I have more substantial disagreement, but I want to do a quick check;
I think it is fine for the organizers to include in that price things like informal financial aid (the subsidizing of the lower tear tickets),...
This seemed to me like one of the central examples of things you were against. Was I misreading?
If the cost (that is, the at-cost price of the venue space, food, etc) of an event is $50 per person, and the audience is totally bimodal (there’s fifty students who can only afford $25, and fifty SWEs making $500k a year) do you think it’s fine to have a student ticket for $25 and a SWE ticket for $75, with the SWEs cross-subsidizing the students?
(By my read you’d prefer there be three tickets; a $25, a $50, and a $75. I’m asking if you’d be fine with the subsidy in the two-ticket example.)
No real community is going to be perfectly bimodal like that, but in the hypothetical I think that is maybe fine? The events I am thinking of where this sort of thing has really bothered me had a ticket marked as “software engineer making $200k/yr” or something like that that cost hundreds of dollars, while other tickets that get you the same seats cost tens of dollars. When price differences are that dramatic, it becomes very obviously exploitation, not a student subsidy.
I also think it is fine to do as bay solstice is doing, having a $2000k ticket marked as “patron” or something to that effect, because that makes it clear that nobody, no matter how rich, is expected to pay that, it is just an opportunity to making a charitable donation on top of the ticket price conveniently packaged in the same transaction. I don’t know if they are sending such people letters documenting a $1965 tax deductible donation or not, but they probably should.
No real community is going to be perfectly bimodal like that..
Yep, I’m making a frictionless vacuum spherical cow example.
My guess is the bay solstice organizers aren’t sending a tax deduction because the obvious-on-first-pass setup is to set things up like people are buying tickets, but I guess it’s plausible the underlying organization is a nonprofit? I know a few SF/F cons that I think have a track for larger donations to count as tax deductible.
I have more substantial disagreement, but I want to do a quick check;
This seemed to me like one of the central examples of things you were against. Was I misreading?
If the cost (that is, the at-cost price of the venue space, food, etc) of an event is $50 per person, and the audience is totally bimodal (there’s fifty students who can only afford $25, and fifty SWEs making $500k a year) do you think it’s fine to have a student ticket for $25 and a SWE ticket for $75, with the SWEs cross-subsidizing the students?
(By my read you’d prefer there be three tickets; a $25, a $50, and a $75. I’m asking if you’d be fine with the subsidy in the two-ticket example.)
No real community is going to be perfectly bimodal like that, but in the hypothetical I think that is maybe fine? The events I am thinking of where this sort of thing has really bothered me had a ticket marked as “software engineer making $200k/yr” or something like that that cost hundreds of dollars, while other tickets that get you the same seats cost tens of dollars. When price differences are that dramatic, it becomes very obviously exploitation, not a student subsidy.
I also think it is fine to do as bay solstice is doing, having a $2000k ticket marked as “patron” or something to that effect, because that makes it clear that nobody, no matter how rich, is expected to pay that, it is just an opportunity to making a charitable donation on top of the ticket price conveniently packaged in the same transaction. I don’t know if they are sending such people letters documenting a $1965 tax deductible donation or not, but they probably should.
Yep, I’m making a frictionless vacuum spherical cow example.
My guess is the bay solstice organizers aren’t sending a tax deduction because the obvious-on-first-pass setup is to set things up like people are buying tickets, but I guess it’s plausible the underlying organization is a nonprofit? I know a few SF/F cons that I think have a track for larger donations to count as tax deductible.