GN'R car racing at Daytona 500 (Feb 2023)

[PermissionToLand]

about the second one, more and more consumers are doing so, buying fairtrade products, looking at their composition, where they were manufactured, boycott chinese products made by children, it's now something the general public is accustomed to, at least in Europe, maybe it's different in the US, I wouldn't that surprised about that... 

The first sentence was sarcasm.

The point is that it's literally impossible to know every abuse that every company engages in and shop accordingly (you might be shocked to find out that every company has skeletons in its closet). Avoiding companies you know are doing something bad is not a substitute for regulation, and that is how the phrase "vote with your wallet" is employed. You cannot know that Company X is dumping pollutants unless they get caught and you happen to hear it on the news or you deeply research every company you ever buy anything from. It's putting the onus on every average Joe to be an expert in supply chains and industry practices. It's a totally unworkable non-solution. You'd spend your entire day reading into every pack of gum you bought at lunch, the gas station you stopped at on the way home, the owner of that station franchise, the gas producer, the gas distributor, and so on. There already exists a mechanism for this, and it's regulation. We need to stop treating that as a dirty word. I'm not against boycotting, but it's very ineffective, which is why it's the favored form of protest by the very companies that engage in this bad behavior.

That is not even getting into the fact that, if you're voting with your wallet, the person with the biggest wallet has the most votes.

[cineater]

Er, I'm the one who normally derails the topic.     But would you get the fuck out of the fast car topic!  Every time it pops up I have hope and you're totally ruining that.

[DeN]

about the second one, more and more consumers are doing so, buying fairtrade products, looking at their composition, where they were manufactured, boycott chinese products made by children, it's now something the general public is accustomed to, at least in Europe, maybe it's different in the US, I wouldn't that surprised about that... 

The first sentence was sarcasm.

The point is that it's literally impossible to know every abuse that every company engages in and shop accordingly (you might be shocked to find out that every company has skeletons in its closet). Avoiding companies you know are doing something bad is not a substitute for regulation, and that is how the phrase "vote with your wallet" is employed. You cannot know that Company X is dumping pollutants unless they get caught and you happen to hear it on the news or you deeply research every company you ever buy anything from. It's putting the onus on every average Joe to be an expert in supply chains and industry practices. It's a totally unworkable non-solution. You'd spend your entire day reading into every pack of gum you bought at lunch, the gas station you stopped at on the way home, the owner of that station franchise, the gas producer, the gas distributor, and so on. There already exists a mechanism for this, and it's regulation. We need to stop treating that as a dirty word. I'm not against boycotting, but it's very ineffective, which is why it's the favored form of protest by the very companies that engage in this bad behavior.

That is not even getting into the fact that, if you're voting with your wallet, the person with the biggest wallet has the most votes.

yeah I understood the tone (sarcasm) but not the sense 

to be clear I didn't say boycotts works everytime (60 percent of the time, it works everytime ), for the main part because people just lost interest and have short memory, they move on very quickly, even more at the time of social media. here we talk about the situation where fans of a band stop buying what is proposed to them, it's very simple and effective, the band has no other solution to propose something else to buy (or to end its career if they are really stubborn).

that said, I think people in 2023 take the time to look at what they're buying, where it comes from, and how it was made, for their personal health, and for the future of the planet. which is wasn't the case 30 years ago. and that's a very good thing.


sorry cineater, still not a vroom vroom post (last post for me, I made my point)

[Oliver]

The thing is, the fans posting on message boards are just a very small fraction of the people attending the shows. And the vast majority of the general public don't care about new songs/albums, they just want to hear the hits. So a boycott from a few online fans wouldn't change anything.

[PermissionToLand]

here we talk about the situation where fans of a band stop buying what is proposed to them, it's very simple and effective, the band has no other solution to propose something else to buy (or to end its career if they are really stubborn).

And yet that hasn't happened, and I can't think of a time it ever has. The majority of ticket buyers will always be mainstream fairweather fans who don't care. Just like the majority of people will never know the intimate details of every company they ever buy anything from.

Also, in 2023, albums don't make money anymore, touring does. So the idea that if your tours are not selling tickets, you'd instead spend all the money to record and release an album which you're basically just hoping to break even on... just doesn't really make sense. If your ticket sales are waning, you have less money than ever before to invest in an album.

[cineater]

Got my GNR race car shirt.  Like it but a medium is really a large.  Had a tag in it to buy tickets but it was tickets to a NASCAR event. 

This going to be one of those things where people ask me about it and say they never heard of it.