Scalpers, just had an interesting debate with my mate. I just got lucky and managed to get a 3080 FE and he was saying i was daft to not immediately sell it and make £800 easy. We then talked about whether there was ever a scenario where scalping was ok.
My point was i dont NEED the £800, luckily for me im in a situation where i dont need to do that to support myself my family and my wants and needs. So scalpers in the same situation are rats granted doing nothing illegal, but care little for others. The kind of people that have no empathy
But what if id lost my job since covid, as a result i was having marital issues due to streses associated with money, mortgage falling behind, anxiety building. Who is anyone to call me a scum bag in that situation. Literally doing it to hold my life together thoughts?
Well you have to understand in some sense the problem with this scenario is that Nvidia has price fixed the FE cards which otherwise in a free market would be priced higher. The problem with scalping is that there isn't really such a thing. There are markets where trade happens, there are goods and services for sale and there are buyers. And the value of any specific good or service is merely where the supply and demand curves meet, if you happen to have low supply for some reason and high demand then the value is going to be very high. That's completely normal and how normal healthy markets work.
To say something is scalping is to say that it's priced above, or even significantly above what is ought to be priced at, and the problem is there's simply no objective way to say what something ought to be priced at, other than letting people compete for it in a voluntary market where participation in the exchange is voluntary and see what prices people settle on. This is why people need to stop projecting what they "feel" is the right price, you're projecting a subjective feeling for which there is basically no justification.
No one is forced into trade in a free market, it's completely voluntary and so empathy just doesn't really apply. Besides empathy typically scales with how close you are emotionally to other people. You have a lot of empathy for family and partners, a bit less so for friends and colleagues, a bit less for members of your local community, then less for people in your county and even less for someone 500 miles away, and by the time you get to people in India or China where tens of thousands of people die every day you basically could not care less. And so trade on more or less a national or global scale has got noting to do with empathy. If I pass on hardware to close friends I'll often do it either for free or massively reduced cost, I just gave one of my 1080's to a friend for nothing despite them going for ~350-400 on ebay. But if I sold one on ebay i'd get as much for it as possible.
The problem isn't scalping, it's a mistaken belief that there's a price at which something ought to be sold at, which you arrive at because of how you feel. The price fixing that Nvidia do has ulterior motives behind it, it's not out of their pure generosity they do that, it's because there's ancillary benefits for things like marketing, it's already known that the FEs struggle to even break a profit. It's why the supply of them is always very low.
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