I’m actually a huge fan of scalping and hope it happens more. Here’s why: many of your more dim-witted, more or less middle-class “free market” bros will gladly tell you that the value of a good is set by supply and demand. Hospital care is so expensive because there are comparatively few doctors, MRI machines, etc. in comparison with the entire population. Houses are so expensive because everyone wants a house and it’s an appreciable asset. I’ve seen these people my entire life. They’ll decry socialism and make the age old joke that “socialism is when no potato.” But the second a PS5 gets a street price of 700 bucks, suddenly they become walking “Homer Simpson fading into the hedge and coming back out wearing a different outfit” memes. They’ll say things like “scalping should be illegal” or “the government should step in to make sure that the actual consumers who want one can get one - nobody should be allowed to buy 500 of them and just sit on them forever.” Suddenly, market economics produces a state of inequality that doesn’t directly benefit them, and the guiding hand of the government should be used to ensure equitable distribution of resources. Not that they’d ever reflect on this in any way or consider how their personal experiences indicates a larger set of structural problems with the economic systems that produce such a state of affairs.
It’s free market exploitation. If you believe a free market can exist without regulations, you’re imbecile.
Just imagine: People need fridges. All fridge manufacturers agree to raise prices of a fridge by 2000%. So what, people are going to stop buying fridges? No - because they need them.
You would say: it’s a free market, some new manufacturer is going to offer fridges at regular prices. Well - no you dumb fuck. What’s the incentive for the new fridge manufacturer to sell at lower prices, when people are going to buy fridges anyway, because they need them? The answer is - none. It would be a dumb business decision, because your supply is limited, and you’re going to sell it at market price, because that item is essential.
So how does the economy even work if that’s possible? That’s right idiot - because it’s price fixing and it’s fucking illegal.
The incentive here would be that a new company could sell far more fridges when reasonably prices compared to their competitors and take all of their market share
But yes of course govt regulation is required when there is actual price fixing going on. I’d also like to know the alternative way of pricing goods/services from people with the alternate view
Your goal as a company is not to sell as many, but to make the greatest profit. So let’s say that the new market price is $3 000.
You’re the new company. Your supply is 20 000.
Do you
a) Sell fridges @ $2 950/each, undercutting competition while selling whole supply, because of demand being higher than your supply, making $59 000 000?
or
b) Sell fridges at a reasonable price of $400, selling the same amount, because your supply is limited anyway, making $8 000 000?
The company still has no incentive to go B route. They only need to undercut the competition, not make prices reasonable.
Free market self regulates, provided nothing artificially screws with supply and demand and there are competitors. Both scalping and price fixing screws with it. It is literally the cancer of free market, and people screwing with it call themselves “investors”, while actually destroying the economy.
It is the government’s responsibility to prevent those situations before they happen, otherwise these changes may be irreversible.
Btw. A situation like this was happening recently in the GPU market. Nvidia had a crazy high demand for their GPUs because companies invested in AI were going to buy these cards no matter the price. So they bumped the prices like crazy, and they were instantly sold out.
Meanwhile Nvidia’s competitor - AMD - didn’t have nearly as strong GPUs for Ai as Nvidia. Do you think AMD’s prices stayed the same? Nope. They bumped it just like Nvidia, barely undercutting them, because there was still demand, in fact growing demand, for GPUs for gaming, while AMD’s supply was obviously limited.
2 years later, lower demand, GPUs actually in stock, but prices are still fucked (though not as much) because people got used to it.
I don’t think you ever took even economics 101 in school because for almost all products there exists a price where you can actually increase your profits by decreasing the price because the larger sales volume offsets the revenue lost. Applies to your fridge example as well. You just assumed the same sales in both scenarios which is not even close to being realistic. And your Nvidia/AMD example ignores the high inflation seen during that period.
They are making the assumption that demand is constant because the product is a necessity (such as with something like insulin). Profit at higher volume and lower prices only happens with products with elastic demand.
In this example this new company would probably sell fridges at a whooping discount of some 5% and still be able to sell more although the price is 1990% of the original
The point being that if company A cuts their price to compete, and company B has an artificially inflated price
Now we have company B with no sales, and are forced to match or beat their competitor
Repeat until the price is fair. This breaks if both companies are co-ordinating with each other and forcing all other competition in line. But that’s a crime and would be regulated
I agree with the sentiment but feel like it doesn’t really work that way. It’s what I learnt from 2020 at least, whenever things turn to worse, people would rather do nothing than change anything. That makes a bit afraid of how bad should something get for changes to occur
This is an important observation. You’re probably more right, that things can get worse without people caring. Sometimes when we say things will get worse unless we do something, that does prevent a bill from passing or someone awful getting elected or some business going bankrupt etc.
I’d rather have retailers and manufacturers agree on a way to start prices high, then bring the price down towards the target MSRP every time the item is back in stock. That prevents scalping, let’s consumers decide exactly how much “get it early” tax they’re willing to pay, and gives the money to the people that did 99% of the work.
The simple reality is that if there are more people interested in a good at the current price than there are goods available, you must select a way to figure out who gets those scarce items. Raising prices and lotteries where you verify everyone participating is a distinct human are probably the most fair options.
I don’t understand commercial marketing people for cases like this. If they literally only listed prices on deals, it still wouldn’t matter because shops have relationships with suppliers and will work with whoever has the part when it is needed. All the extra effort in marketing materials like this are wasted effort just to justify corporate staffing bloat.
Source: Ordered parts all the time in an automotive shop and never looked at these fliers because I would negotiate prices with the guys working the desk to beat the corporate negotiated prices listed and they capitulated because we and they both built a great relationship that benefitted us both.
The US film industry has been operating for over a hundred years, routinely works with firearms, and yet only 3 people have died in firearms accidents that whole time.
I’m saying this for all the gun safety “experts”. I don’t care if you’re military, law enforcement, or a private gun owner, your embarrassing yourself by lecturing Hollywood on gun safety.
Wasnt it a barrel obstruction that was then shot out when he fired a blank with it? Checking to ensure it’s blanks in your magazine/chamber is fine, checking a weapon from a site armorer for barrel obstruction isn’t a routine thing to check. I certainly don’t check my guns for obstruction except when Im cleaning / taking out of storage / have reason to believe there might be one because of ex: a misfire.
If this was live ammo then so many people fucked up. No site I have ever heard of allows live ammo to be present at all. Most studio lots dont allow live ammo, and several in hollywood require security to use custom marked handguns that prominently say they have live rounds in them. Ive been told a few even have fully custom magwells for site security guards / lot cops so you cant swap the magazines around. The paranoia around gun safety in hollywood is nuts. It’s fucking incredible how many people had to fuck up to cause this.
They had live ammo and live shooting non-disabled guns. The crew were using them on the incident day to shoot cans, and this was the armorer’s first second film job
Is there really any scenario where a normal user should NOT be rate limited on posts or comments to some degree? Say, no more than 3 posts per minute? No more than 10 replies?
But when anyone can run an instance, you can’t control it. Someone has an instance which allows them to make as many posts as they want, and then all that content is federated to connect servers
It’s an interesting problem to be sure. It feels like it should be possible for servers to automagically detect spam on incoming federated feeds and decline to accept spam posts.
i look forward to an automated mechanism, like with image checking...
that said, the existing tools arent all that terrible, even if its after the fact.
'purge content' does a pretty good job of dumping data from know bad actors. and then being able blocking users/instances.
if everything was rate limited to some degree, we would manually catch these earlier, and block before the rest of the content made its way over.... maybe.
There’s already plenty of tools that do this automatically, sadly they’re very often proprietary and paid-for services. You just have to have a way to appeal false positives, because there will always be some, and, depending on how aggressive it is, sometimes a lot.
Perhaps a case to be made for a federated minimum-config. If servers don’t adhere to a minimum viable contract, say meeting requirements for rate-limiting, or not requiring 2fa, or other config-level things… They become defederated.
A way of enforcing adherence to an agreed upon minimum standard of behaviour, of sorts
It would be very easy to spoof those values in a handshake though, unless you’re proposing that in the initial data exchange a remote server gets a dump of every post and computationally verifies compliance.
Federated trust is an unsolved problem in computer science because of how complex of a problem it is.
Spoofing that handshake would be a bad faith action, one that would not go unnoticed longer term. Instances with a bunch of bad faith actions will make the case for not federating with themselves.
Really though? You can implement the same limits for federated posts, and just drop the ones exceeding the rate limit. Who knows, might be frustrating for normal users that genuinely exceed the rate limits, because their stuff won’t be seen by everyone without any notice, but if they are sane it should be minimal.
The notice might still be able to be implemented though. idk how federation works exactly, but when a federated post is sent/retrieved, you can also exchange that it has been rejected. The local server of the user can then inform the user that their content has been rejected by other servers.
There are solutions for a lot of things, it just takes the time to think about & implement them, which is incredibly limited.
Not to suggest it isn’t a problem that needs to be solved. But from my understanding of activitypub protocol, there isn’t a way to control content federation on a per message basis, solely on allow/block instances as a whole
I can think of a couple. For events like the NFL or some expo where you want a bunch of different topic discussion threads all at the same time. But even then, it would very limited.
This is why Lemmy needs to keep tweaking it’s feed algorithm. I understand why many people rightly have a distaste of social media algorithm fuckery, but Lemmy doesn’t have some of the same bad incentives that an ad driven site like Reddit or twitter might have. A better algorithm will help Lemmy grow and surface interesting posts organically.
The recent feed change to boost smaller communities in 0.19 is a good start, and not showing too many posts in a row from the same community will be another welcome change.
Try changing your user agent to a Chrome one (e.g. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36). Works a treat!
Feels like we’re back to 2007 again when spoofing firefox user agent to IE would fix websites not working properly, only now we spoof it to chrome instead.
Not really. The example listed above is perfectly readable.
Knowing the versions of webkit, browser version, etc. is important due to inconsistencies, new features, mossing features, and deprecated features. Sure it can be faked, but that is on the end user.
There is more information in there that isn’t actually true and only supposed to trick some old web servers into treating it a certain way than there is actually correct information,
It mentions three different browsers, only one of which is actually true, and three different rendering engines, none of which is actually what’s used.
Chrome doesn’t use Webkit, and the referenced Webkit version is probably 10 years old at this point. The user agent is full of stuff for backwards compatibility. That’s why it’s being deprecated in favour of a better API (client hints)
There’s an API called “client hits” that’s replacing user-agent. Some of the hints will require the user to provide permission for the site to use them, since they could be used for fingerprinting.
Major browsers (Chrome and I thibk Firefox) are freezing the user-agent. The only thing that’ll be changing in user agents is the major browser version. Other parts including platform will be static. Chrome on Windows will always report itself as Windows 10 for example. www.chromium.org/updates/ua-reduction/
I’ve used it for pulled chicken for a soup. I believe the instructions said boil, but I pressure cook/steam it for a few mins then add it into the muchbmore flavorful soup. Though I just as often just use canned chicken breast instead.
Only thing I’ve ever done that for, since I love chicken to have a browned somewhat firm to crunchy crust, depending on which cut it is.
Definitely boiled, looks identical to the chicken my coworker brought in once. She boiled every piece of meat within an inch of its life because she didn’t know how to prepare it otherwise.
They could probably just do that. Just move to a different career path and show support for an animal activist group; they would get a chance to talk about a cause they support, talk about their father on camera, and honor what so many people remember him for.
This, so much. Every time they get posted I just feel very uncomfortable by this. Just because no one is holding a gun to their head, doesn’t mean that they don’t feel obligated to keep their father alive as it were. I honestly just can’t believe that this is genuine.
I am sure they have the pressure of expectation on the, but from how genuine they come across, they were inspired and shared their father’s and mother’s (don’t forget her) love for animals.
On the command line, space is what separates each argument. If a path contains a space, you either have to quote the entire path, or use an escape character (e.g. the `` character in most shells, the backtick in Powershell because Microsoft is weird, or the character’s hexadecimal value), otherwise the path will be passed to the command as separate arguments. For example, cat hello world.txt would try to print the files hello and world.txt.
It is a good practice to minimize the character set used by filenames, and best to only use English alphanumeric characters and certain symbols like -, _, and .. Non-printable characters (like the lower half of ASCII), weird diacritics (like ő or ű), ligatures, or any characters that could be misinterpreted by a program should be avoided.
This is why byte-safe encodings, like base64 or percent-encoding, are important. Transmitting data directly as text runs the risk of mangling the characters because some program misinterpreted them.
but what does the command line matter for dates? sure every once in a while you’ll have to pass a date as an argument on the command line but I think usually that kind of data is handled by APIs without human intervention, so once these are set up properly, I don’t see the problem
<span style="color:#323232;">rsync -a "somedir" "somedir_backup_$(date)"
</span>
If the date command returns an RFC-3339-formatted string, the filename will contain a space. If, for example, you want to iterate over the files using for d in $(find…) and forget to set $IFS properly, it can cause issues.
Yeah? I once spent an entire week debugging a plaintext database because the software expected the record identifiers to be tokenized a certain way, but the original data source had spaces in those strings.
The software was the ISC DHCP server, the industry standard for decades and only EOL’d a year ago.
Sounds like a weekend that you could have saved if the software was just implemented properly and accepted spaces.
Something being an industry standard does not necessarily mean it’s good. Sometimes it just means it was the cheapest, or sometimes even just because it was used for so long. How long did it take for Torx to somewhat replace philips head screws despite being better in most cases?
I think date strings are made for human and machine readability. Similar to XML or JSON. So, why not improve systems so that we can have more human readable date strings? If you don’t care about human readability and want to make sure there is no confusion with spaces, you can just use epoch timestamps.
But $(date) does return a string with spaces, at least on every system I’ve ever used. And what’s so bad about the possibility of spaces in filenames? They’re slightly inconvenient in a command line, but I haven’t used a commuter this century that didn’t support spaces in filenames.
Ok, I just reread it. I don’t see what you think I’m missing. You mean an improperly written find command misbehaving? The fact that a different date format could prevent a bug from manifesting doesn’t seem like much of an argument.
Spaces can exist in filenames. The only problem is that they have to be escaped. As the comment that you reread explained, cat hello world.txt would print the files hello and world.txt. If you wanted to print the file “hello world.txt” you’d either need to quote it (cat “hello world.txt”) or escape the space (cat hello world.txt)
will process the space-separated parts of each path as separate items. I had to work around this issue just two days ago, it’s an obscure thing that not everyone will keep in mind.
I’m not exactly fond of the space either, but man, the T is noisy. They could’ve gone with an underscore or something, so it actually looks like two different sections.
He’s not facist. He’s libertarian two completely different modes of goverment one wants to disband the state the other wants complete and utter control and so wants to make the state into a one party state
There’s this great thread in the Disco Elysium reddit from years ago. This guy posted and complained that all the family first nation first choices that were part of his morals were making him align with the fasc. Having to do the thumb up the ass salute. All that stuff.
You played disco? Try it out. See if you give it a thumbs up.
Can you find that thread? It sounds hilarious. I’ve tried to do some Google searching myself and I’ve fallen into a rabbit hole if old Disco Elysium reddit threads that have made me want to replay it, but I haven’t found that exact one.
And yet they used to turn a profit. Until Republicans passed a law requiring them to prefund retirements for 75 years out with the USPS Fairness Act. Fairness Act, which imposes this burden on the USPS while no other federal agency (or private business) is required to prefund retirement benefits…quite fair.
This has been revoked recently, we no longer are required to prefund the plan. One good thing DeJoy has actually done.
It hasn’t been beneficial in terms of us getting a raise or anything since there hasn’t been a contract with the NALC in almost 2 years now but I’m sure it shows in the now 66¢ cost of a stamp (price may be more by the time I press send on this message).
“People” aren’t. It’s regressives that are trying to disenfranchise mail in voters. Then they put a regressive in charge of the USPS who is trying to run it into the ground so they can be like “oh gosh look how bad it is!”
Republicans want to privatize every public work. USPS isn’t supposed to turn a profit. It’s supposed to be a public good that is sold at cost so we all benefit. It used to be subsidized.
Republicans want to turn it into a new industry a la UPS, FedEx, etc, so it’d cost way more to send a letter. The love of money is the root of all evil. It’s also the root of the Republican party.
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