Monopolies take advantage of consumers... who knew?

To the surprise of no one, Ticketmaster's monopoly on online ticket sales for many events produced chaos and ugliness and incredibly inflated prices for Taylor Swift's first in-person tour in over four years.

People waited in online queues for hours, and often still couldn't buy tickets. Websites crashed and families were likely damaged due the stress. There are reports of seats going for $12,000 or more, and the fact that there are likely some people willing to part with that much for a few hours with their idol is sobering. But I guess "freedom" means we can do whatever wacky things we want to do with our money. 

I will not be engaging in such weirdness, thank you. But Taylor Swift means something special to a large chunk of Millennials and that pent up demand to experience her talent live connects directly with all sorts of inflationary forces in today's economy.

After a couple years not traveling to see relatives at the holidays, Americans are definitely going this year, whatever the cost. Airline prices are up over 40 percent but airports are expecting record passengers passing through next week.

Our national (and international) return to normal means trouble for overextended online platforms, which invested in hiring and expansion at huge costs when everyone was stuck in the virtual world. It turns out that humans prefer in-person to virtual, which is bad news for Zuckerberg and Meta and those wacky headsets they want to foist on us. 

Twitter is in a death spiral, which is supremely entertaining for those of us who enjoy a bit of schadenfreude over rich people screwing up. Cryptocurrency is being exposed as the pyramid scheme it is. Facebook and Amazon are shedding workers, and what a nice pre-holiday surprise that must be for thousands of skilled workers. 

I assume those fired workers will end up just fine in the end. Skilled talent always does, though that is easy to say for an old guy not employed by one of our nation's "masters." 

I admit that I would be inconvenienced by Amazon decreasing its services and efficiencies, but I can and do live without Twitter. If Facebook vanished, I would just shrug. 

I'm sure there are some frantic parents who have promised children those golden tickets to see Taylor Swift and who now have to break the news that they simply can't obtain those treasures. There will be tears. 

And then we can get back to agonizing over a disgraced man running for president again, over our continuing suffering due to returning to standard time, and over how clunky the Disney app is on Xfinity.

Now that last item has really been bugging me.