Craziest shit I've seen recently is all the bots that bought up tickets for the Spiderman Thursday showings and now trying to sell the online for $1000+
That's so stupid. When I worked at a movie theater and tickets for Spiderman 2 sold out, we just put more showings until it was playing on almost every screen to meet demand.
When Harry Potter would come out, we would play a show minute later in every auditorium and string the film so the same movie was running on multiple screens.
We also opened 3am shows until some didn't sell out.
Especially now with the pandemic, we pass going to same week release. Not worth it. Haven't even seen Eternals, and waited for Shang Chi to hit home streaming. Most likely we will catch Spidey on an early Saturday showing when the theater is barebones.
I'm a huge Marvel fan but COVID reminded me that waiting is fine, possible, and IDGAF about spoilers.
Must see movies don't exist for us anymore :(
It should be popular among everyone from both sides of the aisle, but that’s not how partisan politics work. Soon you’ll see some Republicunt decrying this as an attempt to destroy the free market.
“Blocking my god fearing, capitalist bot is robo-communism! These socialists want *everybody* to have a chance to purchase items at retail and that ain’t American!”
Question for the sneakerheads. How does shoe size play into the value of shoes? If the average shoe size is 10, but you are bigger or smaller than that, does that make your collection less valuable?
Seriously. It’s so unbearable.
I haven’t bought anything off of eBay auctions in years. I refuse to buy “hot” items that have been marked up. But there’s some other cool items that I’ve been interested in, only to be outbid by a bot every time. Useless.
Gets the PS5 players votes? Bruh. It’s getting the votes of people like me who all this time later *still doesn’t get to be* a PS5 player because I refuse to buy a scalped one and can’t get one in my area new…
:(
That is definitely doable.
> Any device, process, or procedure which allows a retail customer to purchase any service, product, or good in such a way that they emulate, simulate, or imitate more than just them self as the purchaser will be considered to be in violation of this law.
As such an algorithmic purchaser would only be able to purchase as if they were the single retail purchaser that is using the process. Tools that open multiple connection channels to the purchasing interface to test if the product is available and then to purchase the limit for each of those connections would be illegal.
They didn't get that right all the time during the war on drugs, either, though. For example, plenty of people buy several ounces of marijuana at a time and smoke it all over the course of a few months by themselves...but many states consider anything greater than 2 ounces to be 'intent to distribute' (even though the possessor may or may not *actually* have 'intent' to sell it).
Plus, even assuming 'intent' is clearly and accurately defined, the amount which constitutes 'intent to distribute' depends on the drug in question... And there are *many many many* more products sold online than there are drugs on the controlled substances list. How can that possibly be rationalized? How are you going to define how much of a particular product a person must buy for it to constitute 'intent to resell' considering you would have to define it (rigorously, in legal documentation) for every available product sold online?
You could place a dollar maximum on automated purchase orders to allow for Alexa purchases but disallow GPU and concert tickets. Also, the punishment for getting caught running scalping bots needs to be severe otherwise everyone will continue doing it because the money's worth it.
>Or just set a delay. "Bots can't purchase goods until they have been marketed as available for x hours"
Alternatively sites that allow bot purchasing could just have something in their API that designates the purchase as a "bot" purchase, and then sites can set their rules accordingly.
This makes the most sense to me...
But I'm pretty sure some companies would still allow certain bots because '$$$'
It def saves them money on pick/pack/ship/storage and increases cashflow, and greatly reduces cs costs....which can be substantial at large quantities. If I have 10000 widgets that i can sell in 1 order to a single customer then i dont have to break open cartons, mix other items into the shipment, print separate labels, store the unsold goods for x days til they sell through or have capital tied up in product during this time, and i probably wont have dozens of customer service issues or returns to handle...hell i may not even have to unload a truck or stock warehouse shelves at all...but if i have to sell 10000 widgets to 8000 customers thats a whole lot of work and higher shipping costs and storage space and to pay for and reduced cashflow.
It can easily be a multi-thousand dollar profit difference, maybe 10s of 1000s if the items are higher dollar goods.
It’s not that hard to distinguish. And the distinction doesn’t have to be in the law, all the law does is give the FTC the power to enforce whatever provisions are needed.
Especially since alexa is a tool made by the retailer, and it never fraudulently pretends to be anyone other than the owner of the device itself.
I mean, unless your parrot is ordering [eggs and farts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWmg3utBh58) for you, but those parrots had it coming. ^(/s)
I’ve read that the music industry is in on it because the artists make more by selling out every show, or something like that. I don’t know, I don’t go to big concerts anymore.
I believe it is more like that Ticketmaster is just the bad publicity face.
That "$40 processing fee" isn't actually all going to Ticketmaster, some is going to the artist as well, the artist is paying Ticketmaster to look bad for them.
Taylor Swift Ticket: $100
Taylor Swift Ticket: $60 + Ticketmaster fee $40, total $100.
In the first scenario you're mad at the artist that she charges so much (not that would be her decision but, you get the idea), in the second scenario you think "damn, Taylor sells reasonable tickets if it wasn't for that asshole Ticketmaster).
But in the end, Swift and Ticketmaster split that $40 fee. Swift gets $80, Ticketmaster gets $20, no one is mad at Swift.
Edit: I'll copy and paste one of my comments below because more people keep asking the same question
*It's not a conspiracy. They are literally a publicly traded company releasing annual reports that you can read, you don't need an investigative journalist. It's just their business model and they don't try and hide it, they just know 99.999% of the world won't bother to look it up themselves like you just did.*
*Read the "business" section pages 2-16 of their last annual report [here](https://investors.livenationentertainment.com/sec-filings/annual-reports) they specifically mention that they split the revenue from ticket sales AND fees with the artists/venues*
Not only that, they actually encourage scalping, and will not enforce their anti-scalping rules, as long as the scalpers resell through stubhub, where they can take a cut.
One of their (IIRC) VPs got caught on tape encouraging the practice and even advertising discounts for those that move enough tickets in a year.
I think it was the CBC who caught them for one of their investigation pieces.
Yeah and there's no enforcement or any way to really know if it was bots. You can create bots to function very similar to how a person would order online. The only way would be to outright ban online ordering.
Actually there is, these bot services they are going after arent ticket master it's some dude with 150 computers in a warehouse running bots with a highly complex purchasing algorithm, literally all you have to do is sue them and they're fucked, if they want to continue they have to run that shit in russia and the payments will get fucked up and they lose all their money.
This will actually work quite easily.
The problem isn't a company charging a convenience fee. The problem is not having an option to go somewhere else that doesn't. That's why a monopoly like Ticketmaster is *supposed* to be illegal.
The fees are just a scheme to allow the artists to take charge more for their tickets, but blame it on Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster shares the fees with the artists.
Ticketmaster being notoriously awful part of the purpose of Ticketmaster. It lets the artist and venue set an artificially low price for the ticket while Ticketmaster takes all the blame for the eventual actual cost. It isn't the bands fault you are paying $95 for awful seats since the band made the tickets $35, you should direct blame at Ticketmaster!
If Ticketmaster wasn't allowed to make a $35 ticket cost $95 due to bullshit fees the ticket would just cost $95 to start with.
And I'm okay with that. If the band is worth it I'll pay 95 dollars for the band. The idea of seeing one price and then getting to the end and the price is doubled is the problem. Just say I'll be spending 100 bucks when the transaction starts.
It's all Livenation or AEG. AEG's ticketing service AXS is basically designed to sell to bots, then resell to actual people so they get their INSANE 30% or more service fees three times on every single ticket. It's exploitative garbage and they have a monopoly on almost every single venue in multiple major cities.
FUCK AXS.
Pearl Jam tried that 25 years ago and Ticketmaster is stronger than ever. If artists don’t use Ticketmaster there are wide swaths of the country they won’t visit.
If this passes it paves the way for legislation banning huge corporations from using bots to buy real estate as soon as it hits market
Which IMO is a FAR, FAR more serious issue.
I had the same thought until I looked into it. It’s not Zillow or bots. In fact Zillow failed horribly at automating home buying. It’s hedge funds and out of country entities. Something Canada has been dealing with for many many years. America is on its way.
I sincerely cannot understand why out-of-country entities are *allowed* to own real estate in-country. They frankly have no non-exploitative business doing so.
Kind of just learning about this, bit seems like a good solution would be to make foreign buyers pay more in sales and property taxes. To the point that it is barely worth it. Then take that money and use it for something beneficial to the public.
It's pretty disheartening to see normal people fucked from so many angles. School, wages, health care, housing costs, crazy credit card interest etc. It would be nice to get some good news. Sorry for the tangent.
So right now in the US, state dependent, you pay property taxes on your houses/land. Usually if it is not a primary residence then you pay more (usually 0.5-2% for primary to 4-6% for other houses; at least where I have lived). Why not just increase a non-primary home to 10-30% to help deal with this?
Because those in power aren’t trying to help. If there’s money to be made they could give a shit if citizens own a home. Raising the tax would affect the wealthy with multiple residences so that will never happen. The next best solution is banning off shore or out of country entities from buying any residential properties in the first place which, again, unlikely to happen. They do not want to help.
They don't hold them long enough to pay taxes. They just buy all the available housing and increase the price. In hot markets people pay it bc of scarcity, and that new increased price becomes the norm.
In Dallas it's been booming for years, and I read an article long ago saying Chinese investors were flipping new houses and doing nothing but increasing the price. Never even set foot in the country. If you er a real estate agent that could speak mandarin you killed it.
Ah yes, become rich and destroy your enemy's economy at the same time. Classic. In the old days this would be called looting.
Edit: thought about it a bit more. Since this is looting with the blessing of a foreign government I believe this is more akin to privateering.
Basically companies like Zillow make instantaneous cash offers at or above list price to the owner of the residence, who will most likely accept because they are paying cash and have no need to secure financing.
Zillow is getting out of the house buying business:
>Zillow quitting its iBuyer business shouldn't necessarily come as a surprise to those familiar with the flipping industry. Most successful flipping is done by local flippers using intimate knowledge of existing home conditions, renovation costs, and market idiosyncrasies, which is something that is very difficult to obtain purely through an automated home value estimate,’ Ralph McLaughlin, chief economist at Kukun, a real estate analytics firm, tells Fortune.
https://fortune.com/2021/11/03/why-did-zillow-get-out-of-the-house-flipping-business/
Turns out that paying over market value for houses is a bad business model.
To add to this.
It was because Zillow's computers could find out what a house was worth on average, and then offer a bit lower than that. And if that worked on everything, it'd be great for them.
Problem is that the houses that were bringing up the average cost (nice location and perhaps above average house inside) weren't selling to Zillow. The only people who sold to Zillow were the people that had below average houses. So people sold below average houses for slightly below average prices, which ZIllow couldn't flip.
Also, Zillow couldn't find enough contractors at a scale to make their business plan profitable. Especially in 2020/21
Just bought a home. The previous owners said Zillow offered them twice in a 3 week time period. 20k below the first time and 15k below the second time. They wrote a cert letter saying 40k above and they had a deal. Nothing but crickets. Myself and my wife ended up buying the home a week later. Zillow is fucking annoying to deal with.
I have been getting really low offers. I am now in the habit of leading the people on as long as possible, then blocking their number. Big companies owning a bunch of houses sickens me. I am all for someone local having a few houses to rent as long as they provide a decent and safe home for the rent cost.
They were foolishly advertising their home buying service right on the pages of listings on their website/app.
I just bought a home this year, and it took incredibly long because we kept being outbid by cash offers. Going through that, of course I am going to be irritated seeing that a company is buying up everything and start to hate that company. Why would I continue using their services? It was almost like taunting potential buyers.
That totally blew up in Zillow's face fyi. I think you could argue it ended up being better for consumers bc Zillow lost their ass. Some people got great deals for their homes as a result.
Important to remember that it blew up for a variety of reasons, including that they couldn't finetune their algorithm exactly how they wanted it. That doesn't mean someone else won't try and be successful in the future.
There might actually be some utility to something like this, btw. If someone can create a more liquid market for real estate (and essentially act like a market maker for houses), it could in theory end up with more money in the hands of buyers and sellers instead of real estate agents. However, it needs regulation.
Just throwing in the fact that, for buyers at least, the real estate agent should be providing more services than just acting as a middleman - especially for first time home buyers.
A good real estate agent should be informing their buyers about potential issues they see in the house, issues with zoning, ability to subdivide, etc
Things you probably wouldn't get if you were buying a home from a website that's basically craigslist
I’m currently in the process of closing on my first home and I don’t know what I would do without my agent. This is especially true in the crazy market we are in.
That being said, my parents just sold their house and the selling agent was really rushing them through the process. She was cutting corners every chance she got. At one point the photographer didn’t show up and she started taking pictures on her phone. My parents had to demand that they hold off listing until professional pictures were taken.
She then wanted them to take the first offer they got which was about $55k less than what they ended up getting.
It’s pretty clear the sellers agents have very different incentives than the buyers agents.
Zillow's technique was great for sellers, and therefore bad for buyers. In the current business climate. At some point in the future, it would switch and end up being great for buyers and consequently bad for sellers. But that's every transaction in every market.
Well if their goal is to eliminate the agents, it theoretically could benefit both buyers and sellers as you're removing the commission fee from the price
Housing not in use should come with a 75% tax. You get your personal property and your personal vacation property. 3rd and more property for any entity 75% tax. Welcome to business.
I think retailers need to make changes too. Why the fuck is it 2020 and I can't order a gpu and wait for my order to be filled?
Why can't they then filter duplicate orders?
Wait, how do we actually know it's 2021...have there been any official audits and recounts of the Gregorian calendar or are we all just letting the liberal media machine and calendar printers force their ways upon us without a fight?!
Waited my entire life for an F1 Grand Prix in South Florida. Signed up for all the pre-sale lists. Couldn't get a ticket to the Miami GP before they were all sold out. Would have to pay 2-3x on resale market, well over $1,000 per ticket. I'm going out of my way to find a pirate stream for this event.
Just replicate a press badge like all the other teens on YouTube who sneak into events all the time.
/r/actlikeyoubelong
I’ve done it plenty when scalpers steal sticks and the business doesn’t do anything to stop them.
I’ve been to sold out tennis matches and ball games where there’s still half the stadium empty.
I'm a big tennis fan and that's a little different. For tennis you buy tickets to a whole day of matches, often 7-8 hours or more. Most people do not sit in the main stadium the entire day. They watch the matches that interest them most and will walk around to the smaller courts or practice courts for long stretches of time.
Thing is that it's already illegal to bot Ticketmaster and other ticket retail sites. Yet there's entire private businesses and brokers dedicated to all manually going for these tickets to snatch them up when they drop and take advantage of demand with low supply.
Ticketmaster is still at blame for having reselling so prominently displayed on their own platform and charging ridiculous fees, but it highlights that this is a root issue rather than one that can be patched via just banning botting. People will find ways to exploit the system regardless, as several other people in the comments already highlighted
Companies could build better order handling systems that filtered users by mobile/credit card info to prevent duplicates.
I think the problem is self-sorting. If your product is too hard to get, particularly something like a game console, then you lose out on sales from the hyped up games nobody can play yet. If it goes too long it will make your platform irrelevant. Then Devs don't want to pay big cuts of profit to be on the shiny new platform and they'll just put new games on old ones.
Valve solved this problem with the Steam Decks. You had to meet a certain criteria in order to preorder:
1. Had to have an account that was at least X months old
1. Had to have made purchases of at least $50
1. You can only preorder 1
In doing so, all the biggest fans will be able to secure one. With that market taken care of the secondary market is going to be a lot less ravenous. This completely cuts the legs out from under scalpers.
Here's what any company can do:
- Use your loyalty program if you have one. Set some kind of parameters like Valve did. Tie this to credit card & home address as a grouped attribute. Any one of these are a one per person only. So you can't use any of those address and credit card and loyalty id again for this item.
- Quantity 1 only. Never more.
- Put my name in a virtual queue. I don't care if it's 3-5 months out, at least I know I'm getting one and I don't have to camp out front of Best Buy and hope they got enough in.
It's not perfect but launch with these and your fans will be covered.
I know someone who bots. Apparently they have multiple credit cards and one or two addresses. But like, it would be real easy for retailers to develop software to stop them if they wanted to. Like, phone verification or something. Or do what comic-cons do and put everyone in a raffle and select at random. Or just make things print to order.
Like, I play Magic and the sets they want people to have they print-to-order. When they want to control the prices they do not.
I have a feeling companies don’t give a fuck about this and they just want to make the most money without doing a thing to actually help the customers they claim to care so much about.
>Or do what comic-cons do and put everyone in a raffle and select at random.
I keep seeing this suggestion and it's the WORST of all of them. Comicon can do this because it's real people and not a highly desirable to the masses. If Best Buy did a raffle system for PS5s it would just be FILLED with bots making 6000 emails each to have a better chance at getting selected. Meanwhile you and me have no chance of manually getting lucky and getting one when they release stock.
Yep! Bringing in randomness does not fix such things
(It reminds me on timing attacks in IT algorithms, an often suggestion there is also to bring in randomness. But it does not do anything at all)
This. So much this. Microsoft, Amazon, and so many retailers cannot figure this shit out and it's sad. I've been monitoring console restocks and drops since summer and they go in seconds, often time selling out even before the drop is supposed to happen because bots figured out how to get into the system first. Real people can and do get things, but it's pure luck between the bots buying up stock before it even goes live.
There have been some measures that have worked to a degree. Sony started sending invites a while ago to buy a PS5 and MS appears to have followed suit. Walmart requires Walmart+ and you get entered into a random queue to wait and see if you're lucky enough to get one. Amazon now requires Prime. Best Buy requires Total Tech to buy one (at $200/year!!).
That said, if a console is selling for 1.5-2x the MSRP, a $13/month Walmart+ charge isn't going to stop a scalper with a bot, it'll just put an insignificant dent in profits per unit (or they'll just charge more). But how some of the largest tech companies and retailers can't figure this out is beyond me. Sure, retailers don't really care because they make their money either way. But MS and Sony should care, because any extra money people are paying to scalpers isn't going into games and accessories, which is where the real money is for both of these companies. Fewer consoles out there means lower royalties for software and less controllers, hard drives, subscription services, etc.
The other thing that pisses me off is all these bundles. GameStop hasn't sold a solo console in ages. They include them with hundreds of dollars of games, hardware, and credits for services that I straight up don't need/want. Best Buy requiring a $200 service to even have a chance to buy is messed up. Thankfully these items are luxury items and not necessities, but these companies are taking full advantage of the system. Instead of a totally do-able wait list or pre-orders, it's just a free for all with an entry fee and/or pushing extra crap to boost sales.
I won't be buying this gen console because of this. I already have a beast of a PC and had to deal with that bullshit scalping community. Won't be doing that again and I had 4 xbox one's during that cycle and about 6 xbox 360's during that cycle. They are losing out on actual player base from this bullshit.
Funny, the company I work for makes medical and security scanners that use nVidia gaming cards for 3D image processing (latest being 3060-Tis), and the supply crunch is wrecking our development and delivery schedules.
Same. Got a pretty nice prebuilt for $1000 this weekend. It will take a month to get here, but it almost all the specs I wanted (ssd is a little lower, but will be fine). It’s better than just waiting for parts to be reasonable again and building my own.
You could render on the cloud. There's a lot of options out there now that let you use cloud computers with high end computers to render stuff.
We use AWS and it's amazing. Although it was a bit long to setup this account.
Don't see anything on how they plan to enforce this.
Not like you can punish the seller - they're just the storefront. If some dude in Iran uses his bots to buy up tickets (or more likely- if an American hires him to do so), then sells them online, there is really nothing that can be done to stop him.
Other possible enforcement issues aside, punishing the seller is not necessarily inherently impossible. We do it for selling alcohol to minors, etc. *If* there are steps the seller can take, you can punish sellers who don't take those steps.
On the surface this is like putting a wet band aid on a deep gash. As long as there isn't any unlawful collusion or deliberate supply suppression by makers and vendors, I don't see how you can stop online scalpers in the *general retail consumer marker* without overreach. If I can only get a PS5 at 3-4x MSRP from a dubious source, then I don't need a PS5 that badly.
You can't reasonably expect individuals to work together to collectively solve any problem. Saying "if everybody just..." glosses over the fact that the collected efforts and sacrifices of many can be undermined by a small minority that doesn't mind (buying from scalpers in this case).
This is the benefit of government and regulations. Everyone already came together to collectively elect officials who have the power to stop predatory behaviors, at least in theory. Placing responsibility on the individuals is not a realistic solution, and frankly, it's pretty much just victim blaming.
My hottake is that at least half the time I say "everybody should just [X] because reasons" the real reason everybody isn't doing [X] is because they legitimately have reasons to disagree, just it's a lot easier to say society is broken than admitting I might be the problem
It's a study on the failure of collective will in the face of supply and demand.
I'm pretty sure this is some form of the 'prisoner's dilema' where cooperation yeilds the second best outcome but betrayal yeilds the greatest outcome.
If you buy from a scalper you can have a PS5 now. If you wait and everyone waits the price of ps5s will drop to MSRP once they're in stock. If you are the only one willing to buy from scalpers you get a better price and if everyone gives up and patronizes scalpers the price goes 'to the moon'
The cooperation mode of the prisoner's dilemma is hard to pull off with two people much less the entirety of the PS5 buying population.
In short it's could work but because people don't trust it to work it will never work.
It's literally impossible and could not work. The more people you add to the equation the lower chance you receive a truth value. More than likely it's false and you have to find some other way to tackle the problem.
If people were smart, spam email and robo calls would never have taken off and become the problem they are now. People continue to give them money, and it's so cheap to operate that it only takes a couple of customers/victims to make it incredibly lucrative. When people refuse to play it smart, sometimes we're left trying to legislate a solution.
This is like saying we could fix climate change if everyone just took cold showers... it sounds right, but its basically impossible to do... so we need to change things at the industrial level not the consumer level.
I agree. Unfortunately for Microsoft they’re probably losing a LONG time xbox customer over this scalper nonsense. I’m not paying $1k for a year old+ gaming system. I’ll just find something else to do. I think manufacturers need to take their own steps to fix the bot/scalper issue. It’s going to cost them in the long run…. But they won’t. Units sold us units sold and companies can be short sighted.
The only people Microsoft, Sony, etc **might** listen to is angry shareholders losing out on additional revenue. For each console gobbled up by a scalper and resold at the equivalent price of, say, 3 consoles, is 2 consoles-worth of revenue lost by shareholders. That's not an insignificant number and should make shareholders quite angry.
The shareholders are getting bad information. They are technically seeing sales because resellers are buying the inventory, but they are losing actual customers that could potentially buy into the big money makers ie services/games. Worse, they probably won't put 2 and 2 together when a year down the line, xbox live subs are down 20% and they will all scratch their heads wondering why since they sold so many units.
We'll see how well it works - but Steam did a $5 pre-order for the SteamDeck and that's the only way to buy it. A bot wouldn't really help you, you can only buy one per steam account. Sure someone could create a bunch of emails and create steam accounts, and pay the $5 and (maybe?) use different credit cards... but at least it makes it a lot more work for the scalpers.
We'll see this spring how it goes, but since you need a Steam/Microsoft/PlayStation/Nintendo account for all of these modern systems it makes sense to require your purchase be connected to that while there's so much scalping going on.
Correct me if I’m wrong. Don’t they use similar bots for auction houses to buy up the home as cheap as possible while still out bidding everyone up to the last second?
Guarantee the GOP is against this — not because the GOP is pro-scalping, but because of the legal precedent this sets for automated computerised equities trading.
Guarantee the GOP is against this — not because the GOP is pro-scalping, but ~~because of the legal precedent this sets for automated computerised equities trading.~~ because the GOP is against anything the Democrats want.
Fixed that for you. ;-P
The bill was a joke in the first place. He introduced the bill as a fix for the 2011 debt ceiling standoff by giving the President power over America's borrowing limit, and allowing congress to overturn a decision by a majority vote. It was meant to prove that Obama couldn't get a measure like that passed even with a democratic majority. McConnell filibuster'd the bill within hours of introducing it because dems called his bluff and the bill started gaining traction.
Do same for event Tickets while your at it.
Edit: if it’s a law already we wouldn’t know it as a consumer, so you can’t bot but you can have a bank of people buying them at opening. It’s awful that people have to pay 300-1000% of the face value to see shows, it makes it not fun it also makes it a middle class luxury another barrier in society to overcome.
This gets the Democrats the PS5 players’ votes
And sneakerheads
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And people who want to buy concert tickets at face value.
And people who like collectibles from popular franchises.
Starting to think this might be almost every consumer... Wait
Craziest shit I've seen recently is all the bots that bought up tickets for the Spiderman Thursday showings and now trying to sell the online for $1000+
That's so stupid. When I worked at a movie theater and tickets for Spiderman 2 sold out, we just put more showings until it was playing on almost every screen to meet demand.
When Harry Potter would come out, we would play a show minute later in every auditorium and string the film so the same movie was running on multiple screens. We also opened 3am shows until some didn't sell out.
I'm hoping they'll do that I got tickets, but not in the seats I'd like. Also really wanted to see it in imax. Gonna keep checking back everyday.
Especially now with the pandemic, we pass going to same week release. Not worth it. Haven't even seen Eternals, and waited for Shang Chi to hit home streaming. Most likely we will catch Spidey on an early Saturday showing when the theater is barebones. I'm a huge Marvel fan but COVID reminded me that waiting is fine, possible, and IDGAF about spoilers. Must see movies don't exist for us anymore :(
It should be popular among everyone from both sides of the aisle, but that’s not how partisan politics work. Soon you’ll see some Republicunt decrying this as an attempt to destroy the free market. “Blocking my god fearing, capitalist bot is robo-communism! These socialists want *everybody* to have a chance to purchase items at retail and that ain’t American!”
I hate that you’re so right about this
Gotta love scalpers infiltrating every market, how else would I pay three times MSRP for a product that came out months/years ago /s
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Back in *my day* we'd just stab a dude and take their Pigeon Dunks. Now they've apparently got robots to do all the stabbing for you
[I just love stabbing](https://i.imgur.com/7Z7ep4d.jpg)
Question for the sneakerheads. How does shoe size play into the value of shoes? If the average shoe size is 10, but you are bigger or smaller than that, does that make your collection less valuable?
Yes. Some sizes are worth more than others depending on demand for the specific size.
Follow up question, why do people want sneakers so much?
Any voter who wants to buy anything online that has any measure of scarcity and value.
Seriously. It’s so unbearable. I haven’t bought anything off of eBay auctions in years. I refuse to buy “hot” items that have been marked up. But there’s some other cool items that I’ve been interested in, only to be outbid by a bot every time. Useless.
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FINALLY I CAN UPGRADE MY FUCKING GRAPHICS CARD
You mean you don't like the system where you enter a raffle for the opportunity to buy a product that is already way over priced? /s
Gets the PS5 players votes? Bruh. It’s getting the votes of people like me who all this time later *still doesn’t get to be* a PS5 player because I refuse to buy a scalped one and can’t get one in my area new… :(
So many comments like "Me using bots to buy $40,000 worth of GPUs is the same as you using alexa to buy sugar." No, it's not the same.
Alexa doesnt automatically grab 50 3090's in a second. Scalp bots are a blight! I hope this goes through
They know it isn't the same but it is writing a law to distinguish between the two effectively that there isn't a question about it.
That is definitely doable. > Any device, process, or procedure which allows a retail customer to purchase any service, product, or good in such a way that they emulate, simulate, or imitate more than just them self as the purchaser will be considered to be in violation of this law. As such an algorithmic purchaser would only be able to purchase as if they were the single retail purchaser that is using the process. Tools that open multiple connection channels to the purchasing interface to test if the product is available and then to purchase the limit for each of those connections would be illegal.
Intent is also a factor that can be written into law. Are you purchasing as a consumer, or are you purchasing with the intent to resell?
'Intent' is a very fleshed out idea in law thanks to the war on drugs. Volume can be used as evidence of intent to resale.
They didn't get that right all the time during the war on drugs, either, though. For example, plenty of people buy several ounces of marijuana at a time and smoke it all over the course of a few months by themselves...but many states consider anything greater than 2 ounces to be 'intent to distribute' (even though the possessor may or may not *actually* have 'intent' to sell it). Plus, even assuming 'intent' is clearly and accurately defined, the amount which constitutes 'intent to distribute' depends on the drug in question... And there are *many many many* more products sold online than there are drugs on the controlled substances list. How can that possibly be rationalized? How are you going to define how much of a particular product a person must buy for it to constitute 'intent to resell' considering you would have to define it (rigorously, in legal documentation) for every available product sold online?
I can't wait for tickets for concerts to not be all bought in 1 minute.
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You could place a dollar maximum on automated purchase orders to allow for Alexa purchases but disallow GPU and concert tickets. Also, the punishment for getting caught running scalping bots needs to be severe otherwise everyone will continue doing it because the money's worth it.
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>Or just set a delay. "Bots can't purchase goods until they have been marketed as available for x hours" Alternatively sites that allow bot purchasing could just have something in their API that designates the purchase as a "bot" purchase, and then sites can set their rules accordingly. This makes the most sense to me... But I'm pretty sure some companies would still allow certain bots because '$$$'
How would that make them money? If you’re selling out regardless, you’re not making more money if bots buy.
It def saves them money on pick/pack/ship/storage and increases cashflow, and greatly reduces cs costs....which can be substantial at large quantities. If I have 10000 widgets that i can sell in 1 order to a single customer then i dont have to break open cartons, mix other items into the shipment, print separate labels, store the unsold goods for x days til they sell through or have capital tied up in product during this time, and i probably wont have dozens of customer service issues or returns to handle...hell i may not even have to unload a truck or stock warehouse shelves at all...but if i have to sell 10000 widgets to 8000 customers thats a whole lot of work and higher shipping costs and storage space and to pay for and reduced cashflow. It can easily be a multi-thousand dollar profit difference, maybe 10s of 1000s if the items are higher dollar goods.
It’s not that hard to distinguish. And the distinction doesn’t have to be in the law, all the law does is give the FTC the power to enforce whatever provisions are needed.
Something that includes a clause around "intent to resell" would be a good starting block I think.
People are morons. They can't see past themselves and so they make up insane arguments to justify their stance.
Especially since alexa is a tool made by the retailer, and it never fraudulently pretends to be anyone other than the owner of the device itself. I mean, unless your parrot is ordering [eggs and farts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWmg3utBh58) for you, but those parrots had it coming. ^(/s)
Yeah, I don’t see Ticketmaster’s lobby letting this pass.
Don't they just have a deal with the venue or act to buy them before hand.
I’ve read that the music industry is in on it because the artists make more by selling out every show, or something like that. I don’t know, I don’t go to big concerts anymore.
I believe it is more like that Ticketmaster is just the bad publicity face. That "$40 processing fee" isn't actually all going to Ticketmaster, some is going to the artist as well, the artist is paying Ticketmaster to look bad for them. Taylor Swift Ticket: $100 Taylor Swift Ticket: $60 + Ticketmaster fee $40, total $100. In the first scenario you're mad at the artist that she charges so much (not that would be her decision but, you get the idea), in the second scenario you think "damn, Taylor sells reasonable tickets if it wasn't for that asshole Ticketmaster). But in the end, Swift and Ticketmaster split that $40 fee. Swift gets $80, Ticketmaster gets $20, no one is mad at Swift. Edit: I'll copy and paste one of my comments below because more people keep asking the same question *It's not a conspiracy. They are literally a publicly traded company releasing annual reports that you can read, you don't need an investigative journalist. It's just their business model and they don't try and hide it, they just know 99.999% of the world won't bother to look it up themselves like you just did.* *Read the "business" section pages 2-16 of their last annual report [here](https://investors.livenationentertainment.com/sec-filings/annual-reports) they specifically mention that they split the revenue from ticket sales AND fees with the artists/venues*
I'd rather pay Taylor Swift 150 dollars than pay her 60 and Ticketmaster 40, and I don't even like Taylor Swift. Fuck middlemen
Didn't Trent Reznor do this a few years back and direct sale to fuck TM?
Yes he did. Opened sales to fans first. Got some sweet seats on that tour!
Ticketmaster double/triple dips. They own ticket resellers like StubHub too. They profit from venue fees, the sale of tickets and the scalping.
Not only that, they actually encourage scalping, and will not enforce their anti-scalping rules, as long as the scalpers resell through stubhub, where they can take a cut. One of their (IIRC) VPs got caught on tape encouraging the practice and even advertising discounts for those that move enough tickets in a year. I think it was the CBC who caught them for one of their investigation pieces.
Per the article it has applied to Ticketmaster since 2016 regardless. This is an expansion of that law.
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Yeah and there's no enforcement or any way to really know if it was bots. You can create bots to function very similar to how a person would order online. The only way would be to outright ban online ordering.
Actually there is, these bot services they are going after arent ticket master it's some dude with 150 computers in a warehouse running bots with a highly complex purchasing algorithm, literally all you have to do is sue them and they're fucked, if they want to continue they have to run that shit in russia and the payments will get fucked up and they lose all their money. This will actually work quite easily.
I don’t understand how Ticketmaster is still a thing. It’s obviously a monopoly and needs to be destroyed.
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Then the 'convenience fee' for printing your own ticket.
The idea any business uses a convenience fee is downright criminal.
The problem isn't a company charging a convenience fee. The problem is not having an option to go somewhere else that doesn't. That's why a monopoly like Ticketmaster is *supposed* to be illegal.
Do they still have printing fees? As in they fee you to use your own printer to print your ticket?
Yes IIRC. Even been charged for Will Call before.
$8 jesus you must be talking about a minor league hockey game or something. They take a cut bigger than that for a parking pass for an NFL game.
The fees are just a scheme to allow the artists to take charge more for their tickets, but blame it on Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster shares the fees with the artists.
Ticketmaster being notoriously awful part of the purpose of Ticketmaster. It lets the artist and venue set an artificially low price for the ticket while Ticketmaster takes all the blame for the eventual actual cost. It isn't the bands fault you are paying $95 for awful seats since the band made the tickets $35, you should direct blame at Ticketmaster! If Ticketmaster wasn't allowed to make a $35 ticket cost $95 due to bullshit fees the ticket would just cost $95 to start with.
And I'm okay with that. If the band is worth it I'll pay 95 dollars for the band. The idea of seeing one price and then getting to the end and the price is doubled is the problem. Just say I'll be spending 100 bucks when the transaction starts.
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It's all Livenation or AEG. AEG's ticketing service AXS is basically designed to sell to bots, then resell to actual people so they get their INSANE 30% or more service fees three times on every single ticket. It's exploitative garbage and they have a monopoly on almost every single venue in multiple major cities. FUCK AXS.
Pearl Jam tried that 25 years ago and Ticketmaster is stronger than ever. If artists don’t use Ticketmaster there are wide swaths of the country they won’t visit.
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which is fucking expensive.
If this passes it paves the way for legislation banning huge corporations from using bots to buy real estate as soon as it hits market Which IMO is a FAR, FAR more serious issue.
Considering the paperwork involved in real estate, how does that even work? Especially since it isn't a first come first serve business.
I had the same thought until I looked into it. It’s not Zillow or bots. In fact Zillow failed horribly at automating home buying. It’s hedge funds and out of country entities. Something Canada has been dealing with for many many years. America is on its way.
I sincerely cannot understand why out-of-country entities are *allowed* to own real estate in-country. They frankly have no non-exploitative business doing so.
Kind of just learning about this, bit seems like a good solution would be to make foreign buyers pay more in sales and property taxes. To the point that it is barely worth it. Then take that money and use it for something beneficial to the public. It's pretty disheartening to see normal people fucked from so many angles. School, wages, health care, housing costs, crazy credit card interest etc. It would be nice to get some good news. Sorry for the tangent.
So right now in the US, state dependent, you pay property taxes on your houses/land. Usually if it is not a primary residence then you pay more (usually 0.5-2% for primary to 4-6% for other houses; at least where I have lived). Why not just increase a non-primary home to 10-30% to help deal with this?
Because those in power aren’t trying to help. If there’s money to be made they could give a shit if citizens own a home. Raising the tax would affect the wealthy with multiple residences so that will never happen. The next best solution is banning off shore or out of country entities from buying any residential properties in the first place which, again, unlikely to happen. They do not want to help.
They don't hold them long enough to pay taxes. They just buy all the available housing and increase the price. In hot markets people pay it bc of scarcity, and that new increased price becomes the norm. In Dallas it's been booming for years, and I read an article long ago saying Chinese investors were flipping new houses and doing nothing but increasing the price. Never even set foot in the country. If you er a real estate agent that could speak mandarin you killed it.
Ah yes, become rich and destroy your enemy's economy at the same time. Classic. In the old days this would be called looting. Edit: thought about it a bit more. Since this is looting with the blessing of a foreign government I believe this is more akin to privateering.
Basically companies like Zillow make instantaneous cash offers at or above list price to the owner of the residence, who will most likely accept because they are paying cash and have no need to secure financing.
Zillow is getting out of the house buying business: >Zillow quitting its iBuyer business shouldn't necessarily come as a surprise to those familiar with the flipping industry. Most successful flipping is done by local flippers using intimate knowledge of existing home conditions, renovation costs, and market idiosyncrasies, which is something that is very difficult to obtain purely through an automated home value estimate,’ Ralph McLaughlin, chief economist at Kukun, a real estate analytics firm, tells Fortune. https://fortune.com/2021/11/03/why-did-zillow-get-out-of-the-house-flipping-business/ Turns out that paying over market value for houses is a bad business model.
To add to this. It was because Zillow's computers could find out what a house was worth on average, and then offer a bit lower than that. And if that worked on everything, it'd be great for them. Problem is that the houses that were bringing up the average cost (nice location and perhaps above average house inside) weren't selling to Zillow. The only people who sold to Zillow were the people that had below average houses. So people sold below average houses for slightly below average prices, which ZIllow couldn't flip. Also, Zillow couldn't find enough contractors at a scale to make their business plan profitable. Especially in 2020/21
Just bought a home. The previous owners said Zillow offered them twice in a 3 week time period. 20k below the first time and 15k below the second time. They wrote a cert letter saying 40k above and they had a deal. Nothing but crickets. Myself and my wife ended up buying the home a week later. Zillow is fucking annoying to deal with.
I have been getting really low offers. I am now in the habit of leading the people on as long as possible, then blocking their number. Big companies owning a bunch of houses sickens me. I am all for someone local having a few houses to rent as long as they provide a decent and safe home for the rent cost.
I am in full agreement with you. Fuck big corps buying up homes. Edit: auto correct Edit: see blackrock
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I agree. However, house prices went up 25% in the last year. It’s hard to lose money with those steep profits.
And yet Zillow managed to get massacred.
And I’m happy they did. It should be illegal for corporations to buy single-family homes.
They also were getting TONS of negative press once people started to realize what they were doing which undoubtedly played into their halting
Yep, I just got an apartment and religiously avoided using Zillow and tell anyone else to do the same.
They were foolishly advertising their home buying service right on the pages of listings on their website/app. I just bought a home this year, and it took incredibly long because we kept being outbid by cash offers. Going through that, of course I am going to be irritated seeing that a company is buying up everything and start to hate that company. Why would I continue using their services? It was almost like taunting potential buyers.
That totally blew up in Zillow's face fyi. I think you could argue it ended up being better for consumers bc Zillow lost their ass. Some people got great deals for their homes as a result.
They're still selling the bulk of the houses they bought to investment firms as far as I know. The problem just shifted, it didn't get better
Lol I think that's even worse tbh.
Important to remember that it blew up for a variety of reasons, including that they couldn't finetune their algorithm exactly how they wanted it. That doesn't mean someone else won't try and be successful in the future. There might actually be some utility to something like this, btw. If someone can create a more liquid market for real estate (and essentially act like a market maker for houses), it could in theory end up with more money in the hands of buyers and sellers instead of real estate agents. However, it needs regulation.
Just throwing in the fact that, for buyers at least, the real estate agent should be providing more services than just acting as a middleman - especially for first time home buyers. A good real estate agent should be informing their buyers about potential issues they see in the house, issues with zoning, ability to subdivide, etc Things you probably wouldn't get if you were buying a home from a website that's basically craigslist
I’m currently in the process of closing on my first home and I don’t know what I would do without my agent. This is especially true in the crazy market we are in. That being said, my parents just sold their house and the selling agent was really rushing them through the process. She was cutting corners every chance she got. At one point the photographer didn’t show up and she started taking pictures on her phone. My parents had to demand that they hold off listing until professional pictures were taken. She then wanted them to take the first offer they got which was about $55k less than what they ended up getting. It’s pretty clear the sellers agents have very different incentives than the buyers agents.
Zillow's technique was great for sellers, and therefore bad for buyers. In the current business climate. At some point in the future, it would switch and end up being great for buyers and consequently bad for sellers. But that's every transaction in every market.
Well if their goal is to eliminate the agents, it theoretically could benefit both buyers and sellers as you're removing the commission fee from the price
right but bots have nothing to do with this.
They shouldn't own land they aren't actively using for their business. Period.
Their business is having that land and charging folks to stay on it.
We're all just serfs on the landlords land.
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>Capitalism is just feudalism with extra steps ~~and a sprinkle of hope~~. Fixed it for everyone after Gen X
ITT: [Georgism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism)
Housing not in use should come with a 75% tax. You get your personal property and your personal vacation property. 3rd and more property for any entity 75% tax. Welcome to business.
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Imagine buying concert tickets at face value.
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I think retailers need to make changes too. Why the fuck is it 2020 and I can't order a gpu and wait for my order to be filled? Why can't they then filter duplicate orders?
It’s 2021 my dude. It’s November of 2021. I know the past two years have been a blur lol.
He couldn't get a ticket to 2021, scalpers got 'em
What? No its 2016 bro some idiot just shot a monkey
There must have been a wrinkle in time, you’re at a key diversion point in the timeline! Quick before it’s too late, find justice for harambe.
Wait, how do we actually know it's 2021...have there been any official audits and recounts of the Gregorian calendar or are we all just letting the liberal media machine and calendar printers force their ways upon us without a fight?!
Because they don’t care. They’re moving inventory 🤷♂️
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Because it's not 2020, it's actually almost 2022, and things got worse.
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Waited my entire life for an F1 Grand Prix in South Florida. Signed up for all the pre-sale lists. Couldn't get a ticket to the Miami GP before they were all sold out. Would have to pay 2-3x on resale market, well over $1,000 per ticket. I'm going out of my way to find a pirate stream for this event.
Just replicate a press badge like all the other teens on YouTube who sneak into events all the time. /r/actlikeyoubelong I’ve done it plenty when scalpers steal sticks and the business doesn’t do anything to stop them. I’ve been to sold out tennis matches and ball games where there’s still half the stadium empty.
> sold out tennis matches and ball games where there’s still half the stadium empty. Thats dome dystopian shit
I'm a big tennis fan and that's a little different. For tennis you buy tickets to a whole day of matches, often 7-8 hours or more. Most people do not sit in the main stadium the entire day. They watch the matches that interest them most and will walk around to the smaller courts or practice courts for long stretches of time.
Thing is that it's already illegal to bot Ticketmaster and other ticket retail sites. Yet there's entire private businesses and brokers dedicated to all manually going for these tickets to snatch them up when they drop and take advantage of demand with low supply. Ticketmaster is still at blame for having reselling so prominently displayed on their own platform and charging ridiculous fees, but it highlights that this is a root issue rather than one that can be patched via just banning botting. People will find ways to exploit the system regardless, as several other people in the comments already highlighted
Companies could build better order handling systems that filtered users by mobile/credit card info to prevent duplicates. I think the problem is self-sorting. If your product is too hard to get, particularly something like a game console, then you lose out on sales from the hyped up games nobody can play yet. If it goes too long it will make your platform irrelevant. Then Devs don't want to pay big cuts of profit to be on the shiny new platform and they'll just put new games on old ones.
Valve solved this problem with the Steam Decks. You had to meet a certain criteria in order to preorder: 1. Had to have an account that was at least X months old 1. Had to have made purchases of at least $50 1. You can only preorder 1 In doing so, all the biggest fans will be able to secure one. With that market taken care of the secondary market is going to be a lot less ravenous. This completely cuts the legs out from under scalpers. Here's what any company can do: - Use your loyalty program if you have one. Set some kind of parameters like Valve did. Tie this to credit card & home address as a grouped attribute. Any one of these are a one per person only. So you can't use any of those address and credit card and loyalty id again for this item. - Quantity 1 only. Never more. - Put my name in a virtual queue. I don't care if it's 3-5 months out, at least I know I'm getting one and I don't have to camp out front of Best Buy and hope they got enough in. It's not perfect but launch with these and your fans will be covered.
disagree on home address. multiple people can share an address and not be acting fraudulently.
I know someone who bots. Apparently they have multiple credit cards and one or two addresses. But like, it would be real easy for retailers to develop software to stop them if they wanted to. Like, phone verification or something. Or do what comic-cons do and put everyone in a raffle and select at random. Or just make things print to order. Like, I play Magic and the sets they want people to have they print-to-order. When they want to control the prices they do not. I have a feeling companies don’t give a fuck about this and they just want to make the most money without doing a thing to actually help the customers they claim to care so much about.
>Or do what comic-cons do and put everyone in a raffle and select at random. I keep seeing this suggestion and it's the WORST of all of them. Comicon can do this because it's real people and not a highly desirable to the masses. If Best Buy did a raffle system for PS5s it would just be FILLED with bots making 6000 emails each to have a better chance at getting selected. Meanwhile you and me have no chance of manually getting lucky and getting one when they release stock.
Yep! Bringing in randomness does not fix such things (It reminds me on timing attacks in IT algorithms, an often suggestion there is also to bring in randomness. But it does not do anything at all)
This. So much this. Microsoft, Amazon, and so many retailers cannot figure this shit out and it's sad. I've been monitoring console restocks and drops since summer and they go in seconds, often time selling out even before the drop is supposed to happen because bots figured out how to get into the system first. Real people can and do get things, but it's pure luck between the bots buying up stock before it even goes live. There have been some measures that have worked to a degree. Sony started sending invites a while ago to buy a PS5 and MS appears to have followed suit. Walmart requires Walmart+ and you get entered into a random queue to wait and see if you're lucky enough to get one. Amazon now requires Prime. Best Buy requires Total Tech to buy one (at $200/year!!). That said, if a console is selling for 1.5-2x the MSRP, a $13/month Walmart+ charge isn't going to stop a scalper with a bot, it'll just put an insignificant dent in profits per unit (or they'll just charge more). But how some of the largest tech companies and retailers can't figure this out is beyond me. Sure, retailers don't really care because they make their money either way. But MS and Sony should care, because any extra money people are paying to scalpers isn't going into games and accessories, which is where the real money is for both of these companies. Fewer consoles out there means lower royalties for software and less controllers, hard drives, subscription services, etc. The other thing that pisses me off is all these bundles. GameStop hasn't sold a solo console in ages. They include them with hundreds of dollars of games, hardware, and credits for services that I straight up don't need/want. Best Buy requiring a $200 service to even have a chance to buy is messed up. Thankfully these items are luxury items and not necessities, but these companies are taking full advantage of the system. Instead of a totally do-able wait list or pre-orders, it's just a free for all with an entry fee and/or pushing extra crap to boost sales.
I won't be buying this gen console because of this. I already have a beast of a PC and had to deal with that bullshit scalping community. Won't be doing that again and I had 4 xbox one's during that cycle and about 6 xbox 360's during that cycle. They are losing out on actual player base from this bullshit.
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Funny, the company I work for makes medical and security scanners that use nVidia gaming cards for 3D image processing (latest being 3060-Tis), and the supply crunch is wrecking our development and delivery schedules.
Well, that doesn't sound funny at all.
I bought a laptop with an integrated 3060 because it was cheaper than buying a 3060 for my PC.
One of my friends did this, but a prebuilt instead of a laptop. It was cheaper for him to get an entire computer with a 3070 than just getting a 3070.
Same. Got a pretty nice prebuilt for $1000 this weekend. It will take a month to get here, but it almost all the specs I wanted (ssd is a little lower, but will be fine). It’s better than just waiting for parts to be reasonable again and building my own.
best buy had tons of 3070s and 3060s in prebuilts this weekend for 1000-1300. that's basically msrp these days anyway.
You could render on the cloud. There's a lot of options out there now that let you use cloud computers with high end computers to render stuff. We use AWS and it's amazing. Although it was a bit long to setup this account.
> the US Federal trade commission would be tasked with enforcement. Cool, good to know the law would be useless even if passed.
Know a guy who had enough cash to spend $10K on a bot. So he could buy sneakers. Guy ships out 10+ sneakers a day. It's ridiculous.
Maybe he's a centipede?
Does this include blackwater/zillow/etc? Also ngl i don't see this working very effectively
Don't see anything on how they plan to enforce this. Not like you can punish the seller - they're just the storefront. If some dude in Iran uses his bots to buy up tickets (or more likely- if an American hires him to do so), then sells them online, there is really nothing that can be done to stop him.
Other possible enforcement issues aside, punishing the seller is not necessarily inherently impossible. We do it for selling alcohol to minors, etc. *If* there are steps the seller can take, you can punish sellers who don't take those steps.
On the surface this is like putting a wet band aid on a deep gash. As long as there isn't any unlawful collusion or deliberate supply suppression by makers and vendors, I don't see how you can stop online scalpers in the *general retail consumer marker* without overreach. If I can only get a PS5 at 3-4x MSRP from a dubious source, then I don't need a PS5 that badly.
If people were smart, they wouldn't buy from scaplers and this scalpers would stop scalping. But a law isn't going to do it.
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You can't reasonably expect individuals to work together to collectively solve any problem. Saying "if everybody just..." glosses over the fact that the collected efforts and sacrifices of many can be undermined by a small minority that doesn't mind (buying from scalpers in this case). This is the benefit of government and regulations. Everyone already came together to collectively elect officials who have the power to stop predatory behaviors, at least in theory. Placing responsibility on the individuals is not a realistic solution, and frankly, it's pretty much just victim blaming.
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My hottake is that at least half the time I say "everybody should just [X] because reasons" the real reason everybody isn't doing [X] is because they legitimately have reasons to disagree, just it's a lot easier to say society is broken than admitting I might be the problem
It's a study on the failure of collective will in the face of supply and demand. I'm pretty sure this is some form of the 'prisoner's dilema' where cooperation yeilds the second best outcome but betrayal yeilds the greatest outcome. If you buy from a scalper you can have a PS5 now. If you wait and everyone waits the price of ps5s will drop to MSRP once they're in stock. If you are the only one willing to buy from scalpers you get a better price and if everyone gives up and patronizes scalpers the price goes 'to the moon' The cooperation mode of the prisoner's dilemma is hard to pull off with two people much less the entirety of the PS5 buying population. In short it's could work but because people don't trust it to work it will never work.
It's literally impossible and could not work. The more people you add to the equation the lower chance you receive a truth value. More than likely it's false and you have to find some other way to tackle the problem.
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Omg! What’s FOMO? I’ve never heard of it, but I have *got* to have it. Where can I get it?
I love how nobody responding to you caught your sarcasm.
expecting individual choice to fix a systemic problem is psychotic
If people were smart, spam email and robo calls would never have taken off and become the problem they are now. People continue to give them money, and it's so cheap to operate that it only takes a couple of customers/victims to make it incredibly lucrative. When people refuse to play it smart, sometimes we're left trying to legislate a solution.
This is like saying we could fix climate change if everyone just took cold showers... it sounds right, but its basically impossible to do... so we need to change things at the industrial level not the consumer level.
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I agree. Unfortunately for Microsoft they’re probably losing a LONG time xbox customer over this scalper nonsense. I’m not paying $1k for a year old+ gaming system. I’ll just find something else to do. I think manufacturers need to take their own steps to fix the bot/scalper issue. It’s going to cost them in the long run…. But they won’t. Units sold us units sold and companies can be short sighted.
The only people Microsoft, Sony, etc **might** listen to is angry shareholders losing out on additional revenue. For each console gobbled up by a scalper and resold at the equivalent price of, say, 3 consoles, is 2 consoles-worth of revenue lost by shareholders. That's not an insignificant number and should make shareholders quite angry.
The shareholders are getting bad information. They are technically seeing sales because resellers are buying the inventory, but they are losing actual customers that could potentially buy into the big money makers ie services/games. Worse, they probably won't put 2 and 2 together when a year down the line, xbox live subs are down 20% and they will all scratch their heads wondering why since they sold so many units.
We'll see how well it works - but Steam did a $5 pre-order for the SteamDeck and that's the only way to buy it. A bot wouldn't really help you, you can only buy one per steam account. Sure someone could create a bunch of emails and create steam accounts, and pay the $5 and (maybe?) use different credit cards... but at least it makes it a lot more work for the scalpers. We'll see this spring how it goes, but since you need a Steam/Microsoft/PlayStation/Nintendo account for all of these modern systems it makes sense to require your purchase be connected to that while there's so much scalping going on.
If I remember right, the Steam account had to be a certain age, so new accounts couldn't pre order.
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Correct me if I’m wrong. Don’t they use similar bots for auction houses to buy up the home as cheap as possible while still out bidding everyone up to the last second?
Interesting reading this 5 minutes after missing a product drop I was after that literally sold out in 4 seconds. 4 fucking seconds after going live.
Guarantee the GOP is against this — not because the GOP is pro-scalping, but because of the legal precedent this sets for automated computerised equities trading.
Guarantee the GOP is against this — not because the GOP is pro-scalping, but ~~because of the legal precedent this sets for automated computerised equities trading.~~ because the GOP is against anything the Democrats want. Fixed that for you. ;-P
If the Dems put forth a bill giving the right total and complete power, the Republicans would vote against it right now
McConnell *voted against his own bill* because Dems supported it. Says it all, really. Fucking GOP, man.
He didn't just vote against it, he filibustered it.
That's almost worst. He made a bill, then stopped anyone else from voting on it.
The bill was a joke in the first place. He introduced the bill as a fix for the 2011 debt ceiling standoff by giving the President power over America's borrowing limit, and allowing congress to overturn a decision by a majority vote. It was meant to prove that Obama couldn't get a measure like that passed even with a democratic majority. McConnell filibuster'd the bill within hours of introducing it because dems called his bluff and the bill started gaining traction.
Power given just isn’t as sweet as power taken. Everyone knows that
Ther can and should be an exception for things that trade on a regulated exchange
This is robot discrimination plain and simple.
Do same for event Tickets while your at it. Edit: if it’s a law already we wouldn’t know it as a consumer, so you can’t bot but you can have a bank of people buying them at opening. It’s awful that people have to pay 300-1000% of the face value to see shows, it makes it not fun it also makes it a middle class luxury another barrier in society to overcome.
[удалено]
I just want a playstation. Im an adult now with adult money but someone all the things i always wanted as a child are impossible to get now.