same vigor.

“Hyunie,” you whisper, the words about to leave your mouth as hollow as his preservation for your dignity. “Not here.”

“You don’t care,” he responds. The pad of his thumb easily finds your clit under your dress, rubbing circles into the center of your legs without stumbling on his words. “Everyone downstairs could see me fucking you and all that would matter to you is if you got off. And you know it.”

You moan into his mouth when he licks the roof of yours with his tongue. His fingers still dance in the pool at your center, your underwear clenched in his other hand pressed against the wall.

“Please fuck me, Jaehyun,” you beg, tugging on his pants as he continues with his thumb and forefinger bordering the walls of your cunt. The strain of his cock in the fabric is obvious, the outline of it making your mouth water.

He smirks, holding his bottom lip between his teeth. “Not before I feel that beautiful mouth on me, baby.”

By the time Jaehyun slides the keycard against the door mechanism and lets you both inside, you have him pressed to the other side of the door in record time. It takes only another second for the underside of your tongue to meet the tip of his cock. He barely had time to pull his pants down before you were taking him in your mouth, but he loves to see you like this, lust-drunk and impatient.

Just because you’re a good liar doesn’t mean you’re good at practicing delayed gratification.

Sure, you may not like him a good portion of the time. But now, with his hand violently wrapped in your hair, ruining the curls you spent an hour working on so he can fuck your face, you think you may die if you don’t feel him inside of you soon.

You gag around him when the tip of his cock hits the back of your throat. Tears pool in your eyes, but the sound of his moans and the way he slides between your lips is indescribable.

“Fuck, this mouth was made for me, you know that?” He groans, lovingly holding your cheek with the palm that isn’t wrapped in your hair. “My perfect little whore.”

You hum and continue letting him abuse your throat. His body trembles at the endorphins rushing through it, and he hasn’t even come yet.

Jaehyun pulls his cock out of your mouth abruptly, making you whine in confusion. He pulls you up by the hands, a knowing smile plastered across his face. Your knees burn from the friction against the carpet, but the force of his kiss makes you forget any feeling that isn’t pleasurable. The rest doesn’t seem to matter much at the moment; only him and his effects on your being take precedence in your mind.

“Y’know I love coming in your mouth, but I want your pussy more.” He takes you to the bed and motions for you to get on all fours once your dress and high heels are discarded in a corner of the room.

He lands a hard smack against your ass, rubbing the skin as you whimper into the pillows underneath you. “You’re such a bad girl. Acting like you don’t want me, yet you’re hungry to have my cock filling you up every time you see me.” He takes his other hand to press his fingers inside of you. “My little brat, too proud to admit she loves being my little fucktoy, huh?”

You shake your head and stuff your face further into the pillow. You arch your back only for Jaehyun to spank you a second, third, and fourth time. He doesn’t take his fingers out of your heat even as he hits you, but each bout of contact with your ass and his palm is harder than the last.

“Don’t lie to me, baby. You know I hate it when you do that.” A fifth smack meets your ass, and you almost press your whole body flat onto the bed, the pain and pleasure too much to absorb at once.

“I love it, Jaehyun, I do. I love being yours,” you gasp, legs shaking. Your body stretches the coil inside of you tighter, unsure when will be the exact moment you fall apart.

Jaehyun doesn’t make you wonder for too long. “Prove it. Come on my fingers, baby. Let go.”

He presses a kiss to your reddened skin as you come undone, the orgasm ripping through your energy without mercy. Your legs are limp and unable to hold you up any longer when you come back to reality.

That doesn’t mean the devilish man who’s caused you so much satisfaction is done.

“On your back, baby. It’ll make it easier.”

He hooks one leg across his waist, holding it tenderly as he slips inside of you. He groans at the feeling of finally entering you, your walls still drenched from your previous arousal. He doesn’t push you further than necessary though, his pace languid but purposeful.

“You look so beautiful like this,” he moans, his sounds reverberating through the room. Your body is completely at his will, the aftershocks of your orgasm leaving you spent to an unfathomable degree. All that’s left for you to give are weak whimpers of ecstasy. “So fucked out because of me,” he continues, suddenly picking up the pace.

“Are you gonna make me come again, Hyunie?” You ask, eyes half-lidded. Your body is on a slow crawl to a second release. But if Jaehyun has anything to say about it, he’ll make you orgasm before he does, like usual.

He may be full of himself, but he’s a giver.

He runs his thumb into your slick again, drawing swirls into your clit. You cry out at the feeling, him penetrating the deepest parts of you while touching the motherboard to your nerves so effortlessly. Why did he know how to get under your skin and also burn it alive?

With all of your strength, you lift your hips up to meet Jaehyun��s. He grunts as your skin meets his, his thrusts more powerful with your added effort.

“I’m gonna come, baby,” Jaehyun warns, slamming harder into you as his release comes closer to fruition.

“Me too, Hyunie,” you respond to him, the words becoming lilts of air as he pounds into you mercilessly. This orgasm is different from the first one, your body in silent surrender as the pleasure overtakes you. The only physical response you have is your slackened jaw.

“Fucking shit,” Jaehyun curses, your cunt tightening around him beautifully from your release. It pushes him into his own, his seed filling you with mind-blowing warmth.

Some of it spills out of you when you separate, but he plunges it back in with his fingers slowly. He kisses your stomach as you buck up from the sensitivity. “Easy, baby. Don’t want any of it going to waste, do we?”

Like clockwork, your satiated thoughts from pleasure become ones of humor at his ridiculous ways of claiming you for his own.

Your legs are intertwined with Jaehyun’s on the bed, the fuzzy robe you stole from the bathroom covering your body. Jaehyun is sitting up against the headboard, wearing nothing but his briefs. He says nothing but stares intently as he strokes your thigh, your focus on stuffing your face with ice-cream.

Jaehyun went downstairs shortly after he crawled off of you, even apologizing personally for you and giving an excuse of not feeling well enough to stay at the conference. Normally, you would be fine going back downstairs without a second thought. Tonight, however, seems to be different in a way you can’t pin down. Something inside of your heart has shifted, more than you thought possible.

It doesn’t help that he came back upstairs with your favorite desserts. He walked in with a bashful grin, candy and ice-cream littered across the metal tray. “Extra cherries for your sundae, right?”

Now, looking at him, the weight of all the lies you told yourself before seems unnecessary to carry any longer. Would it be so bad to admit he was annoying but also endearing?

You turn from your vanilla ice cream to look at him for the first time in forever. His mouth opens for a spoonful of your dessert, his eyes lit with glee at the prospect of you sharing with him. And you do, your heart too swollen with affection to say no.

This may be uncharted territory, but maybe it’ll be easier if you’re honest. And the truth is simple: the bane of your existence may very well be your perfect match.

@yvnempire @sjylouvre @mini-mews @jayparked @heesuncore @yoursjaeyun @sungbeams @jenoslutie @loserlvrss @pars-ley @lovetaroandtaemin @wonwovy

𝐧𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐬 ౨ৎ˚₊

@kstrucknet @k-films @kvanity-main @sweetvenomnet @onedoornet @sayxonet @violetanet @svthub @whipped-kpop-creators

[radiant-reid]

A blurb on spencer with the audio thats like “I always thought you were the most beautiful girl i’ve ever seen” and it’s to reader? :))

love this !! and i don't care if it's such a cliche image, I'm not going to stop

Spencer jumps when you slide the balcony door open. Even with the serial killer caught, you're all still on edge, chilly in the Alaskan spring.

"Sorry, I hope you don't mind me interrupting." You step forward and close the door to stop any heat from the fire escaping inside.

"Not at all," Spencer assures you, smiling softly to encourage you forward.

You stand next to him, looking out over at the hill and evergreen trees, everything with a fresh dumping of snow on it. The sun's just setting even though it's not too far into the afternoon, the sky beginning to turn soft pink and orange.

"Things were getting a bit tense inside." You laugh at the very recent memory of some passionate arguing.

"Prentiss and Morgan?" Spencer guesses. You confirm with a nod. "Hotch should add Uno to the list of banned games."

You laugh at the rare joke from him. "We're not going to have anything left now that Monopoly, Clue, and all card games are banned."

"We'll have to all play chess." He decides, matching his enthusiasm with a grin.

"Then you'll have to sit out so it's fair." You remind him with a smirk.

He pouts at that, not the answer he was after. A comfortable silence falls between you as you watch the sky changing colors. It's really like nothing you've seen before, and it's a nice reminder that there's still beauty in the world.

"It's just wow." You say softly, in awe.

"The stars will be out soon," Spencer notes. "They should be incredible. It's meant to be clear and there's no light pollution here like there is in DC."

"You looked it up?" You wonder. It's sweet, really, and his interest seems to go beyond adding to his vast general knowledge.

He turns to you to nod. "I'm going to come out after dinner to watch them. I've never seen anything like this in the cities I've lived in, and we don't get many cases in such beautiful, remote places."

You hum with your own nod. "You're right. Or..." Your curiosity doesn't allow you to resist the opportunity to segue the conversation. "Many beautiful people, like the deputy that's into you."

You're trying to disguise it as teasing him, at least then you can play it off as being teammates and friends, and you're desperately hoping he doesn't notice that you're tense about his answer.

His nose scrunches slightly. Maybe disgust, maybe excitement. "I wasn't looking."

"Not your type?" You ask, slightly alarmed again. You do share some similar traits with her, so if she's not his type, your chances are slimmer.

"I always thought you were the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen." He says sincerely, knocking the wind out of your chest. "So, no, Y/n, I'm not looking at anyone."

You take longer than you should to get over your shock. "You're serious?"

"Sorry, sorry." He quickly apologizes as his cheeks heat up more than can be accounted for by the cold weather. "That was weird. I didn't want to make you uncomfortable."

"No." You rest your hand over his, hoping to calm his spiraling worry. "You didn't... just thank you. That's... the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me."

"It's true." He reiterates.

Your smile deepens. "Can I come stargazing with you?" You ask. "I promise I won't distract you."

"Looking like that? Impossible." He jokes, flirtier than you imagine. It's like your reciprocation spurs him on. "But I'd love company... your company, specifically. Inviting someone else would be weird."

You chuckle. "Just me and you."

[centrally-unplanned]

To talk about monopoly & antitrust, I want to start off with your first day in Econ 101, when you learn "how prices work". The toy model that nearly everyone learns as one of the first things ever is that classic supply-and-demand graph of price and quantity; you know it, I don't need to show it. And in relation to how firms set price in a market, the explanation you get is something like:

"In a world with perfect information, zero transaction costs, rational agents, and no barriers to entry, new firms and/or increased output will enter the market until marginal price equals marginal cost"

This (seemingly) portrays a model where new companies "entering the market" is how prices go down. Like say there are Firms A, B, and C, engaging in oligopolistic pricing for a normal good; what happens is some new Firm X (with the same production costs) emerges with the sole business strategy of "offer prices lower than them because they are skimming" and it drives everyone's prices down in a race to the bottom. That, in a sense, competition between identical firms drives the price equilibrium.

That isn't very true, not in practice and not even theoretically; the 101 stuff just sort of biases you to see it that way. Firm X above is being rational in one way but silly in others; why would it enter a market where its competitors are making healthy profits just to fuck that up, knowing it has no advantage they can't immediately replicate in response? And pay all the fixed costs other firms have already paid to make that 0.1% profit? In real life firms almost never do this, they compete over (actual or perceived) advantage or market segmentation. And it also means that - if all firms are truly the same in a market - cooperating on price, far from being aberrant behavior, is the natural thing to do. Why would I look at my rival firm and lower my price to "undercut" them, knowing that they 100% can just lower it too? We both lose, immediately. In practice, companies often set their prices by looking at the prices of competing firms and matching them!

Many things actually drive the price equilibrium of course, but one of the biggest - and most useful for our purposes - is the substitution effect. If companies defacto cooperate on prices all the time, why is the price not infinity? Well because if you are selling steaks and set the price to infinity, I'm not gonna buy it! I can just buy chicken, for me it's pretty much the same. And chicken is cheaper to make than steak. As a chicken firm, I totally can set my price under your steak and you can never, ever match it; that is a real advantage, one from asymmetries of production. The price of steak is driven by the need to compete with chicken much more than it is driven by the need to compete with "other steaks". And so on down a chain of a million desires and costs and needs.

So to wrap this around to antitrust, there is a common idea out there that monopolistic pricing is increasing from the past because if I look at different industries, so many of them today are consolidated into 2-3 big firms. Your grocery stores are all Giant or Safeway or w/e it is in your city, if you are buying a TV Samsung & LG are half the entire US market. How could these companies not collude on price? Of course they do, and they don't need explicit agreements that would violate extant FTC regulations to do it; they can just softly communicate and feel out cooperation. So you gotta break them up and change the rules so they can't do that.

The trap is thinking this is any different if it was 10 firms - it really isn't! Maybe marginally, sure, and if it was 2000 firms yeah okay the sheer chaos would probably create some price churn; but in the past prices were not driven down by the diversity of firms making price cooperation impossible. The long history of guilds, business associations, chambers of commerce, and so on shows that they had plenty of avenues for cooperation - and often did straight-up set prices. Meanwhile, when Wal-Mart, Target, Aldi, and others all cut prices at around the same time, they are not mainly competing with each other. If they were they would just mutually agree to not do that, without even saying anything! How stupid do you think they are? That isn't hard to do. Instead they are competing with Amazon; with boutique local stores; with restaurants; with the changing price of labor; with shifting consumer sentiment and expectations. The industry concentration doesn't matter.

Until it does of course! Because what is the substitution good for oil? They exist of course, but they ain't cheap; people will still buy gas at gigantic ranges of prices. Here, the fundamental structure of the market is monopolistic - and also a geopolitical clusterfuck, but let's not get into that. Producers openly rig prices sometimes, and antitrust actively regulates against it, and it is a hot mess of governments and companies and all that. Are people who hold patents engaging in monopoly pricing? Obviously, that is the point of patents! It is by design; but there are tons of arguments to be made around creeping exploitation of the IP system. Sometimes hundreds of firms in a dominant market niche will offer complex, bundled products where the price of each piece of obfuscated and the value is subjective, but consensus is you can't not buy the product or you will be screwed and since you can't tell what the product even is, let alone how valuable it is, you can't object when they set the price - I hear these are called "universities", but they go by other names in other sectors.

All of the above are something like "monopolies", which maybe are getting worse over time, but they are monopolies for different, product-specific reasons. I think there is a good deal of FTC work and other reforms that could be done in the US to identify areas where this kind of rent extraction is happening. But what it doesn't look like is opposing blanket industry consolidation. And in fact the correlation is honestly pretty weak. Because identical firm competition does not drive the price equilibrium.

[vivwritesfics]

No Need To Ask

Chapter Twenty-Three - Without Him

The Norris' were a notorious crime family in the UK. One of many. With Norris, the head of the family, running operations with his son, Lando, they work to keep Y/N Norris, Norris' daughter protected. Life in a crime family wasn't something they wanted for her.

But with tension with one of the Spanish crime families rise, Norris and his now deceased wife come up with only one plan, offer their daughter to the Sainz's or risk an all out war.

2.1K words

Series Masterlist

Recap from a previous chapter:

Carlos's phone vibrated against his chest. He picked it up, reading the text. "What is it?" Y/N asked softly, gently. Carlos wasn't hiding the screen from her or anything, but the text was in Spanish and she couldn't yet read it.

"My mother," he answered as he replied to the message. She was okay, had been in contact with Carlos ever since she'd made it to Alonsos safehouse.

As much as the Sainz family and the Alonso family hated each other, they had an agreement in place. If anything happened to the Sainz, those who could get out were to get to Alonsos territory if they could. It worked both way, with the Sainz offering sanctuary for Alonso and his men if needs be.

Señora Sainz had made it to Alonsos territory. By the time she'd gotten there, the attackers had left Alonsos. It was in a state, everything broken, documents missing, just like Carlos's house.

Alonso hadn't escaped like the Sainz family had. He had a bookcase that he could hide behind. Once he was behind it, the bookcase looked bolted to the wall, unmovable. Nobody thought to look for Alonso in there.

When Señora Sainz arrived at the Alonso house, he took her and her daughters to his own safehouse.

While she was in the Verstappen Stronghold, Max was the only person Y/N spoke to. He was the only person who would speak back to her.

She'd heard the rumours growing up, that Max Verstappen was as ruthless and terrifying as his father. But she didn't see that. To her, Max was sweet and kind and definitely not terrifying.

He loved joking, loved making her laugh. Actually, he was the best company she could have asked for while she was waiting for her husband to return.

Max gave her the tour of the Verstappen stronghold. He showed her the library, the home cinema, Max's very own game room. That game room wasn't Y/N's sort of game room. There were screens and monitors on every wall, with every type of gaming console known to man. There was a cabinet full of board games, Monopoly, cluedo, battleships, and chess.

The two of them spent a lot of time in the games room, playing chess with him. Well, it was more like Y/N playing a game of chess alone while Max playing his racing games on his xbox and tried his best to talk to her at the same time.

It wasn't like last time, when Y/N was the newcomer in Carlos's house. She wasn't going to rot away in her room while she waited for her husband to return. Time would pass by quicker if she kept herself busy.

"So, you're pregnant?" Asked Max as he drove around the corner. His set up had a proper steering wheel with the foot pedals and everything.

Y/N looked up from her game of chess. "Did Carlos give it away?"

Nodding his head, Max concentrated on the game. But the bots he was playing against were all colliding into the back of him, causing him to retire from the race. "Actually, he said you guys are gonna name the baby after me."

She couldn't stop herself from laughing at him. "Somehow, I really doubt that, Max."

"Yeah, but think about," he said, turning in his gaming chair. "You could name it Maximus Sainz, which is probably the most bad ass name for a head of family, ever."

Y/N rolled her eyes. She and Max continued chatting casually in this fashion as he played his racing simulator and she played her game of chess. Day after day went like this, but she didn't get bored. Not while she was waiting for Carlos to return.

Max was her solace in this time.

***

When Carlos returned to Spain, he was incredibly scared for his own life, although he'd never admit it. He had a wife who he loved, a wife who loved him, and a baby on the way. It wasn't like when he was a kid and he could throw himself into the line of fire without a second thought. There were people who counted on him. People he wanted to be there for.

When he landed back in Spain, from what was hopefully his last ever commercial flight, he rented a car. His car was too recognisable now.

His driving was still smooth as he headed back to his house. Their house. The house they were going to raise their baby in.

As he drove, his phone buzzed. Carlos easily answered it as he continued towards the house, holding the phone up to his ear as he steered. "Hamilton," he said into the phone.

"Sainz. I am sorry to hear about your father," said Lewis. "I've heard from almost everybody but you that they have managed to recover. How are you doing?"

Carlos sucked in a breath. "They found us in the safehouse," he said. "I've had to send my wife away but I won't be saying where, if it's okay with you," he said and Lewis agreed. So, Carlos continued. "I am heading back to my house to rebuild," he said.

"Keep us informed," said Lewis.

Carlos hesitated before hanging up. He had just one question left for the head of all of the families. "Norris, is he okay?" He asked him.

"Yes," Lewis answered quickly. "He's tightened his security, just as all of us have."

Carlos hung up the phone. There was no goodbyes in the mafia family, they just stopped the call. Carlos pulled over to dial one more number.

"Y/N?" Said the person on the other side as soon as they picked up.

Carlos pulled back onto the road, driving towards the house. "No, Lando. It's her husband," he said flatly.

The noise Lando made was unrecognisable. "Where is Y/N? Is she okay?" He asked quickly, urgency in his voice. Clearly, he was panicked.

"Yes, Lando, she's fine. I've gotten her somewhere safe," Carlos answered. "But I need you to do me a favour and call Max," he said.

"He's right next to me."

For a moment, Carlos frowned. He'd just left Max in the Netherlands. What on earth did Lando mean? But then it clicked. He always seemed to forget about Lando's best friend Max. "No, the other Max," he said. "Verstappen. Give Max Verstappen a call," He said and put down the phone.

Carlos drove the rest of his way to the house in silence, just praying that Lando did what he asked.

He pulled up to the house, the gates shutting behind him. They'd have to go, he thought as he imagined a few more rows of wall and gates. It would all have to be completely fortified.

He abandoned his car and walked into the house. The doors were already being replaced by metal ones, ones that bolted shut and required a retinal scan to get in.

Carlos made his way up to his office. That was where all the controls would be. It had been cleaned up by his men since the last time he'd been there, his papers put back into order. There was a stack of receipts, the costs of fortifying the house.

He wanted guard dogs, too. They weren't his usual sort of dog, with Carlos preferring something small. But he'd get the biggest dog around if it meant keeping his wife and unborn child safe.

He checked his weapons, all of them still where he had left them. Aside from the few papers, the thieves hadn't stolen anything. It was so confusing, what they actually wanted from him. They hadn't stolen anything of value, just paperwork.

The thieves had only seemed to attack every other family once. But Carlos had been targeted twice. Why? What did they want with him?

He signed some papers, allowing construction to start.

***

"You!" Shouted Señora Sainz as she stared at Oscar. She grabbed a hold of Alonso's gun and pointed it straight at Oscars chest. "What do you think you're doing here!?"

Suddenly, Alonso grabbed a hold of the gun, taking it away from Señora Sainz. "Now, now," he said, placing it in one of the many desk drawers. "There is no need to resort to violence."

Señora Sainz grumbled and crossed her hands over her chest, glaring daggers at Oscar. "I'm sorry to barge in like this," he said, although his tone suggested anything but apology. "But I've got nowhere else to go. Y/N and Carlos have gone and I can't get back to Australia," he said.

"As Webber's boy, you're allowed sanctuary here," said Alonso as he stood up to shake Oscar's hand.

Oscar visibly deflated, like he was a balloon that had lost all of it's air. He suddenly realised just how exhausted and hungry and thirsty he was.

But, before he could ask Alonso for some food, Señora Sainz cut in. "What of my son and his wife?" She asked suddenly.

Unable to hold himself up anymore, Oscar sank into the nearest seat. "They got away," he said. "While we were being ambushed, Carlos managed to get her out. I'm not sure where they are now."

"What ambush?" Asked Alonso.

"Those thieves, the ones that broke into every house. They came for us in the safehouse."

Alonso frowned. He shouted something in Spanish and two of his men strode forward. Oscar recognised one of them to be Lance, on loan from Stroll in Canada. Lando grabbed a hold of Oscar and walked him through the house, promising him food.

Oscar allowed himself to be dragged along. If he didn't get something to eat soon, there was no way he was making it through the night.

***

Max's phone rang. He looked at the caller I.D, a smile gracing his features. He held a finger up to Y/N and ducked out of the home theatre, walking out to the hall to answer the call. "Little Lando Norris," he said, wearing a smile.

"You can't call me that now, Maximillian," Lando responded with a slight grumble. "I'm a head of family now."

Max rolled his eyes. It really was easy to forget that Lando now had as much power as his father did. It wasn't fair, wasn't fair that someone younger than him had to deal with such a burden. "What do you wan?" He asked, his voice still chipper as he leaned against the wall.

"Carlos said I should call you," Lando said, jumping straight to the point.

Max shrugged his shoulders. "Probably because I've got your sister here," he said.

Lando made another one of those unintelligible noises. "What?!" He cried. "What do you mean? Is Y/N in the Netherlands? Are you in Spain? Can I speak to her?"

Unsure just quite how to answer that many questions at once, Max walked back into the theatre and passed the phone to his house guest. She looked at her host in confusion as she took the phone and lifted it to her ear. "Hello?" She called, her voice unsure.

"Y/N?" Came the startled voice of her brother. "Is that actually you?"

"Holy shit, Lando!" She stood, walking into the hall as Max went back to watching the movie. "You're safe," she said. "You're safe, you're safe, you're safe!"

"I've been so worried about you! Why're you with Max? Where is Carlos?"

Their conversation was a jumble of voices, the both of them trying to talk over the top of each other. Y/N needed Lando to shut up and listen and he was rambling, clearly stressed. Y/N could picture him now, his tie knotted too tight, his curls a mess, sticking up in every direction from where he had been pulling them.

"I'm pregnant!" She blurted out when he wouldn't shut up.

That did the trick. Lando fell silent. "Lan, you're going to be an uncle."

"Well, that's great and all, but you haven't actually answered any of my questions," Lando answered.

It wasn't the answer Y/N had been hoping for, but at least he wasn't stressing anymore. So, she calmly and collectedly took him through the events that had ended with her in the Netherlands and Carlos back in Spain.

Lando had only interrupted her once, with a little cry of 'they ambushed you twice?!' but he quickly let her get back to her story.

"That's it," he said as soon as she had finished speaking. "I'm bringing you home right now."

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