A lot of people like going to live music and theatre events and scalpers make it more difficult and more expensive for them
Scalpers make it possible to get a ticket at market price, instead of maybe being able to get it for less and maybe not being able to get it at any price. It's not at all clear that the latter is better.
The "market price" you're talking about, is set by how many scalpers are creating scarcity. If the number of scalpers is 0, then the "market price" is different. It becomes the price that both the vendor is willing to sell for, and the event visitor is willing to buy for. Which is a more desirable "market price" to achieve.
The only thing scalpers make possible, is pricing out people that the vendor wanted to sell tickets to.
Are you unaware that scalpers are set up to hoover up as many tickets as possible before an actual person that wants to visit the event can get one? Because it seems like you are?
I'm aware. But I'm also aware that in the absence of customers, the scalper's prices will fall to zero.
If the scalper has enough customers that he can sell out the show above the face price of the tickets, the existence of those customers is sufficient to make it "practically impossible to get a ticket at face price" whether the scalper exists or not.
Imagine having your house paid for, and you grow old and you have no rent to pay.
My home is "paid for". Except for the HOA and property taxes that are not that far off from what I was previously paying in rent, the ongoing maintenance costs with random large spikes, and the opportunity cost of having a large chunk of money in the house and not in the market. It was still probably the right decision, but it's not at all a free lunch.
Surely though, the HOA and all that would likely be baked into a renter's price.
Sure, the same way that the benefits of a fixed mortgage payment are baked into sale prices. The efficient market hypothesis would say that neither renting nor buying should be obviously superior in the long term, because if either was then people would bid up rents/prices until it wasn't.
And you didn't need to go live in a HOA
I pretty much did, unless I wanted to significantly compromise on other factors.
> The efficient market hypothesis would say that neither renting nor buying should be obviously superior in the long term, because if either was then people would bid up rents/prices until it wasn't.
Buying have much higher entry point, need a bunch of cash at start then a ton of paperwork.
It is absolutely possible that local buying market is inflated precisely because the area is so desirable buying to rent is (or was) good investment, but that's rarely is true for a bigger market
And it's gonna be interesting wherever this narrative will shift over the next 5 yrs
I keep hearing that properties are in the biggest bubble yet in the USA - with the affordable housing shortage being a red herring, because real estate managers and boomers are unwilling/unable to reduce their prices - despite not getting renters/buyers because it would kick off a death spiral as their interests would consequently go up (because of lower security). Along with the ai layoffs etc
I'm not American so I only hear the occasional interview so don't have any idea if it's really as pressing as these industry professionals keep saying but I'm definitely at the edge of my seat watching...
> Gosh, I hope colleges don't find out about this pricing strategy.
They've been doing it for years; it's called "financial aid". It is literally the textbook example of how to get people to pay different amounts for the same thing based on what they are willing or able to pay.
It's also why the recent shift in immigration policy has affected top-tier universities so much: domestic education is, by and large, subsidized by international students who are almost exclusively admitted on a need-aware basis, allowing the schools to ensure the financials work out on paper.
Now that there's been a huge drop in international applications, they need to make up the loss in revenue, so they're shifting those costs back to domestic applicants.
Provided the criteria are transparent and directly applicable I don't see the issue. I wouldn't object to a grocery store that offered standardized discounted rates if you applied with documentation of your financial situation. Whereas an opaque operation with the goal of maximizing the final bill on an individual basis using entirely arbitrary criteria is dystopian and clearly extremely consumer hostile.
I can hardly claim omniscience but my understanding is that by and large universities bin students into broad categories and apply a uniform rate schedule based on demonstrated financial need (plus academic performance in some limited cases), with international students generally billed at the highest rate.
Grocery stores already do this! Why do you think there's "senior discount day"?
The thing is nobody will pay more than the advertised price so they want to not list a higher price, and then offer discounts. They do it via coupons and other mechanisms, but they'll never get anyone to pay $20 for a $5 bottle of Coke.
I realize that. My point is that you can view university financial aid favorably while also being against individualized offers from retailers. The current or historical practices of grocery stores isn't the primary issue under contention here.
A coupon that you must be over a certain age to redeem is an entirely different beast than one which was sent only to you specifically with an individualized price based on opaque criteria aimed at directly and immediately optimizing revenue. It is entirely possible to outlaw the latter (though Maryland appears to have failed to accomplish that) without restricting the former.
> Now that there's been a huge drop in international applications, they need to make up the loss in revenue, so they're shifting those costs back to domestic applicants.
What I said is correct. Inflation-adjusted hourly wages are down.
You posted a link that people are working more hours per year, so their yearly inflation-adjusted income is up.
So you're really posting the second negative here, thanks. As I said, tge average hourly median wage is below what it was 50 years ago. From the same federal reports you linked. Plus, we can see from here, that not only are people paid less per hour, they have to work more.
I don't know why you think these two negative things post a rosy picture.
It's immensely frustrating that Operation Warp Speed was probably the most successful government program in my lifetime, and now nobody wants to acknowledge it (Republicans because of anti-vax idiocy, Democrats because they don't want to credit the Trump administration).
Republicans don't want to call attention to the fact that "big" government actually can cut through red tape when it needs to. Suddenly, getting results means the vaccine is too "experimental".
And it's silly. A person earning $100 a year is not "twice as poor" as a person earning $200 in any meaningful sense; both are extremely poor and will require essentially the same amount of public support. But this metric treats the difference as so huge (80 hours to earn $1 vs 40) that it drowns out any differences in the rest of the income distribution.
Say you have 10 people: one making $800/year, 8 making $80k/year, and one evil billionaire making $800 million. Their times to earn $1 are respectively 10 hours, 0.1 hours, and essentially zero. If you take the arithmetic mean of that you get 1.09 hours, and that's dominated by the single poor person. If you double that person's income to $1600, then they're at 5 hours to earn $1, and the overall average is nearly cut in half to 0.58. Meanwhile you can reduce the income of all the middle class people to $40k and not much changes; the average time to $1 would be (5+8(0.2)+0)/10=0.66.
It captures the income distribution much better than average income.
Not really, and certainly not better than median income which is what people typically use. It tries to measure exactly how little income the very poor make, which is not normally what people mean when they talk about inequality or poverty, and also hard to measure at the accuracy that you need when small changes produce huge swings in the result. In particular I don't believe he's correctly accounted for government benefits; hardly anyone in the US is consuming less than $8000/year.
Thanks for the comment, I was trying to parse the meaning of "time needed to earn $1" for a bit. This just boils down to what countries have the highest floor for their poorest members.
you need more RAM? Throw it away and buy a new one.
Or sell it, which is much easier to do with Macs because they're known quantities and not "Acer Onyx X321 Q-series Ultra".
There is then the software issue, with Apple devices you are forced to use macOS that kind of sucks, especially for a server usage
That's a fair point. Apple would get a ton of goodwill if they released enough documentation to let Asahi keep up with new hardware. I can't imagine it would harm their ecosystem; the people who would actually run Linux are either not using Macs at all, or users like me who treat them as Unix workstations and ignore their lock-in attempts.
Scalpers make it possible to get a ticket at market price, instead of maybe being able to get it for less and maybe not being able to get it at any price. It's not at all clear that the latter is better.
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