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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

This neglects the demand side.

PS5's are purchased between $700 and $1,000. PS5's aren't the only device with premium. Used cars have an unprecedented premium, alongside all GPUs.

The market is saying that semiconductors, especially GPU accelerated compute time is worth this much.

You can point at miners, you can point at scalpers, you neglect that every cloud compute and cloud gaming provider is building massive data centers full of GPUs as fast as they can get their hands on them at a premium too.

It doesn't take a free market libertarian to observe that its the MSRP that's wrong.

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I'm not arguing people aren't willing to pay more. I'm pointing out that the scalper is providing nothing of value to anyone but himself. You can apply your same logic to healthcare, because people are always willing to pay more. It's the cornerstone of the US healthcare system.

I'm discussing ethics and you're discussing economics. The problem is this obsession with finding arbitrage to extract value from the system, which is the entire point of your comment where you're defending the market because someone can profit from it without actually providing any value. I'd like to live in a world that isn't full of selfish assholes trying to fuck everyone else over all the time. I understand market dynamics just fine - I got rich from it and I'm a shittier person for it.

Okay, let's discuss ethics. I don't see or have an ethical problem with this. Scalpers are taking a risk, if the supply was greater they lose, if the supply becomes greater before they can move their inventory then they lose. The supply is not greater. It is an amoral reality.

> I'd like to live in a world that isn't full of selfish assholes trying to fuck everyone else over all the time. I understand market dynamics just fine - I got rich from it and I'm a shittier person for it.

It is not possible to live in a market based economy and fulfill that desire. It is very easy for me to accept that. Demand for the asset simply has to dry up. It has not. People that want a PS5 can get one, at the available price. Scalpers are providing liquidity, you provided liquidity. Individual owners would be removing liquidity, likely causing greater premium in price to let one go and further hoops to jump through.

You're saying people scalping PS5s right now are taking a risk and deserve to be compensated for it. Setting aside how absurd I think this is, in the same paragraph you say this is both an "amoral reality" and you "don't see...an ethical problem with this."

You're using market dynamics to justify morality. My point is you extrapolate this and you end up with the US healthcare system, which is completely fucking broken providing less value at higher cost. Parasitic middle men don't deserve to be compensated and we should do everything possible to eradicate them.

It's actually quite easy to live in a market-based society and not have these problems - it's called regulation and we need a shitload more of it. It's how we established a minimum wage, and abolished child labor, and even separated commercial banking from investment banking for a period of time.

Good thing we are talking about consumer electronics and not healthcare, but if you must extrapolate then I can tell you my position is one of liquidity and services that provide liquidity, which the US healthcare system does not satisfy because of different market inefficiencies. So you can save that guilt trip for some other form of penance you pursue, good luck with your personal redemption arc, that doesn't move my position on consumer electronics scalpers or some other forms of middlemen.

I'm not trying to guilt trip anyone I'm just pointing out how retarded "the market" can be by using an obvious example. You're right, consumer electronics is not the same as healthcare. You're defending scalpers because you say they provide liquidity, but you're ignoring that they're creating artificial scarcity in order to price gouge you. It seems like things are misaligned to me, but agree to disagree.

Although scalpers don't behave in a uniform way, I'm envisioning a reality where individual owners using them for their consumptive purpose would be creating greater scarcity.

You're envisioning a world where people are using the product as intended, and simply because it's not available to richer people instead that is what you view as the problem?

It seems to me the problem is scarcity (I think we agree on this much), and people trying to profit off that aren't anything more than parasites (we seem to disagree on this).

Let's just agree to disagree.

Not really my stance except the one thing we agree on.

MSRP is wrong, the console is worth around $750, this would match the inflation adjusted price of home entrainment consoles for the last 40 years. In both of our views - maybe ironic to you - it would be more ethical to diminish the returns of scalpers by having the price correct in the primary market to begin with. The only reason it hasn’t happened is because Sony doesn’t want the vocal backlash especially when they drop the price to $200 just a few years from now.

As long as the primary market chooses to misprice, all the symptoms - like all the startup partime retailers you say aren’t providing a service - are completely benign. Extracting value isn’t unethical, to me that is blaming Sony’s “make work” program (the mispricing) as unethical, taking us back to square one: charge the correct amount.

I’m not here to agree, I’m completely fine with that disagreement and it doesn’t end the conservation at all, I’m here to elaborate.

I don't have a strong opinion about the manufacturer raising prices in this instance. In the sense that there is a wild mismatch between supply and demand it makes sense to do so, and I'd rather the manufacturer reap the reward. I haven't thought enough about knock-on effects though. Yes, I'd prefer the manufacturer raising prices to having scalpers do it. I'm not trying to nitpick here, but I never said otherwise.

My focus was entirely on the immorality of the scalper. In my opinion, they aren't providing value. In fact they are actually reducing value, since they have to hold at least some cards in order to sell them, actually restricting supply (and that's assuming they aren't doing it intentionally to create more artificial scarcity, which I'm sure some are). All they are doing is matching a limited supply with the highest bidder. Without scalpers just as many cards would get delivered to end users, now the only difference is those end users are richer. They are constricting a bottleneck and profiting from it at the expense of consumers and arguably even GPU manufacturers.

> Extracting value isn’t unethical

We just fundamentally disagree here. Parasitism is unethical to me. I understand it's inevitable, but that doesn't make it okay.

Rationing is prone to corruption, this is how scalpers usually get their goods but this also means they are just symptoms.

> I'm not arguing people aren't willing to pay more. I'm pointing out that the scalper is providing nothing of value to anyone but himself.

How is the scalper different from the retailer or the distributor (assuming there's a distributor between Sony and the retailer, although their might not be)

The scalper is providing value to the retailer by paying for and taking delivery of their inventory (although, if the scalper overbuys and then returns, that's a negative); although, if the demand is so high that the product never sits on shelves, the scalper doesn't provide much value to the retailer.

The scalper provides value to the customer by having inventory available.

I personally don't like to pay more to get something now, when I could wait and get it later for less, so I wouldn't buy from a scalper, but I can see there's value provided. The market shows there's value too.

Ethically, as long as you're honest about it, and personally, that would include not returning items you overbought, I'm not sure I see an ethical problem. If something is hard to find, and you take time and effort to find it, you can and should charge a premium to compensate you for your time. Sure, people buying to resell may move forward demand, and make the item harder to find, and that feels a bit squishy, kind of like if everyone stocks up on a commodity at once, it makes it harder to find, and makes stocking up more desirable, etc, but eventually people have enough and there will be a lull and then back to normal. Does that make stocking up unethical? I don't think so, but maybe it could be argued.

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