The thing I never really understand about scalping is why the original retailer/supplier wouldn't simply raise their prices. If graphics cards are consistently out of stock, why not simply raise prices? We're seeing that with cars as many dealerships raise prices on their inventory rather than letting people buy them at MSRP and then re-sell them for a profit.
If you're selling the items, why would you want to give that profit to scalpers? Is the issue that the seller doesn't know that demand so far exceeds supply?
With something like Tickle Me Elmo, one could assume that they didn't know in advance, but could have quickly changed the price from $20 to $80 and dampened demand as the season went on.
Could sites potentially predict demand by having some pre-registration for product sales and then predict the price better based on that? For products that are going to "drop", it could be beneficial to consumers (at least ones that have money) and sellers to have that. As one collects data, one could start predicting what price would leave you without too many scalpers based on pre-registration numbers.
Maybe the issue is that many things might be more winner-take-most or winner-take-momentum/word-of-mouth/hype markets. If everyone saw Tickle Me Elmo at $80, some other toy would get all the hype as the hot-item of the year and they wouldn't sell any. Still, for something like graphics cards, that seems less likely to be the case. People don't buy graphics cards because it's a hot item. They buy them for practical purposes. I guess one could argue that if certain crypto markets saw graphics cards as having higher prices long-term, they might try and migrate off graphics cards which could lower the demand long-term, but it seems like graphics card companies are more interested in serving gamers.
It's just always seemed odd that sellers would allow people to arbitrage their pricing like that - especially on known hot items.
The problem with just raising MSRP is that their pricing is far too transparent to do that. The brand damage caused by getting ahead of scalpers would be higher than the consumer surplus taken. Not to mention that, for at least some classes of goods, raising prices in response to demand is considered gouging and prohibited by law. Furthermore, for at least some of these goods[0], using a market-clearing price would actively harm other business goals.
In the example of game consoles, Sony and Microsoft aren't trying to sell you a PS5 or Xbox Series X because it makes them money. In fact, they take a loss on them even in "normal" market conditions. The point of the console is to lock you into a software ecosystem that they can charge developers a 30% tax in order to access.
Most of the money made from selling graphics cards is not by selling individual cards in retail packaging. The DIY and upgrade card markets are actually quite small. Most of the money comes from OEM design wins, system-integrator sales, and so on - markets in which the consumer is buying a fully-functional computer rather than parts.
What seems to have ultimately happened is that companies have used the introduction of new products to set new, higher prices. For example, Apple's 2021 product launches have consistently increased pricing over their replacements from prior years.
[0] notably game consoles, though merchandise like the Tickle Me Elmo would also qualify
> In the example of game consoles, Sony and Microsoft aren't trying to sell you a PS5 or Xbox Series X because it makes them money. In fact, they take a loss on them even in "normal" market conditions. The point of the console is to lock you into a software ecosystem that they can charge developers a 30% tax in order to access.
This is a good argument for producing more consoles, but if there isn't enough supply to clear demand then getting more of the limited stock of consoles into the hands of consumers with less money to spend on gaming is not likely to increase overall spending on the related software.
> Sony and Microsoft aren't trying to sell you a PS5 or Xbox Series X because it makes them money. In fact, they take a loss on them even in "normal" market conditions.
And yet, they dont seem to care, as they could have implemented a system to limit one console per account sort of solution. I would bet someone is just "working their KPI" at some level.
I got mine through this program. I don't know if it's still running or how long it ran for, but it was a straightforward system where I had to accept the purchase invitation from my account on my console.
Credit card processors already have tools to mitigate most of those attacks. Leveraging that should make it much harder.
Stores or manufacturers could even send a physical letter ahead of time to further validate. Of course no one wants to wait to buy anything but a few days to get a letter may be preferred to waiting years (like EVGA customers) or paying scalpers.
Manufacturer sells to distributor who sells to retail. Retail is constrained by pricing agreements. They can't sell at a higher price because the manufacturer directs the retail price. Scalpers are really just improving market place efficiency, but manufacturers know that demand is variable so they don't want to strictly limit products to the wealthiest consumers because there is plenty of data that doing so slows wider adoption. It's all about marketing and we know that right now affordability and limited quantity is an ideal mix.
I thinks some retailer don't want to irritate they're customers. Microcenter has signs all over the store indicating one video card per customer per month. They want to sell the other components.
I'm always surprised that online sellers don't just set up a queue for people who wanted to buy. (thank you steam and steam deck)
Best Buy is allocating PS5s to people in their Best Buy Club... which of course is $200/yr.
People tend to shoot the messenger when market forces are not in their favor. Any more profit that a retailer gets from raising prices on this tiny part of their inventory could get them more than that amount of flak for raising their own prices. I think many retailers are happy moving 100% of their product at normal margins while letting scalpers take all the flak for price increases. Graphics cards are just one item of many on the shelf for most retailers.
Didn’t Nvidia attempt to market silicon that would slow crypto mining to prioritize gaming customers? That doesn’t sound like they’re happy to be cleared out of inventory, but would rather cater to a specific demo that is more price sensitive. Good will has tangible value.
I was referring to retailers, not manufacturers. Obviously, to Nvidia, the economics of GPUs and the market placement of those products is of utmost interest -- it's their whole business.
I think you are missing the risk. The supplier could raise prices but there comes a point when demand slows and now the retailer is stuck with inventory. If every one else is selling below MSRP and you are selling for double, you won't get business until everyone else is sold out. Most retailers and wholesalers want a certain amount of basis points. They simply want to sell everything for X% more than they paid. They don't want to be in the speculation game. Graphics cards is mostly a function of re-purposing the supply for something it wasn't really intended for. Look back at beanie babies when they were a craze. As a retailer, you wouldn't want to get stuck with inventory you couldn't even move at a loss. I do agree that they could be a little more aggressive with selling at MSRP if demand is high and drop back to "sale" prices if demand slows. I think there are probably some legal things for some products that you can't sell for over MSVP or for less than some minimum advertised price. Additionally, some of these products can be seen as "loss leaders" in the sense that they become a trusted source for "good deals".
By raising prices, you may lose some of your customers, who unfairly penalizes the retail/manufacturer especially when politicians (and reddit and HN) happily side with sub-optimal fixed price solutions.
Pitchforking is real and very dangerous in the modern era.
So, retail / manufacturer have to let true marketplace like scalpers to provide the needed correction (albeit inefficiently).
The correction isn't "needed"; the same inventory gets sold to the same number of consumers, the scalpers just take a bit more money from front running them, reducing the net benefit of owning of the final product. And Nintendo is more worried about ensuring there's a healthy market for games than "pitchforking" when it sets its RRP. Scalpers mean they sell less.
Side thought after reading this.
Is there anyway to currently get a feed of high quality summarizations of laws passed by each congress?
By that I mean, as a voting citizen I want to watch what congresses law/executive orders do. I don't want to read the laws, or how they work, or any of the details.
I want the why, high level what does this change, and high level what was the opposition to this.
I feel like one of the things that we struggle with is 'uninformed voters' in a modern democracy. I try to stay informed but I need to cut off my time somewhere. Are there any ways for me to stay lightly informed with low effort on my part?
I co-founded a company in this space, although not focusing on summarization, and not targeted at normal citizens.
> I want to watch what congresses law/executive orders do. I don't want to read the laws, or how they work, or any of the details.
The real answer is "No you don't." Most congresses [1] pass a few hundred bills per year, and up to a thousand resolutions, and most of them are completely uninteresting to most people. On top of that, single bills can be omnibus monsters that touch 1000 subjects. That's not even touching executive orders (which are pretty minor), and regulations, which are not. There are usually a few hundred federal regulatory updates per week, which can be thousands of pages.
Jokes about government gridlock aside, the US is very big and the government does a _lot_, it's just that we're to the point where most of it is tweaking very specialized things. It's so much noise that the best way to be an informed citizen is, unfortunately, to find a few news sites you like, because it takes a large team to surface the stuff of interest to the general public.
At the risk of turning this into a news bashing political discussion, I think politico and thehill tend to have good content on congress, and are generally up front about political biases. A quick scan of those every other day will put you far ahead of most people.
All that said, both congress.gov and openstates.org (for state level stuff) offer searching and alerting, and every federal bill that's going anywhere does get a nice summary, although they are fairly verbose. But realistically you need a gatekeeper to sift through the chaff, because there's just too much happening.
More basic than summaries, in my city there is no way to easily view how an individual city council member voted any any particular motion before them. Or even to see a list of the things the council has voted on.
In order to see this information you need to wade through big PDFs versions of the council meeting minutes to find the motions. They are also backlogged by over a year in creating and publishing the minutes.
I can't tell if your joking or not, but wouldn't summarization at that level require some pretty insane AI? The closest I have seen is pretty decent and runs on some of the reddit news subreddits.
But it is far from the work of a person skilled in real summarization, because real summarization requires you to predict what I care about based on the world at large.
It's not so much summarizing the text of bills, but having an API to query just the text of bills would be really nice. Even better would be some kind of diff/git blame log of changes. I would love to know who voted for which amendments, or how a particular bit of text got into a law.
But, realistically, that would never happen as it's not information that I think people would be comfortable providing.
That's all available, fairly easily. At the federal level it's at congress.gov, including redlines for (some) amendments and versions. To be fair not every single amendment vote is available, but that's a quirk of how the legislative process works.
At the federal level, the US has a great bulk api from GPO/FDSys, including full bill text in plain, pdf, and XML.
At the state level Openstates.org does it, including with an API.
A lot of us in the space have mess with various "git diff" type solutions, but unfortunately the way bill text changes doesn't lend itself to this.
I know a few people on the commercial side have experimented with automated summarization, but it never out-competes the summaries provided by hand by the Government, and any mistakes will get you ridiculed by customers. There's a bunch of downside for no real upside.
It's amazing how many places these bots show up where you wouldn't expect. Here in Vancouver, they've been used for grabbing campsites at the provincial parks.
Yeah. They are especially bad around things where you can hold inventory with no penalty for canceling later. Which ends up in a lot of "Why can't we have nice things?" rules later.
If bots are hosted in China (or any non-US country), and purchase products to be delivered to China does this law prevent any scalping of product at all in that case?
I would guess the shipping costs would keep a lot of that (though not all of it) in line. It did used to be a big issue when the UPU subsidized shipping from China, but that's gone now.
I wondered the same - I mean, we've all seen the effectiveness of anti-robocall legislation. All folks will really have to do is avoid using the bot inside the US.
It will just wind up being a bill to show that "we have done things! We passed the bill!"
This is a great idea in concept, but sadly I don't think it'll ever work. Most etailers spend good money trying to prevent these type of bots. There are dozens of players in the anti-bot space. Unfortunately it doesn't stop the most dedicated attackers. And this is a cat and mouse game that can evolve at the speed of technology. A game that evolves at the speed of law will be out of date before it's even made it out of the draft stage.
Even if a law is written so well that there isn't a single loophole (which will never happen)... all the scalpers need to do is operate in a different country. Between botnets, proxies, re-shippers and other middle-men groups... you aren't going to stop it through the law.
Scalping is just meeting an ineffeciency in supply and demand. I don't know why we feel the need to regulate one of the basic principles of a market.
If you truly want to stop scalping, you should become more comfortable with dramatically increased MSRP and remove competitive moats around certain products. Nintendo should be able to sell the NES Classic for 13k if they want. I should be able to produce my own home-console that plays 20 year old games if I want. Those are the actual solutions to scalping.
As is so often the case, your "is just" papers over a lot of detail. When a firm sells a good for less than the bid price of the buyer, the marginal value captured by that bidder is called consumer surplus. Firms do this for many reasons: they don't want the reputational hit of running an auction, they don't consider it worth the effort, they don't anticipate a need until after the revealed demand of the market is shown, and by that time it's too late to build an apparatus. Probably others I'm not thinking of.
Scalpers capture this marginal value and in exchange provide the "service" of reallocating some of the goods to the buyers with the highest bid prices. (I put scare quotes around service here because I'm sure many consider it a pessimization.)
If you're a wealthy person, scalpers may actually be good for you, because you don't have to compete with poorer people who have more time to refresh a webpage. You can just buy the good on eBay. On the other hand, it seems totally valid for the government to decide that it is in the best interests of the people that the consumer surplus in the system devolve to actual consumers.
If someone like Shopify introduced an auction system that can be turned on/off from the click if a button, or automatically when inventory goes out too fast, that'd probably help a lot of online stores.
There’s a risk that scalpers establish a short-term monopoly over a market.
For example, say scalpers buy all of a particular model of remote control car - they can now dictate the selling price, without adding any value to the market. But of course, the opposite argument is that people will then buy competing remote control cars and the scalpers will have to reduce their prices. Thus they are merely being entrepreneurial and finding an opportunity for arbitrage.
This is one of those timeless debates with no answers. I’m sure Ancient Egypt had scalpers, and people wanted to ban them.
Indeed. This is especially important because if, say, TSMC or Nvidia increase their MSRP's, then they go go re-invest that into additional capacity to solve the supply shortage. Instead, middlemen take the markup profits and have no ability to put that towards additional production.
I do wonder if it's a bit of an backdoor anti-inflation deal thing:
- TSMC/Nvidia boards don't want to raise prices because it might cause rank-and-file consumers to feel like inflation is higher, and there's perhaps fear it could lead to a cycle of increasing across-the-board inflation on wide basket of goods.
- USA/etc offers TSMC/etc subsidies for building additional capacity to make up for the revenue/reinvestment shortfall on keeping artificially low MSRP's.
And then this is a ham-handed attempt to exert some limit on any scalping operation getting "too large" and potentially drive consumer prices down a bit more until the additional capacity (funded by govt. subsidies instead of MSRP) finally comes online.
Is that hypothesis/"mad ramblings" completely unreasonable? It might be. I just really feel that the producers should increase prices and reinvest in capacity, rather than allow middlemen to skim the arbitrage.
Chip manufacturers can't increase capacity any faster due to supply chain constraints. Raising prices wouldn't allow them to expand any faster. And most of their prices are locked in by long term production contracts anyway.
What do you mean? Nintendo could sell the NES Classic for 13k if they wanted to, but nobody would buy it. Companies choose their pricing very carefully, and there are a whole lot more factors than max value on secondary market that go into it. Nvidia is well aware they aren't going to be able to keep up with demand, but if they raise their prices too much people will consider the cards poor value and won't purchase them. Think mac pro wheels. Scalpers operate on a different playing field, and are really just parasitic.
I agree with you that scalping is a symptom of market inefficiency. But I think it occurs mostly when there are further considerations taken into account, e.g. public image and reputation.
For instance everyone knows, including organisers, that some people would be willing to pay large sums for tickets to premium events (concerts, sport, etc) but selling tickets at such price would lead to a public outcry.
We saw the reactions to Uber's surge pricing as well.
It may also be a brand strategy to let products sell out and be reported as being resold at huge prices. It creates a buzz and scarcity that may increase demand further.
Scalping is usually a short-term monopoly based in a temporary shortage, and it has the same problems (arrogation of consumer surplus and deadweight loss).
> Nintendo should be able to sell the NES Classic for 13k
That’s a somewhat different issue, it’s what happens as the result of a legally sanctioned monopoly (copyright) that has been exploited far beyond any reasonable term. It’s still a monopoly and it’s still bad.
The only reason scaplers exist is because people are willing to pay a higher price than what the scalper pays for the good. The fact that people are willing to pay the higher price shows it was priced too low.
Taking Nintendo as mentioned above, they have plenty of reason to aim for a stable, low price. The economics of their business are different than somebody, say, selling their labor by the hour. If they maximize per-console profit, they end up screwing themselves by creating a platform without many users, which is then unattractive to both game-makers and game-purchasers.
This assumes the only purpose of selling is to maximise short term yield on that particular item.
One of the reasons ticket scalpers associated with events are particularly despised is that the promoters of the event would much rather the event was affordable and full than expensive but half empty, which might be the capacity which yields the most ticket revenue.
Sometimes based on artificial scarcity created by a scalper. People are sometimes paying for a status symbol and wouldn't have purchased the item otherwise. Meaning their interest was only piqued after the item was hoarded.
All it shows is that price discrimination is needed, not that the price is too low. Indeed, raising the price may net reduce revenues if they’ve already priced the MSRP optimally on the price demand curve.
The only solution here would be to have an MSRP that’s dependent on your net worth but that’s seen as undesirable so instead we get 2 price points: scalpers and normal channels. So rather than the manufacturer or consumer seeing the benefit of price discrimination, the scalper, who’s essentially rent seeking, gets to arbitrage that opportunity.
Either ban resale for more than retail or let manufacturers alter their prices based on your price sensitivity.
The scalping only exists because the market was "unhealthy" (not efficient). What is detrimental to society and markets which are based around maximizing utility of dollar spent is the massive wealth inequality that makes it so things need to be priced so low as to actually allow a majority of the population to afford their choice of scarce resources.
This pure economist point of view feels so unwelcome & reductionist. That the market isn't taking every ounce of profit being viewed as inefficiency, this idea that prices must be as high as possible seems like a diseased view to me.
Consumers should have access to things like GPUs at a rate the manufacturer is happy to charge. There's a net benefit to society when supply isn't maximally constrained & exploited. Recently, folks are wondering whether PC gaming is going to be able to survive, when even shitty ass lower-mid range graphics cards cost as much as a console. That would be horrificly sad for computing.
> Consumers should have access to things like GPUs at a rate the manufacturer is happy to charge.
Okay, great, so you ban scalping bots. Now consumers can't buy GPUs because they're sold out, as opposed to because they're too expensive. (1)
The problem is that the supply of GPUs is constrained and there are more consumers who want GPUs than there are GPUs to sell them. Banning scalping bots is not going to solve that problem.
(1) Of course people can still resell for a profit on eBay, unless you decide to ban that too. Heck, why not just ban everything you don't like? Let's pass a law to ban poverty while we're at it.
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All that said, the act actually doesn't ban bots, it bans bots which circumvent protections that the seller put in place to block them. Which is fine by me, if a seller wants to put in a place a policy that says they will not sell to bots, I think it is fine for the government to help them enforce that policy.
> Okay, great, so you ban scalping bots. Now consumers can't buy GPUs because they're sold out, as opposed to because they're too expensive.
Scalping bots don't increase the supply of GPUs. In the scalper's absemce no more people than before will be unable to buy GPUs because of the shortage, it's just those that do manage to buy them will tend to get them earlier at a cheaper price.
> it's just those that do manage to buy them will tend to get them earlier at a cheaper price
That's the problem. It means they go to people who may not have been willing to pay what they were actually worth, while others who were willing to pay are unable to buy them because there aren't any left to sell.
If people value an item more than those who bought it, they are perfectly entitled to indicate that they would be willing to pay more on a secondary market, and see if there are any takers. Scalpers buying huge chunks of inventory and releasing it slowly to maximise yield adds no value to them.
> If people value an item more than those who bought it, they are perfectly entitled to indicate that they would be willing to pay more on a secondary market, and see if there are any takers.
By which point the item may have already been consumed (if not a durable good) or whoever bought it at the discounted price may not be willing to sell at any reasonable price. At least if scalpers get the item you know that they have little incentive to keep it for themselves.
> ...whoever bought it at the discounted price may not be willing to sell at any reasonable price. At least if scalpers get the item you know that they have little incentive to keep it for themselves.
If they're more interested in keeping it for themselves than selling it at a price the prospective buyer is willing to pay, then obviously that's not a problem. They don't value it as much as it's actually worth to the current owners, ergo no more efficient market allocation is possible.
It's a weird, cargo cultish notion of markets where asking prices are only "reasonable" if the only value an item has to its owner is how much they think they can gouge others for, and people refusing to sell items at a price because they have more incentive to keep it for themselves is seen as a problem! The actual deadweight losses are incurred when the opposite takes place: scalpers don't enjoy the stock but do restrict others from enjoying it.
The only situation in which scalpers actually help you buy something you couldn't otherwise have made an acceptable offer for is if lots of people value something at more they can actually afford, and scalpers inserting themselves in the middle prevents them from getting their hands on it at a price they could afford. But that shift in allocation isn't pro-market, it's anti poor.
Otherwise, if you can't buy it, that's because you're the one that's not willing or able to pay what it's actually worth
What you're describing as a "problem" is people beyond the wealthiest members of society having a chance at owning popular consumer goods, while the wealthy must contend with an X% chance at getting them on demand instead of 100%.
Please do keep in mind that we're talking about toys here. You don't have to be among "the wealthiest members of society" to be able to afford the market-clearing price.
It's really hard for me to accept such downtalking, the presumption that we should all have to compete & that since these are mere "toys" it's ok that we get charged 2x market rate, 4x what flagship gpu card prices were a couple years ago.
This is a sad drain on society. The way this is talked about, the justification for prices spiking, ignores so much sadness I feel for all the kids who will never have access to PC gaming ever again. Whole generations being cut off from the PC, in this one swoop.
I'd really like to see some kind of even modest go at empathy, some dawning cognition that something is lost here from those justifying the massive massive upswings in prices. So far I haven't seen the recognition of human good that seems clear to me, that we as a world have clearly lost now that this "market surplus" is eradicated & exploited. I'd just like to see some of the anti-market-surplus views at least acknowledge some of the human cost here, be willing to adopt some viewpoint that acknowledges trade-off. That doesn't assume from the start it's own correctness & properness.
The problem here is that lots of people want to buy GPUs. There's no need to "justify" an upswing in prices, because there is no central authority that sets the prices who can accept or reject your justification.
Yes I'm sympathetic but there is no solution here other than increasing the supply of GPUs or decreasing the demand. Complaining about scalpers isn't going to help with either one. Scalpers don't set the price.
In fact, what you should be willing to do is argue that NVidia and AMD should sell all their GPUs direct to consumer at an auction, so that they can capture all the consumer surplus here and re-invest it in order to expand production capacity.
> Yes I'm sympathetic but there is no solution here other than increasing the supply of GPUs or decreasing the demand. Complaining about scalpers isn't going to help with either one. Scalpers don't set the price.
This feels like the "There Is No Alternative" (TINA) and I have never been a fan of that kind of unwillingness to explore.
Video card makers have been running lottery systems. Those systems might need better defense against scalpers, better identity verification to function adequately. Sure the exploiters will keep escalating, keep trying to get the money they can & resell; we can't make perfect the enemy of the good though. We just need to keep iterating, keep trying to do the good job of getting good equipment into actual humans that want them's hands.
I'm not going to just throw my hands up & say "improvement is impossible!"
> In fact, what you should be willing to do is argue that NVidia and AMD should sell all their GPUs direct to consumer at an auction,
Again this absolute refusal to acknowledge that consumer surplus is allowed to exist. GPU makers need to get cards into actual consumers hands. They need to keep the PC gaming market alive. What you propose would destroy the entire industry these card makers exist in. Only the rich being given access to these products would destroy the market, end the product segment entirely. No one would make PC video games. Insisting we obliterate consumer surplus, milk every last oz of profit, is a shortsighted, profit-motivated view of the world, & fails to provide essential essentials.
Endless doubling down on how profit must be extracted, how it's the only possible option: it just totally misses the entire ecosystem of computing that's getting shredded to bits by inaction & exploitation. Simply saying, we need to move those profits to the GPU maker is not going to do anything to help the ecosystem.
If there are only 10,000 graphic cards available to sell - what difference does it make if these end up in the hands of 10,000 rich gamers who can afford to buy them at market price - as opposed to 10,000 randomly selected gamers who won a lottery system?
The fundamental problem is that there are only 10,000 cards. If the PC gaming market is destroyed, it will be because there are not enough cards, not because they got distributed to the wrong gamers. You are focused on the wrong end of the problem.
(In fact, you could certainly argue that the PC gaming market will be better off overall if the limited supply of cards goes to rich gamers who are more likely to spend more money on games and keep the industry alive).
You're using stupidly insulting low numbers to make a point that isn't valid. There's not like, no, cards. There's just not a lot.
Your other point about gamers not needing good/fast cards (in a follow up post) is also not super interesting to me, since all cards are at super-inflated values. Even old/used cards. For a long time RX580's were around $200. Not a blisteringly fast flagship even in it's day (spring 2017). Now they're $400. Just getting started with a basic card costs what a console does, and that's messed up. Obviously messed up.
There is for sure a supply issue here, absolutely. But with gpu miners and scalpers savaging the market, I think it's reckless beyond belief to pretend that we should just let this ride out, that we shouldn't try to help this market stay healthy.
I just cannot believe what protest there is against doing a basic good deed, trying to fight pernicious forces off. What makes you feel so strongly this way?
I'd appreciate you not calling me stupid. I could say that your attitude here comes across like a 14-year-old whose parents told him he won't be getting a new GPU for Christmas.
The 10k number was just an example, is there a number you could substitute that you think makes my point less effective? Please do.
> I just cannot believe what protest there is against doing a basic good deed, trying to fight pernicious forces off. What makes you feel so strongly this way?
I think your opinion here is fundamentally wrong-headed and short-circuiting the market in the manner you are advocating for causes worse outcomes for everyone in the long term, and often in markets that are a lot more important than GPUs and PC gaming. So I get a little bit of satisfaction from pushing back against this viewpoint where I can.
Wow man. Ouch! Some ultra-cruel shit being flung over here.
Ok, so some technicals. I don't think I called you stupid at all. I said the numbers you chose were stupidly low. Please be able to differentiate. You are not the points you make! I asked very genuinely to try to understand some of your perspective. I don't ask that of people I call stupid! I've been rebuffed, and told your only interest is because I am so "wrong-headed", which isn't really helping anything along here... I'd like to see better, I think you deserve to show a better side of yourself than that.
> I could say that your attitude here comes across like a 14-year-old whose
Look man, I've found this attempt to discuss to be super distateful un-willing to engage honestly. I already said that. You're just upping the game again and again & not replying earnestly. Please try to say something useful, please try to help the discussion engage? This is huge flame-bait. I don't think I've ever been so brash or rude. I specifically think one specific number you said is way way way off base. You're making this super nasty. While telling me I am being nasty, and a little child? I really disagree, heavily; I don't think this is called for. But that's not even my real interest here. I don't care what you have to say about me. I'm not making that the new argument.
You've refused to clash again & again. That's the most interesting thing to me, trying to explore & understand & gain & share insight. I raise points & you float off. C'mon man. Your view has not been kind to people just trying to get products without being exploited. I patently don't get it. What drives you to such strong beliefs? Why are you throwing such flame around at me? What's going on here? Tell me about yourself, how you come to feel this way. I genuinely want to know.
> I think your opinion here is fundamentally wrong-headed and short-circuiting the market in the manner you are advocating for causes worse outcomes for everyone in the long term,
How? Why? Nvidia & to a degree AMD have been trying to prevent cryptocurrencies from treading on the gaming market. There's been lotteries to try to insure broader access, but which gets gamed. Everyone else seems to agree, seems to want to try to help the regular plain old non-hostile non-money-grabbing folk get cards, at a rate somewhat like what they could. Except you. You keep insisting the market must serve itself, maximize profit. Or face vague foreboding "or else" consequences. You speak here of bad outcomes, of horrible ills, but fail to define these ends. And not defining or explaining why. (And using very personalized inappropriate senses of conflict to deflect.) Not saying anything to actually defend or explain your position. I patently don't get it. And you don't seem at all sympathetic to how hard you are hitting, which hurts. Why not be a little bit more moderate my man?
I apologize for calling you a 14-year-old, that was stupid of me. :) But I don't think the rest of what I've written has been particularly cruel or hard-hitting - honestly I'm a little shocked you've interpreted it that way.
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To answer your question: I think a lot of harm that has been done to society in the past 20-30 years has come from well-intentioned people, like yourself, trying to fix what they perceive as flaws in the market and making things worse for everyone as a result. That's why I feel strongly about this topic.
College education and healthcare in the US are the two most salient examples, where politicians step in to manipulate the market, thus making things worse in some way, and then use the harm caused by the market malfunction that they themselves introduced to justify further manipulation - ad infinitum.
Let's talk about what happened with toilet paper during the pandemic as a great example of why "price gouging" is actually exactly what you want in a free market. Most people keep maybe 1-2 weeks worth of toilet paper in their house. Why hold onto more when it's easily available at the store? But as soon as people got worried, they rushed to the store to buy months worth of toilet paper at a time. Stores didn't raise prices because they didn't want to be accused of heartless price gouging. So of course they immediately sold out of toilet paper.
Anyone that actually wanted toilet paper couldn't find any, at any price.
Now that supply was an issue, if you happened to be in a store and saw they had some toilet paper in stock, you'd immediately buy it regardless of whether you really needed any - because toilet paper is hard to find! And since it costs the same as always and you're going to need it eventually, why not buy it now?
If stores had simply increased prices by 10x as their inventory got low, and then gradually lowered them back as it was replenished, the entire stupid panic would have been avoided. Yes, some people would end up paying 10x the price for toilet paper, if they really, really needed it. But guess what? At least there was toilet paper on the shelf! The alternative - what happened in reality - is that these people really needed toilet paper, and were willing and able to buy it for 10x the price - and there was none available, at any price, for anyone to buy!
The reason stores were afraid to raise their prices - is because they were afraid of people who would make wrong-headed arguments about the market like the ones you're making here. The pressure to not let the market operate normally made things worse for everyone.
As another, less harmless example: we would all be so much better off if we could simply institute a refundable tax on carbon emissions and increase the tax until emissions dropped below a sustainable level. But a lack of understanding of market dynamics and the value and superiority of price signals, etc. is a large part of what is blocking this and potentially dooming humanity and modern civilization.
The same lack of understanding I perceive in your writing here - is why government subsidies made college education more expensive for everyone in the US - why government interference has led the US healthcare system to be the most expensive and least efficient in the world - and why we are on a path to fail to effectively address climate change. That's why I feel strongly about this topic.
Also I reject your claim that lack of access to the latest and greatest GPUs is going to shred the PC gaming industry. Graphics are nice but they don't make a game fun. If people have to spend another year playing games with the settings turned down a bit, so what?
Seriously. If you ever meet any of these people in real life, take their car keys and remind them the market dictates the price of all goods and the police are a statist intervention.
I sometimes watch 'drops' from a few brands, and it's jaw dropping how fast some of the items disappear, and I'd always wonder if there were bots that make organized efforts to buy these items for resale. Even things like keychains sell out in moments, and pop up in secondary markets almost as fast.
yes there are bots just for this. brands like Nike and Supreme have big problems with this. Some arent even bots they are just people with a browser open, hoping to buying to resell/flip.
its made easier by the fact that so many websites use the same ecommerce platforms which makes one bot work across thousands of sites.
Is there any real difference between a 'bot and a corporation? If you hired people to scalp items, would this bill allow that? If so, what's the point?
I think there is still a point. Lets think about this from a scalpers perspective.
I want to make as much money as possible. I know there will always be a market for products people can't get on the traditional market. I can clearly identify these ahead of time and spend thousands buying them.
If when I use automated bots to buy, my products then become illegal's aka 'slightly harder' to sell. That might reduce my income.
If I then have to employ people to click the same buttons as normal people click using the same software normal people use, and not circumventing order limits or 1 per person rules. That means I can't get products as easily or cheaply and reduces my profit.
I see two solutions to scalpers. Incentivize or require a demand based market. So that prices shoot way up on their own. (bad for many reasons) or cut into profit margins and restrict overall volume of the people that will create that demand based market legally or illegibly.
Basically it's the same reason to outlaw robocalling specifically. The point is to raise costs to bad actors enough that some (and hopefully many) get out of the game.
This is a good first step, but ultimately it's nothing but a band-aid.
We need to make it illegal for toy manufacturers to negligently mis-plan for the holidays, leaving millions of children disappointed.
If it is found that a toy manufacturer could have produced more stock, but failed to, through malice or incompetence, they should be fined at the very least.
A simple underproduction (due to waste/risk avoidance or mere strategy) would create more litigation.
Which companies do you think can afford this kind of regulation? The mom and pop shop or Walmart?
Even if you ignore all of that, failure to sell enough sounds like a bizarre reason for a fine and would push the moral expectations of the law everyone has (murder, theft, violence except in self defense) even farther from the actual law of the land. To give you one example of such type of law, look at the subsidies the US taxpayers provide to billionaire sugar producers. You could easily argue that one of the most diabetic countries on the planet should not subsidize sugar, yet it still happens. These types of action lead me (and I expect others) to have a much lower respect for authority and the law
I can't think of too many downsides to making bot scalping illegal, making it illegal to misunderstand demand seems more fraught......unless this is sarcasm.
The Commerce Clause has been interpreted extremely loosely in recent decades. If you can ban medical marijuana because it might travel across state lines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich), you can ban scalping on similar grounds.
by "I have a feeling", it means I don't really know. I qualified this by saying I'm not a lawyer.
I'll just go out on a limb and say first amendment reasons? It's kind of hand-wavy, but it's pretty broad and I can appreciate that it's applicable for so many forms of protection (do you like those t-shirts printed with illegal source code? I don't know. Don't ask me for analysis here.)
If you're selling the items, why would you want to give that profit to scalpers? Is the issue that the seller doesn't know that demand so far exceeds supply?
With something like Tickle Me Elmo, one could assume that they didn't know in advance, but could have quickly changed the price from $20 to $80 and dampened demand as the season went on.
Could sites potentially predict demand by having some pre-registration for product sales and then predict the price better based on that? For products that are going to "drop", it could be beneficial to consumers (at least ones that have money) and sellers to have that. As one collects data, one could start predicting what price would leave you without too many scalpers based on pre-registration numbers.
Maybe the issue is that many things might be more winner-take-most or winner-take-momentum/word-of-mouth/hype markets. If everyone saw Tickle Me Elmo at $80, some other toy would get all the hype as the hot-item of the year and they wouldn't sell any. Still, for something like graphics cards, that seems less likely to be the case. People don't buy graphics cards because it's a hot item. They buy them for practical purposes. I guess one could argue that if certain crypto markets saw graphics cards as having higher prices long-term, they might try and migrate off graphics cards which could lower the demand long-term, but it seems like graphics card companies are more interested in serving gamers.
It's just always seemed odd that sellers would allow people to arbitrage their pricing like that - especially on known hot items.