If there is a leak investigation which let’s be honest. I highly doubt there isn’t at this point. It just adds to the mounting evidence it is probably true. Just like the lawsuit will be dropped before depos like usual if it ever is refiled.
> The F.B.I. began investigating a New York Times reporter last month after she wrote about the bureau’s director, Kash Patel, using bureau personnel to provide his girlfriend with government security and transportation, according to a person briefed on the matter.
> Agents interviewed the girlfriend, queried databases for information on the reporter, Elizabeth Williamson, and recommended moving forward to determine whether Ms. Williamson broke federal stalking laws, the person said.
> Those actions prompted concerns among some Justice Department officials who saw the inquiry as retaliation for an article that Mr. Patel and his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, did not like, and who determined there was no legal basis to proceed with the investigation, according to the person briefed on the matter.
I don't fully understand this narrative that is going around about scalpers and the controller. So many people online are claiming it was only scalpers who were able to purchase one. I am also not a scalper (as someone else said), and was able to purchase one. We don't know how many they actually had in stock in total but let's say it's around 30K, from what I have searched on eBay and other reselling sites it would only seem like less than 1% of the stock is being sold by resellers/scalpers. I think it was just a high demand product. I know scalpers are a problem in much of the entertainment industry right now, but it's also becoming a scape goat for anything you just weren't able to buy yourself. It's quite annoying and getting old fast.
It’s hard to participate in any gaming communities because you quickly realize they’re all kids who have no idea about markets but they all talk like foremost experts on every subject
This is not just gaming communities and it is not just kids. The number of adults who don't understand basic supply and demand is astonishing.
Every discussion about Ticketmaster and/or scalpers is full of people who think if it wasn't for scalpers and ticketmaster, we could all go to every concert we want to for a reasonable price.
It is the same thing with the tech community and the price of hard drives, RAM, and GPUs right now. I have seen so many comments by people saying they "aren't going to support the price gouging" and seem to think manufacturers are just taking advantage of the hype to increase their prices.
The societal advantage of raising prices with demand is that it will lead to more supply generally, but in some cases supply is just simply limited and cannot be expanded enough sensibly. This leads just to people earning money without any additional economic benefit and often the poor suffering because of it (like with oil currently).
Of course DRAM manufacturers are taking advantage of the current situation, they're companies and making money is what companies are for. The problem is that DRAM manufacturing works in boom-bust cycles, building a new factory is capital intensive and slow, so additional supply will come too few and too late to press prices down to a sensible rate above manufacturing costs.
The funniest to me was people being confused why cutting of the strait of Hormuz would increase gas prices in the US when the US produces enough to supply its own demand.
But since it’s a global market the missing supply raises prices everywhere…
Does Ticketmaster not amplify prices and use perceived scarcity to drive up prices? They can due that because Live Nation is a monopoly in all but name.
If the tickets still sell out at the higher prices, than it is real scarcity, not artificial scarcity.
Each show has a set number of seats... it isn't an artificial monopoly, it is an intrinsic monopoly. People don't want to just go to A concert, they want to go to a SPECIFIC concert, and a concert venue only holds a set amount of people.
I managed to buy one, I also have no intention to sell it anytime soon. I do wish there were better protections against scalpers though, they are a blight.
It's also very important to understand that Valve has 100% control of the marketplace. They don't have to hope that Best Buy or Walmart or whatever secure their system against scalpers. They can enforce account history requirements and rate limiting or what ever they please.
I'd be extremely surprised if they didn't do that.
These days it's hard to tell and there's always a mix of both with any high demand items so it makes the stock limits even more pronounced. With how Valve has done hardware releases lately though I imagine it's more a stock limitation.
Is it really? I go to my "local" second-hand marketplace and I see countless of listings for the new Valve Controller. I think it's fair to say most of those aren't "Ops, I made a purchase and I can't return it" but most likely being scalpers. No doubt, some of them are fake as well, but regardless, tends to be fairly easy to see when things are being scalped or if it's actually just high demand, if it's the latter, you don't see tons of second-hand listings the day after it opened.
Right, they're saying you only see the side of the resellers, you have no idea the number of people who purchased it to keep it (like many of us in the thread). So in reality you may be only seeing less than 1% of stock for resell and not the 99% that are just buying it to keep it like normal. It's just confirmation bias that you assume everyone is buying to resell it cause that's all you're able to see.
I also got one and didn't think scalpers were the problem at the time. I have since seen eBay listings of people trying to sell the controllers (that they don't even have yet) for 3x the price, though, so they maybe did play a role. There was a limit of 2 controllers per Steam account and they sold out within 30 minutes, so not sure if bots were used or what. There wasn't a lot of time to mess around. I've seen a lot of people who wanted one couldn't get one. Personally I added it to my cart about 2 minutes before the official start time and then it took 12 minutes or so of retrying to actually check out.
I added it to my cart 2 minutes before and spent 3 hours trying before realizing that just because it's in your cart doesn't mean it exists since it was actually out of stock.
I got 2. 1 for me and 1 for my brother. I sat with the page loaded and waiting. It opened a few minutes early and I was able to still order a 2nd about 5 minutes into sale
I have one and didn't have any issues buying, nor heard anyone have any issues buying in the past... In fact, the Steam Controller was considered a flop.
I think nobody but valve knows and they are not telling us. We don't know how many units were sold and how the protections were (at least I didn't see anything). Some people seem to assume that scalpers are to blame when a product is sold out really fast (which is understandable when looking at past hardware releases).
Me, I don't think so. I just think people really wanted to get one.
I know the steam deck had good scalper limitations. You had to have a steam account in good standing (no vac bans) that had a game purchase from before the deck was available for purchase, as well as a limit of how many one account could purchase.
There was a limit of 2 steam controllers for this sale, but it sounds like that limit was only per transaction, and didn't prevent an account from placing multiple transactions (if the store would load for long enough to allow it). I don't think any of the other limitations were in place.
This relates to what the first poster said though, at these quantities “just give it away” is incredibly expensive. Trucks, workers, cleaning, fuel, etc.
Just give it away still requires someone to pay for it
Earning calls are when CEO’s are telling the truth about their products. Knowing Tesla’s history of making payments he won’t see a dime. I’m no lawyer but he should set up a publicity stunt like the man who seized Bank of America’s equipment in order to get paid in full the same day. (George and Ora Lee, successfully seized assets from a Bank of America branch after the bank wrongly foreclosed on their home)
In 2000, NationsBank in Charlotte bought Bank of America. They used the BofA name, but the NB people ran things. Hugh McColl had been the CEO of NB for years, and he was CEO of BofA for a year. The next CEO, Ken Lewis, was also from NB. I worked for BofA in Chicago from 2001 to 2009. I talked to people in Charlotte all the time. I almost never talked to people in California.
Now that I think about it, I dealt with people in a lot of regions of the US, but almost nobody on the West Coast.
"Bank of America, Los Angeles, was founded in California in 1923. In 1928, this entity was acquired by the Bank of Italy of San Francisco, which took the Bank of America name two years later"
Gawiser filed a “writ of execution” (another $240 in court fees) just yesterday, which would allow Texas law enforcement to seize and sell off enough of Tesla’s property as would be required to pay the judgment against them.
Yeah, me neither. I mean I've seen models with busty substances covered in pretty sheer bikini tops… which might be pornographic for some. But that's the extent of it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65794363
The author John Green who was top of a recent list said that the Bible was number 6 on the list.
As other comments have pointed out, a "ban" is where a library has chosen not to stock a book for reasons including response to a complaint. If school library serves children up to the age of 13, then certain explicit fiction is not appropriate and would be expected to be removed.
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