My wife and I have visited several European countries, and I just don't agree. Switzerland is the land of many fees, followed by Iceland and other nordic countries. Germany, France, and the UK are also expensive. The going "low" price in Iceland right now for petrol is $8.74 USD/gallon.
(Did you know that most of the public transport in the UK is owned by German and Dutch companies? They can rack up prices with little consequence.)
The US has gotten more expensive to be sure, but IMO most of our high-cost problems stem from consolidated industries with regulatory capture (healthcare, farming+food+pesticide, tax prep, etc.) and low wages for the bottom 50%, not fees.
Managed to see them in London a few months back, can definitely echo the recommendation! (The warm up act could have done with a sound check but I was very impressed with his playing an OG GameBoy as a MIDI controller)
This always gets the pearl-clutchers out of the woodwork - you're gathering a few hundred of the world's fittest people in peak performance mode in the same place for a few weeks, giving most of them a huge amount of downtime, what do you THINK is going to happen? (This is the general 'you', not YOU)
Providing free access to make sure things are happening safely is not what's 'encouraging the behaviour' here :D
Totally personally skewed perspective, but thinking about the number of systems I've installed VLC on, some multiple times through rebuilds etc, 6 billion feels like a huge underestimate!
I'm guessing that's just from the main website. It's distributed so wildly I'd wager we'll never know the complete number. But yeah, I've also must have installed it at least 50 times or so, since the first time I came across it.
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