Whats your preferred method of rationing scarce resources?
Here's an incomplete list of common tools:
0) fitness judgement (e.g. grants, scholarships etc)
1) First come first serve (e.g. most product launches)
2) lottery (e.g. grand canyon rafting permits)
3) auction (e.g. broadband spectrum)
4) third party speculators (e.g. scalping)
You can often use several of these methods simulatenously, but if your goals include prioritizing egalitarian access to the scarce resource then #4 can significantly interfere with that goal. There's a reason you aren't allowed to resell grand canyon rafting permits.
Interesting, I had no idea.
More info https://www.nps.gov/grca/planyourvisit/weightedlottery.htm
My issue was with the comment somehow suggesting the entire system (Big Bad Market) is somehow less wise than an individual actor.
Yet, the entire system contains much more information, that the individual actor does not, and can never have access to, e.g. value judgements of other market participants he will never meet.
Markets, at the core, are just auctions. It's one way to resolve the question who gets the scarce resource first. At other times, it's medical triage, a system very different from "free markets". It can also be first-come, first-serve, which is what currently being attempted by Adafruit now.
Many such options. Why is "free market" judged to be inappropriate here?
From my experience in markets with severe shortages, first-come/first-serve rationing approach never failed to produce a poor supply, and free floating markets were always oversupplied (to a varying extent, but in general there was a trend).
The base Raspberry Pi model is supposed to cost $35, because the Raspberry Pi Foundation has decided that offering a low cost SBC is important for the world.
Using a bot to buy up all inventory so you can resell it at $50 or $100 or whatever is unethical. You have provided no added value; you are just a parasite scalping others for your own enrichment.
If this is what a "free market" is, as many people here seem to think, then free markets are objectively bad for the commons.
The market is credit card sized arm based computers, not raspberry pi. If you narrow things too much then you can make anything not a market. Wal-Mart has a monopoly on apples if you narrow the market to inside their store.
I understood your comment just fine, I just don't agree. Either way,as I commented earlier it's not the essence here so I see no point in further debating this particular point.
But it's not a free market! Adafruit (etc.) are only allowed to sell at particular price points, or the RPi Foundation will stop giving them inventory to sell. You can argue that is a free market, since Adafruit and the Foundation have voluntarily entered into a mutually-beneficial contract.
But then we also have to accept that Adafruit is well within their rights to impose restrictions on how the product is bought, in an effort to ensure the products get into the hands of the people they want it to, at the (lower) price point they want.
All Adafruit is doing is putting up a big "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" sign whenever an ordering bot shows up, which is completely up to them to do if they want.
There has never been an actual shortage of toilet paper or disinfectant during the pandemic, the production-side supply has always been enough to satisfy the demand - the "shortage" was only because people hoarded up and/or tried to profit by re-selling loo rolls on eBay [1].
[1] https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/whats-on/shopping/ebay-toilet-...
Speculative resellers don't actually provide any value. They just extract extra cash from people who want something, when -- absent the retailer with automated buying tools that are faster than humans -- those people could have acquired the product from the original seller at a lower price.
I think "whoever gets through the website order form the fastest" is a perfectly reasonable (if often frustrating) way to ration scarce resources. You get in line, as a person, and get to buy some limited quantity for your own personal use.
Certainly no one can outright ban a secondary reseller market, but I think it's perfectly reasonable for a shop to want to sell to real end-users rather than people who will just turn around and scalp people who could have been potential customers... customers who are now frustrated and get a worse experience.
Until you put the FTTH connection in Ashburn, VA sitting next door to every major cloud provider against the 3G user in Somalia.
Clicking through the form degenerates to an unfair lottery where you can buy more raffle tickets by paying more to your ISP.
It's not the fairest, but it is definitely better than arbitrary. If Alice is willing to pay $5 for a widget, and Bob is willing to pay $50, it's likely that Bob values the item more than Alice does.
It's also possible that Alice is simply poor, of course, but I can't imagine how a practical system could take this into account without also destroying incentive structures.
>I think "whoever gets through the website order form the fastest" is a perfectly reasonable (if often frustrating) way to ration scarce resources. You get in line, as a person, and get to buy some limited quantity for your own personal use.
This is arbitrary, IMO. Might as well hand them out to whomever can win a race in Mario Kart.
If you still think first-come-first-served is too arbitrary, then how about some sort of lottery? A new batch of N units arrives at the warehouse, and then people have a week or something to drop their name into the lottery. At the end, Adafruit pulls N names out of the hat, and they get devices. That eliminates any unfairness around a FCFS ordering period starting at an inconvenient time for some people, or around people's internet connection being too slow to get through the order process fast enough. Adafruit could still try to implement measures to avoid that lottery winners aren't bots, or that people don't enter the lottery some large amount of times, or whatever.
> If Alice is willing to pay $5 for a widget, and Bob is willing to pay $50, it's likely that Bob values the item more than Alice does. [...] It's also possible that Alice is simply poor
That's exactly the point here! One of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's goals is to get decently-powerful, hackable, educational computing into the hands of people who usually can't afford it.
Sure, if we were talking about a Lexus or Mercedes-Benz, this doesn't matter quite as much; it's not a big problem if scarcity raises their prices. But for Raspberry Pi, raising prices hurts one of the important demographic targets of their product!
Because when you're talking about a discretionary purchase like this, it's less "who has the most money" and "who is willing to sacrifice the greatest proportion of their disposable income".
I'm not saying the scalping isn't scummy, but it genuinely is a better way to distribute scarce resources than a lottery or first come first serve. On average, the person willing to pay a scalper to get their hands on something (which is not just expensive but degrading) needs it or wants it more than someone who isn't.
>One of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's goals is to get decently-powerful, hackable, educational computing into the hands of people who usually can't afford it.
If that is genuinely their main goal, then they're doing a woeful job as an organisation! For the price of a base model Pi 4, one can get a refurbished desktop with an i5 (!!!) processor, 500GB HDD and 4GB of RAM. Blows the Pi out of the water.
Maybe I'm a little bit biased here (I spent a decent chunk of my life designing a low-cost USB Oscilloscope, sold with free worldwide delivery, and almost all of my customers have been wealthy tech-enthusiasts from the Western world) but outside of IoT/Education, I don't really see the product being used as much more than a toy for rich people.
As far as "nobody can do anything about it" is concerned, 15 states have made ticket scalping illegal because it harms consumers, and if this sort of thing continues you can bet that will expand further. Such legislation would even be fairly straightforward to write, but I suspect it will be more entertaining to watch as various scalpers of retail gear get nailed for various forms of tax evasion.
Yours?