As someone outside the US, I think the cost of Las Vegas is only a small aspect of the slump. When you factor in the cost of flights and other destinations you may be visiting, Vegas being expensive is often only driving up the total trip cost proportionately.
There have been several situations in the last 12 months where the desire to go to the US (and Vegas, in this case, for conferences) just isn't there, as we are hearing so many terrible stories about travellers being harassed or unwelcome when trying to enter the US, due to the current Government. Anecdotally, this has been the reason I've heard from Canadians who are also considering travel to the same conferences.
> we are hearing so many terrible stories about travellers being harassed or unwelcome when trying to enter the US
There have been a few stories like that, but that is not a new thing. The US has been horrible to incoming tourists for a long time. You get treated like a criminal just for wanting to visit. I've got a few of stories of my own like that, going back decades.
Chalk this up to revulsion with the US president and his actions, across approximately the rest of the world.
The Beatles (especially John) also hated the tedium of re-recording vocals to layer them, as is common in audio production to improve the impact of vocals in recordings.
Their engineer ended up coming up with a technical approach we call ADT (Automatic double-tracking) to artificially duplicate and layer the vocals without requiring the artist(s) to re-record vocals.
IIRC, Richard Carpenter took this to the Nth level. He found the recording equipment with the largest number of tape tracks - 28 - and used them all to layer Karen's voice.
She had an amazing voice, but she also stood out because of his technical nuancing of their sound.
I'm super late with this reply, but they were also the first to close-mic drums. Before that, drums were always recorded with a couple of mics above the kit.
Many years ago I operated the largest nationwide online DVD rental business in my country. Our warehousing evolved from alphabetical to numerical, with layout changes along the way. Eventually we handed the rearchiving of DVDs to the database itself and allowed it to allocate blocks of scanned in DVDs that were being returned. New content also was allocated by this system.
It was incredibly fun seeing things like cached new releases going straight to dispatch rather than going into the warehouse. Blocks of returning stock would be allocated to warehouse sections that had gaps that had the physical size of the block of DVDs that were being checked in.
Obviously, those empty areas were most commonly rotating stock, so over time the warehouse would become more active in areas, requiring a reallocation of stock to allow walking lanes for picking staff to not become congested. Fun times and all done on early Dell AXIMs with upgraded batteries, red laser scanners, and this new thing called wifi.
I was fortunate enough a number of years ago to see a re-screening of the film at a festival with Richard E. Grant present doing an interview at the event. We all smuggled cheap bottles of wine in and got arseholed rewatching it. Fantastic stuff.
The Save the Kiwi trust mentioned on a Kiwi release day that when releasing Kiwis back into the wild there's a weight that the Kiwi must reach (1kg) before having a chance to survive against ferrets, rats, and stoats.
Perhaps the larger egg ensures a reduced exposure time between birth and 1kg for young Kiwis, which has helped those with larger eggs propagate more successfully?
I still recall the workaround to avoid restarting with some of these, once to the bewildered confusion of the ageing IT teacher looking over my shoulder in the library:
At the ">" ROM debugger prompt, type the following lines,
pressing Return after each:
There have been several situations in the last 12 months where the desire to go to the US (and Vegas, in this case, for conferences) just isn't there, as we are hearing so many terrible stories about travellers being harassed or unwelcome when trying to enter the US, due to the current Government. Anecdotally, this has been the reason I've heard from Canadians who are also considering travel to the same conferences.