There isn’t an obviously right place to post this, so I’ll just say that I thought this essay on price discrimination/dynamic pricing was very interesting:
I’ve liked other posts by Waldman, as well - he’s a really thoughtful guy in terms of how markets work in both theory and practice.
It is quite amazing how often the country Colombia is misspelled
Considering how many "Columbia"s there are, it’s not too surprising.
Yeah the Darien crossing has been made a lot easier since I wrote about it in my book. I guess getting robbed, raped, and dying wasn’t good for business.
This seems like a bit of a strawman, actually. At least in Econ 101, you can’t price discriminate if you don’t have market power, so the apt comparison isn’t between the perfect competition equilibrium and the price discrimination one, it’s between price discrimination and the producer just charging an inefficiently high price to everyone.
That was Matt Bruneig’s point about popularism. You can take the same policy and frame it different ways and get different poll results. More than framing if people like the policy they will reframe it in a way they like. Conservatives talk about how Social Security is money they ‘earned’ because it’s a way to erase the cognitive dissonance that it’s an entitlement that they like.
The article suggests this is still happening. But that they also have camps with wifi. It’s a fucking trippy read.
I know that pronunciations like “biaseez” and “processeez” are becoming more common but it is very jarring to hear them emphasized repeatedly in a short period of time. I’m on a call where a guy started talking about unconscious bias and it felt like every other word ended in eez
Geez.
Deez
Fair, but it’s not how I interpreted it. What I had in mind was a case where the equilibrium shift from perfect competition, and consumers don’t fully realize it. I think this roughly describes me - When I am shopping at Costco or on Amazon for everyday purchases, I rarely do a lot of price comparisons. Instead, I assume that through the invisible hand of the market, someone is doing those comparisons and I am free-riding off of their efforts. I just assume that the prices I see are competitive. If Amazon quietly adopts price discrimination, I’m probably not going to notice, and I’ll continue to purchase from them and not realize that I’ve lost some of my surplus to them. Maybe the way to reconcile this with your comment is that I believe in many cases Amazon effectively has short-term market power over me because I’m unwilling to incur the transactions costs of looking elsewhere.
Following up on my complaint a few days ago about people scalping Pokemon cards, there are actually whole communities of people “investing” in Pokemon cards, Lego sets, and probably other toys. Here’s a post from Reddit from someone who wants to invest $50k in Pokemon.
Btw I got the cards I wanted at retail price from Sam’s, so suck it scalpers.
“holding $15k worth of 75336 and other cule stuff”
https://www.brickeconomy.com/set/75336-1/lego-star-wars-obi-wan-kenobi-inquisitor-transport-scythe
This guy appears to be heavily invested in something that is available for immediate shipment from both Amazon and Walmart.
I had no idea there’s actually a lego analyst environment with target prices and everything.
There are people who appear to have bought ~$1,000 worth of a particular card set and are trying to sell it for double on eBay even though it’s still readily available to buy in stores (and from the Sam’s website). And someone is probably buying it from them.
Everyone (including me) is losing their minds, and I’m really not enjoying my stress levels being this high.
I remember back in the early days of the 2016 primaries where I thought that chaos was really fun, and now I very much regret wishing that into the world.
Gotta keep a healthy distance from the news. Be aware of it but don’t have an emotional response to it. The unfortunate reality is that there’s little that one person alone can do to change the direction we’re going.
I found that my stress and anxiety have decreased dramatically since not being glued to news and social media for it.
The stupid thing about all this is that if Harris wins, it doesn’t mean Silver was wrong, and if she loses, it doesn’t mean he was right. It’s just percentages.
