• @pdxfed
    3•19 days ago

    1, how amazing you get to see an opera there, I had a trip planned at some point but got cancelled. Hope you have a great show!

    1. Arts orgs are important and critical pieces to society that are, in the US, funded only at the whim of the rich, which is why they’re constantly failing, going under, curing seasons, etc. it doesn’t have to be like that, of course. I googled some country comparisons and found a 2005 Canadian report showing the UK at 5x per capital spending and France at 10x spending compared to the US. I saw another from 2022 that showed italy’s approach is similar to the US and has low per capita public spending ~£7.5pp which is still above the US but very low compared to nations with more firm public support and funding. The lack of funding means basic 2024 items means basic things like a mobile purchase are at the whim of other essential items each year for budgeting.

    2. Italy maybe lucky, but like suffers from the same monopolization of ticketing and venue purchasing other countries doo–and any company needing the services are at the whim of the software company to deliver a quality product. They, of course, are a monopoly and don’t. Many companies are trying to pretend mobile web doesn’t exist and are forcing users to download and app to interact with them so they can scrape more data to sell. I’m some ways I’m glad for a crappy mobile experience considering privacy.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      8•19 days ago

      I should explain, here’s how I ended up on this page:

      • Doing a crossword, answer was “La Scala”
      • So I looked that up, read about the theater on Wikipedia
      • Then I found it on the map
      • Then i checked out pictures of it
      • Then I clicked through to the web site
      • Curious what people pay for tickets there, I found that page

      The only opera I’ve been to so far was in Vienna. They have a tourist option where you can stand in the back, under the seats good people sit in, for like 5 euros. My friend and I did that with the other filthy travellers until we couldn’t stand any longer, about 30 minutes.

      Your points are totally spot on, but I thought some context might be important here.

      • @pdxfed
        1•19 days ago

        Heh, thanks for the context and no worries my response was probably way too detailed for a community around ugly software, which this page certainly was. I should probably just have up voted and moved on! There are lots of cheap tickets to operas, matinees and previews (before show officially opens, like a dress rehearsal++) are a great way to see incredible things on a peasant’s budget in almost any city.

        I’m not a software engineer, just a lowly user, but I habitually dig into the “whys” when things are broken and it always comes back to resource allocation and it’s hard to get away from.