When it comes to online ticketing, being radically self-reliant will only get you so far.
Scores of Burners found that out the hard way on April 10, when the annual Burning Man ticket Main Sale devolved into a frustrating and broken mess. Yup, that’s right, there were some serious technical issues — and people are pissed.
The Main Sale, which this year offered up approximately 23,000 tickets and 10,000 vehicle passes, is widely known to be a bit of a crap shoot. You either luck out and get a chance to buy two tickets after waiting in digital line for some unknown amount of time, or you don’t. There seems to be neither rhyme nor reason as to why some fortunate souls can purchase tickets and others can’t, and many Burners have resigned themselves to this ugly truth.
That is, they had. Until today.
“We are experiencing unexpected technical issues with today’s ticket sale,” tweeted the Burning Man organization a full hour and 25 minutes after the sale’s 12 p.m. PT start time. “We’re sorry for the difficulty and are looking into what happened. We will share more info when it’s available.”
The unexpected technical issues reported by Burning Man ranged from would-be buyers being booted out of their place in line to being incorrectly admonished for alleged digital cheating, with some being told all tickets were sold out while others were still merrily purchasing away.
There were also reports of hidden buttons and demands for nonexistent access codes.
Roughly three hours after the sale started, with no additional update from Burning Man as to what exactly was going on, many of those still waiting in digital purgatory had their web browsers refresh only tell them that they were now too early for the sale.
Image: screenshot / burning man
And yeah, that went over about as well as you’d expect.
Roughly 15 minutes later a new message appeared: “The Main Sale has ended.”
Sooo @burningman…Is “the sale over” or are “tickets sold out?” Because those are two different things.
Clarity and communication are needed for the hundreds of thousands who spent hours waiting with no idea of what happened or what to expect next. #burningmanpic.twitter.com/aCrA1F64aQ
Thankfully, however, we hear there are still some tickets available for sale. You’ll just need to pick them up at the trash fence, right next to the Daft Punk set.
On Wednesday, Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN reported Smart has a torn left oblique and could be out until the Eastern Conference Finals should his team advance that far.
Smart, 25, averaged 8.9 points and 4.0 assists per game this season, shooting 42.2 percent from the field and 36.4 percent from three. His stats don’t tell the full story of his impact on the Celtics, however, as he also offers suffocating defense on the perimeter and excellent leadership for a team that struggled to find its identity for much of the 2018-19 season.
That leadership earned him the team’s Red Auerbach Award this season:
Smart largely stayed healthy this season and played 80 games, so his oblique injury has to be concerning for a Celtics team trying to make a championship push.
In his absence, Jaylen Brown will likely move into the starting lineup, while Terry Rozier should receive more playing time as well. Brad Wanamaker may also play a larger role for Boston.
The leaders of the 27 EU countries remaining in the European Union have agreed to an extension of Brexit, the chairman of EU summits said in a tweet early on Thursday.
Donald Tusk, the European Council president, said in his tweet that he would now be meeting British Prime Minister Theresa May to secure her agreement.
Tusk’s tweet did not say how long the extension would be, but several news agencies reported earlier it would be until the end of October, with a review in June.
May had come to the summit requesting a delay until June 30 but had acknowledged she would be willing to extend that date.
The British Parliament has repeatedly rejected a withdrawal deal negotiated with the EU, leading to the deadlock over Britain’s long-awaited departure.
EU27 has agreed an extension of Art. 50. I will now meet PM @theresa_may for the UK government’s agreement. #Brexit
Donald Trump continues to refuse to hand over his tax returns, saying “I won’t do it” because he said he is being audited by the IRS. | Ethan Miller/Getty Images
The denial will leave it to the courts to decide the scope of Congress’s power to demand records from a sitting president.
UPDATE: The Treasury Department will not turn over President Donald Trump’s tax returns by a Wednesday deadline set by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal and will consult with the Justice Department on the request, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said tonight.
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The Trump administration is poised to formally reject House Democrats’ bid to seize the president’s tax returns, setting up an epic legal battle that could rise all the way to the Supreme Court.
The expected denial, foreshadowed by Trump on Wednesday, would leave it to the courts to decide the scope of Congress’s power to demand records from a sitting president. The rejection also ensures the matter will remain a prominent issue throughout much of Trump’s third year in office as 2020 Democratic candidates hammer Trump over broken promises and many release their own returns.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.), who is spearheading the effort to extract Trump’s returns from the Internal Revenue Service, declined to comment after Trump scoffed at his request. Democrats have made clear they intend to force the issue, though they have not spelled out their legal strategy.
Before leaving for a trip to Texas, Trump said: “I won’t do it” because he said he is being audited by the IRS. He also said voters aren’t interested: “I got elected last time — the same exact issue, with same intensity, which wasn’t very much because, frankly, the people don’t care,” he told reporters.
The Treasury Department has not formally responded to Neal’s request, which gave the administration until Wednesday to hand over six years’ worth of Trump’s personal and business tax filings. An agency spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
Denial of the request would mark the administration’s latest snub of House Democrats who are intent on using their oversight authority to investigate large swaths of the administration and, in some cases, Trump’s personal and business activities.
Neal is relying on an arcane law that allows the head of Congress’s tax committees to examine anyone’s confidential tax information. It says that the Treasury secretary “shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified in such request.”
A Trump lawyer, William Consovoy, has urged Treasury to reject the inquiry, saying lawmakers need a legitimate legislative reason to see the returns. Some, though not all, legal experts agree, saying the courts have put limits on lawmakers’ investigative powers.
It will likely take months, at a minimum, for the legal system to sort it out, potentially pushing the issue beyond the 2020 election and spoiling Democrats’ hopes of highlighting in the campaign any irregularities — or worse — they find in the returns.
“This is uncharted territory,” said Thomas Hungar, former general counsel for the House of Representatives. “It would be surprising for it to take less than months, and it could easily take a year or more to get a final decision.”
“It’s obviously a big case, so I would think a court is going to want to take its time and think through the issues pretty carefully,” said Hungar, now a partner at the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP.
Democrats want Trump’s returns to help answer a long list of questions about his finances, from how much he pays in taxes to his connections to Russia.
But Democrats also say they have a sound policy reason to get the returns, arguing they need to be able to vet the IRS’s audits of the president. The agency has a policy dating to the 1970s of auditing every president, though Democrats say they know little about how those examinations work, including how rigorous they are or if they even really happen. They point to an episode from the Nixon administration when the IRS initially blessed President Nixon’s tax returns only to backpedal when a subsequent audit by Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation found he actually owed almost $500,000.
Republicans call that eyewash, saying Democrats are less concerned with overseeing IRS audits than with having an opportunity to search for things in Trump’s taxes they could use to embarrass him. They also warn that forcing him to give up his tax information could spur retaliation by Republicans seeking to publicize Democrats’ tax records.
The next step would likely be Neal either issuing a subpoena to compel Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to turn over the filings, said Hungar, or the Massachusetts Democrat could go to court seeking an order that the administration hand over the information.
The administration has an incentive to stall in hopes that Republicans can retake the House in next year’s elections.
“The Trump administation will consider itself the winner as long as the tax returns aren’t turned over before the 2020 elections,” said Charles Tiefer, a former acting general counsel for the House who now teaches at the University of Baltimore’s law school. “They probably don’t want it to be turned over at all, but it matters much less after the 2020 election.”
He said Neal “absolutely” has a good case: “The statute says the Treasury secretary quote shall unquote turn over the files — it couldn’t be any more emphatically clear if it was tattooed on Mnuchin.”
Trump has defied, ever since he first began running for president, a decades-old tradition in which presidents and White House contenders have voluntarily released their tax returns. In recent days, as Neal’s April 10 deadline began to loom, Trump’s aides made clear he had no intention of giving up his returns.
YouTube creator Logan Paul is teasing an appearance by Alex Jones on his video podcast, Impaulsive. Jones has been banned from the platform since August.
Alex Jones is still banned on YouTube, but he’ll be making an appearance on the platform once again thanks to Logan Paul.
YouTuber Logan Paul posted a tweet to his almost 5 million Twitter followers on Wednesday teasing an upcoming episode of his video podcast, Impaulsive. The 4-second-long clip features conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in-studio cursing and yelling while Paul and his co-hosts laugh along.
The Impaulsive episode featuring an appearance from Alex Jones is scheduled to go live tomorrow. Paul’s video podcast has its own dedicated YouTube channel with almost 1.5 million subscribers.
Alex Jones, who is currently being sued by the parents of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, has been banned from YouTube since last summer when the company shut down his InfoWars channel. YouTube also deleted InfoWars-run channels that attempted to operate as a workaround for Jones to stream on the video platform.
However, while YouTube policy prohibits Jones from running an account, there’s currently no such rule that stops a users banned from the platform from appearing in another YouTube users’ videos. While this makes sense for educational content where, for example, it would be newsworthy for an interview with Jones to appear, it has also given the conspiracy theorist a way to get back on the site and reach YouTube viewers.
The Impaulsive appearance won’t be the first time Alex Jones makes his way back on YouTube. ones was most recently a guest on the popular Joe Rogan Experience channel earlier this year. However, Rogan’s fans certainly skew older than Paul’s fanbase of young YouTube addicts.
With nearly 19 million subscribers on his main channel, Logan Paul is one of YouTube’s biggest creators. While the video podcast will be uploaded to a smaller channel, Alex Jones will have an opportunity to appear in front of a YouTube audience that may not even be that familiar with him or what he’s known for. With the ever present problem of radicalization on YouTube, this should certainly be at least somewhat concerning.
Paul has recently shown interest in some of the internet’s conspiratorial corners. The YouTube creator released a film about the flat earth movement last month. Many had worried the controversial YouTuber was going to promote the flat earth conspiracy, but the movie turned out to be a mockumentary poking fun at the whole thing.
Still, though, Paul is known for making incredibly bad content decisions to the detriment of his young fanbase before. Judging by the 4-second clip on Twitter, it seems very possible we’ll be adding Alex Jones’ Impaulsive appearance to that list.
We’ve been through a lot of iterations of the KFC Colonel over the years, but the latest version might be the weirdest.
Instead of hiring a famous celebrity to play the Colonel, the chain created a computer-generated “Instagram influencer” Colonel, which the company has labeled a “Virtual Influencer Colonel.“
Say what you will about KFC, fried chicken, or Instagram influencers, you have the admit that the new Colonel is at least a little bit attractive. I’m basically a lesbian separatist, and I can say that.
Virtual Influencer Colonel” could totally sell me on corporate mass-produced chicken. He’s just that urbane and sophisticated.
“Virtual Influencer Colonel” has all the stereotypical hallmarks of a handsome metrosexual man: high cheekbones, Warby Parker-style glasses, a smug smile, absolutely phenomenal skin, perfect posture, and salt and pepper hair.
And a bunch of people on Twitter agree that the new Colonel is at least kinda hot.
ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported Shepard would receive $21.3 million guaranteed.
Shepard set career highs in receptions (66) and receiving yards (872) while adding four touchdown catches in 2018. Football Outsiders ranked him 42nd in DYAR (defense-adjusted yards above replacement) among the 84 wideouts with at least 50 targets.
In a vacuum, re-signing Shepard makes sense for the Giants. He was entering the final year of his rookie deal and at age 25, he is in the middle of his prime playing years. A little over $10 million annually isn’t an overpay, either. According toSpotrac, he’s tied with Tyler Lockett for 20th in average salary for wide receivers.
This deal is a little surprising, though, after New York signed Golden Tate to afour-year, $37.5 millioncontract. Shepard and Tate aren’t mirror images of one another but have some overlapping skills.
Dan Duggan @DDuggan21
Interesting. The Tate signing seemed like it might signal the end of Shepard’s days in NY. Good move to lock up a homegrown player early for a change https://t.co/pKZdtPR5a7
Patrik [No C] Walker @VoiceOfTheStar
Tate = Slot.
Shepard = Slot.
Explain it to me like I’m five.
Ralph Vacchiano @RVacchianoSNY
For what it’s worth, the Giants don’t view Sterling Shepard and Golden Tate as two of the same player, as so many do. They see them both as capable of playing the slot and on the outside. They think their skills can complement each other, not just overlap.
According toSchefter, the Giants received interest from other teams regarding a possible trade for Shepard, but New York clearly sees him as a big part of the offense going forward. He was already expected to pick up some of the slack in the passing game after the team traded Odell Beckham Jr. to the Cleveland Browns.
Between trading Beckham and giving Shepard a long-term extension, general manager Dave Gettleman is clearly building the Giants offense to his preferences this offseason.
US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would have to mobilise more of the military at the US border with Mexico after listening to stories from people attending a Republican fundraiser in Texas about migrants crossing the border.
“I’m going to have to call up more military,” Trump said without elaborating.
The president interrupted his discussion with Republican donors in the city of San Antonio in south-central Texas to bring in reporters to listen to the stories about the border.
“Many, many dead people,” Trump said, referring to migrants who he said had died along the journey.
Trump, who drew sharp criticism for falsely saying during the 2016 presidential campaign that Mexico was sending rapists and drug runners to the United States, said on Wednesday that those comments were tame compared to the stories he had heard since.
Over the last year, Al Jazeera has spoken to many residents along the border who have critcised Trump’s characterisation of the southern frontier. Humanitarian workers in the region have also said that the politicial climate created by Trump has made doing their work harder.
The president has made immigration a signature issue of his presidency and of his re-election campaign. He declared a national emergency over the issue earlier this year in an effort to redirect funding from Congress to build a wall along the US southern border – a move that’s being challenged in the courts.
Last year, Trump sent thousands of troops to the border as large waves of mostly Central American migrants and asylum seekers made their way north.
There are currently about 5,000 active-duty and National Guard troops near the border, though that number fluctuates.
“We support our federal partners,” Pentagon spokesman Army Lieutenant Colonel Jamie Davis said when asked about Trump’s comments.
Trump in February deployed an additional 3,750 US troops to the country’s southwestern border to support Customs and Border Protection agents.
Later that month, Democratic governors of states including Wisconsin, New Mexico and California withdrew their National Guard troops, saying there was not enough evidence of a security crisis to justify keeping them there.
Democrats prepare legislation
Trump’s comments on Wednesday came as the immigration debate ramps up on the southern border and in Washington.
Democrats are reportedly working on bills to address the surge of families entering the US. House Democrats plan to introduce legislation soon addressing the recent waves of Central American migrants reaching the border. Senate Democrats are pursuing multiple tracks, including exploring whether talks with the White House might be feasible.
Democrats accuse Trump of “manufacturing a crisis” at the border by aggressively detaining migrants caught entering between official ports of entry and slowing the processing of asylum seekers, which can take months or longer.
Trump has also moved to cut nearly $500m in aid to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, whose citizens have trekked towards the US in growing numbers. He has curbed the number of asylum applications that authorities process. He has been blocked by a federal court from forcing refugees to wait in Mexico while their cases are decided. And he has warned he’ll close the southwest border, a threat he’s intermittently eased and renewed.
The US president accuses Democrats of “obstructing”, and refusing “to act”.
A woman’s recent Lyft horror story involving an inappropriate driver has become yet another reminder that safety issues can be hard to navigate when using ride-hailing apps. But as a passenger, you do, in fact, have several different options you can take during and after a bad ride.
Let’s say you’re coming home late at night, alone and with your home address plugged into the app. Using this guide, you can better know what to do if the driver starts harassing you — whether you’re in a Lyft or Uber.
First, if anything life-threatening goes down in a car, call the police on your phone immediately. Uber has its safety center always clickable within the app and a dedicated 911 button. Other safety features introduced last year on the Uber app include a contact list you can set up to notify friends and family about a situation.
If you don’t want to escalate it to the police (totally understandable), but feel uncomfortable and don’t want this person to ever drive you or really anyone ever again, you need to let the company know.
After the ride, in the Lyft app you can report driver behavior in the “Get Help” section. The woman got in touch with Lyft’s 24/7 safety team, which is always an option on the Lyft website, even mid-ride.
Before any decisions about the driver’s status are made, at this point you can at least be assured that you and your account won’t ever be matched with the driver you’re reporting if you book a car in the future.
I have already contacted your safety team. They have yet to send me the email with the official report and nothing was actually done to reassure me that this man would be fired.
All of Uber’s safety info is explained on their website, including information about continuous background checks that are supposed to catch any drivers breaking the law after their initial screening. The company also advises double-checking you’re getting into the correct car.
An Uber spokesperson pointed me to the community guidelines that state, “Actions that threaten the safety of drivers and riders will be investigated and, if confirmed, lead to permanent deactivation of your account.” Sure enough, inappropriate language like “overly personal questions” or comments that are “aggressive, sexual, discriminatory, or disrespectful” qualify.
The woman wrote on Twitter Tuesday afternoon that the driver was fired and no longer on the Lyft platform. She spoke to someone at Lyft Wednesday, who told her immediate action was taken to deactivate the driver involved in the incident.
Lyft did not respond to our request for comment on the woman’s ride.
The rating part of a ride-sharing trip is another chance to call out or raise attention to a problematic experience or driver. A low rating or complaint can even mean a driver is deactivated. Uber says its 24/7 safety team reviews ratings feedback and follows up on reports that sound like community guideline violations.
And as seen with this woman’s experience, getting on social media can also make sure the company is aware of the issue and does something. Lyft and Uber support teams are quick to respond online and can connect you to the appropriate teams or contacts within the company — just tag @Uber_Support or @AskLyft in a post or DM the accounts.
This all might not be as satisfying as immediately clicking a button and kicking the driver permanently from the app, but you’ve got some options.
(@crepesvites) 
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