jmp242 @ jmp242 @sopuli.xyz

Posts

20

Comments

537

Joined

2 yr. ago

I've seen some sketchy motels in my time, which is why I stopped staying in them. Hotels, especially major chains tend to be decent to great quality, and are usually cost competitive with AirBnB according to several news stories and lemmy threads over the last 10 months or so. And they have less weird requirements about you doing bed stripping / cleaning before you leave.

https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2021/03/01/the-science-of-supply-and-demand for instance used the COVID economic data to show how lack of supply, or lack of demand depending on the industry bore out what one might expect.

On Scalping - I don't know that anyone has done a study proving the existence of it, but it's a major part of news stories over the last 10 years, and there's papers about how scalpers often set ticket prices in the secondary market, and how it also more effectively allocates the tickets: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4324594

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/how-scalpers-justify-their-actions points to numerous news articles, and denying that this happens when there's high demand for items in low supply is like denying there's a war in Ukraine right now because there's no study proving it.

Finally, maybe you just aren't understanding me - are you saying you've never been to Ollies or Tuesday Mornings or seen liquidation or end of model year sales? You need a study to prove to you this happens pretty much all the time? You are arguing that if you've got a bunch of IDK 2022 Camrys on your lot when the 2023s start coming in, you're going to have less demand and less ability to sell those 2022s if you price them the same as the 2023s (i.e. demand dropping causing prices to need to drop to sell)?

Look - maybe you think "supply and demand" is too simplistic, and I agree. But if you're saying NO WHERE in the economy does supply vs demand affect pricing then I don't know what to tell you - just watching the News or living life buying stuff proves you wrong.

Well, it's harder now. Back in the day I migrated people to text secure then over to signal. So it was just an upgrade to their texting. Now that Signal dropped texting it's harder for regular people to use it. There was a large debate and the people wanting to bring in more new people lost.

Today I "sell signal" for people who want to share pictures (SMS never works with AT&T resellers and cheap phones), people who want to get my pictures when I'm out of the country, and people who want my "technical support" for media.

But there are some people who won't get on Signal and they just miss out on my trip pics they want to see. That's on them.

If you can figure Wine out you could use PDF XChange Editor.

The question here is just is a self organized posse better than the state police? I guess there's a reason that kind of went away in the west as it became less "wild". And we see what self protection or self enforcement leads to in many reports in the US. It's differently crappy / violent but not obviously better.

Ok but marketing teams and micro transactions teams to get rich have fuck all to do with k8s or clusters to run lots of data quickly over the network.

Maybe you know some magic way to provide high availability for petabytes of data pushed at hundreds of Gigabits per second to millions of simultaneous connections. But I don't. And I work with large data volumes for research that still are a fraction of Netflix data and throughput and we've hit the limit of single high performance storage devices necessitating a ceph cluster for storage and availability.

The problem with the data referenced is that as far as I can tell it's a bunch of surveys. And I really don't understand how you expect to discuss microeconomics at the level of one seller like the essay references without it being talking about anecdotes.

In general, (not specifically economics) I find ignoring the consensus of experts in a field leads you to conspiracy theories. So yes, in terms of sources reliability and my rating system for who to trust, I will take the standard college classes and consensus of experts.

It feels like each thing I address just has you pulling either a non-sequitor or just lambasting standard economics.

I also don't really see what you are arguing with me about except for a pedantic definition of supply vs demand or if those are even concepts.

The main argument in the essay is that the money printer doesn't lead to inflation. I never claimed it does, and all but one standard theory referenced in that essay agrees with you and the essay writer that it's not a straight "hydrolic" relationship.

The anecdotes you're both ignoring is that unless you're rather well off, if you get a raise or a stimulus package - almost everyone spends that money (or pays off debt, which is less direct but does free up spending power down the road). And we have seen shortages that pretty much were driven by hoarding in the pandemic. One vital part of that is having the money to spend - there were few reports of stealing actually leading to shortages.

And you completely skip the scalpers - did we imagine the PS5s being only available on ebay for 3x or more the MSRP? Did not having more money enable people to pay more to bid up the going price for the few available? What is that if not microeconomic supply and demand curves meeting at ebay sold prices?

I suppose the link you're disputing is getting from individual sales to the economy at large, but that's the problem this theory has, the reverse of the issue the essay claims traditional economics has.

I can't speak to k8s but there are reasons you need clusters to handle absurd amounts of data with high uptime and high networking performance.

The reason the streamers are creating their own content is licensing breakdowns and copyright law. I don't know why everyone thinks they can out Netflix the Netflix streaming service, but they also think they'll make more money trying to do it. It's like Amazon deciding to somehow make their delivery system better than UPS. Or cheaper.

I think it either calls into question the supposed economies of scale and core business competency theories or they're not doing it to save money / make money at all.

The biggest issue I see is self serving fuckwads don't go away. They'll import themselves a la Putin if they think they can get away with it. They'll create their own institutions a la the Mafia if there's nothing else.

The second problem is there are large groups of people who want to be under some Authority to the extent they get populist / fascist stuff going or invent ones like in Religion.

I just don't think people "freed from institutional authority" are inherently going to not just recreate it, probably worse...

The problem I have always seen is how do you deal with bad actors in general? It always eventually comes down to force.

No police or military just means that eventually some one will come in and take over.

I don't mean supply and demand in the extremely vague sense of that essay though. I mean individual people purchases and company sales. Something is happening when a person decides or not to buy something.

If in the aggregate people buy one product instead of another, that affects the business and they need to either appeal on other grounds or drop prices to compete.

I know there are different demand elasticity for different people for different things. That doesn't mean that price is completely arbitrary and buyers have no leverage at all. I think most of that essay is just saying to ignore macroeconomics, which as far as I ever learned (as taking the required class and a very minor interest in terms of expertise - so not much) was a major simplification to express large groups of people's actions. So of course it comes down to individual transactions. But I think the idea makes even more intuitive sense there.

Lets say I'm at a craft fair as a buyer. Someone wants to price their ceramic mug at 50 dollars. They can do that, but I am going to pass and look at other sellers. If the seller 30 feet down also has artsy ceramic mugs, but for 30 dollars - then that might make people there question the 50 dollar mug. Prices tend to affect demand and hence volume at least in my personal experience.

It's not the end all of things. I would take more flights if the price was 1/2 of what it is, but I don't know if I would take even more as it went cheaper. There's only so much travel I want to do in a year.

All that said - I agree that business just set prices but outside of maybe hospital bills, they're not arbitrary. If a business is constantly selling out they will raise prices I would argue that it seems pretty obvious to me that a lot of "covid" pricing was businesses just charging more and seeing if people would pay.

On the flip side, businesses regularly set lower prices on stuff that isn't moving. This ranges from simple "manager markdowns" all the way to the liquidation of merchandise to sellers like Ollie's. For small businesses they'll often see if you bite on something at the arbitrary price, but if not and the item has sat there too long they might haggle with you to get something vs an unending storage cost.

Even if you argue that we don't have an auction for many of the things we buy so the price is arbitrary and set by the seller - we still are almost always buying something that there are other potential buyers for. If I don't want it at price X+10%, the impact of that depends on how many other potential buyers will step in to buy it. When I talk about demand, I am simplifying a paragraph to a word.

Whats more, scalpers and ebay resellers will do the whole restricted supply driving prices up for the company even if they don't want to. We see that all the time. At that point it seems worse for the economy as the scalpers are just skimming money from buyers with no actual value provided. At least the original manufacturer could get a bonus or invest in more capacity if they grabbed that money.

Sellers can set prices, but for many things there are alternatives and hence more than one seller. Apple sets the iPhone prices, but you can substitute an Android pretty effectively, and there are multiple manufacturers of Android phones at lots of price points. If Apple decided to set the base price of an iPhone to 100k, people would not get mortgages, they'd buy a 500 dollar Android.

This holds true for lots of things, but housing is distorted by lots of factors. But housing doesn't disprove supply and demand.

No more than you needed to use quicken back in the day.

I guess it's like quickbooks. It can import financial institutions transactions downloads I believe.

This may be true for chrome, but as far as I can tell anyone building chromium can also change that open source code to not break ad blockers?

Patreon?

I know at least 2 Republicans that when you actually talk about individual policy preferences it comes across as moderate democrat. One of them was a virulent PRO masker because of their job.

I think people just don't pay attention to actual policies, it's all just the soundbites and controversy.

Gnucash can do this and is floss so won't really go away.

I don't need YouTube that much. It's competing with books, more traditional TV shows and movies, and Nebula / Curiosity Stream and Wondrium / LinkedIn Learning. I guess I might miss some reaction videos, but oh well.

Marxist ideas just don't seem to work in practice. You have to have a revolution that is authoritarian to force the change, and then the people in power never give it up willingly. Almost no one ever does.

But even if you did an ideal Marxist transformation, you have the huge economic problem of figuring out what to produce and where to distribute it. This is an impossible task for a committee to manage at a national scale. Capitalism outsources figuring that out to every transaction. Even when a company gets it wrong, it's limited to that company or sector. But in planned economies when they get it wrong, it's the entire economy. It's all great depressions and no minor corrections.

Whats worse is you lose a lot of choices - at best a good hearted technocrat is telling you what to make and what you will get. At worse you get famines because of mistakes in prediction.