#manufactured scarcity

[odinsblog]

🤯 No. fucking. way.

[millionmovieproject]

[modern-alebrije]

i do wanna try to snag creeproduction ghoulia and spectra but looking at the mattel website:

From April 1 at 12am ET through April 1 at 11:59 PM ET, only Fang Club members can buy the Boo-riginal Creeproduction Dolls at MattelCreations.com, while supplies last. During that time, the dolls may also be available at participating Target and Walmart locations, as well as Amazon.com, Target.com, and Walmart.com. Doll cannot stand alone. Doll stand included. Colors and decorations may vary. Purchase limits subject to change at the sole discretion of Mattel.  

are these mass produced plastic women only going to be available for a single day or am i reading that wrong??

[prince-steele]

do you see this shit my liege

[barrymccaulkinem]

did the beanie baby market come back when crypto crashed?

[springrls]

I hate to vent post, but this is intense so I don’t feel comfortable telling my friends directly or through a discord vent channel.

I asked my mom for $60 to buy groceries for 2 weeks. She asked “when does your ebt start?” Not going to unpack all of that right now, that’s at least a year in therapy, just wow.

I don’t live in a cheap city for food. I spent $100 3 weeks ago for 2 weeks of food. I’ve been covertly shamed for that since. I told discord friends I spend $100 for 2 weeks of food. They ask if I’m starving myself. She is, lol.

A month ago I told her I feel bad asking for money to buy food. That I feel greedy. She said no I’ll always help you. Then here we are…

Alls this to say. I just realized she thinks of me as less than. She treats me that way. $60 to eat for two weeks? She wants me to love her. Maybe if she treated me like I was human I would .

[transarsonist]

law idea: products that are not currently and will not be purchasable from the parent company for the foreseeable future are not counted as "copywritten" in regard to the sharing, reproduction, and other "piracy" claims in court of law.

if you aren't selling them your customer doesn't have to buy

this is in regards to all copyright, if someone starts a factory producing clones of iPhone and iMac chips for the purpose of repairing devices, that's not copyright infringement, because apple does not sell those chips :)

if they want to keep their copyright they can put their repair chips on the public market, continue matinance of old products, etc

Nintendo will hate this law the most I'm sure.

widows is surprisingly robust to this law as you can actually buy every copy of windows ever produced right now on windows website, albeit you might have a hard time finding it because they'd PERfer you didn't.

streaming companies dropping original content from their service for tax purposes can expect to find it on YouTube the next day for free no ads

I think you all will be able to see how this will have a hotting effect on the market, where as now copyright holders have the power to delete content from the legal sphere, under this law they cannot do that. they can sell it themselves or they can give it away for free.

no more manufactured scarcity for the sake of inflating already inflated prices

[rbbbff]

This is an informational post about my experience with the 5/24 HSLOT 22 US Amex presales. Hoping it might help someone buying during verified fan presale tomorrow or general sale weds. @cuethetommo has great ticket insights and advice on their blog that I recommend reviewing and will reblog. i know this process is extremely anxiety-inducing and truly a capitalistic minefield and my heart goes out to anyone struggling with it/the unfairness/the prices/the US-centric tour sched/all the fucked up components that make this up! and yes i agree that Louis should be scolding Harry for this ticketing horrorshow every chance he can get.

TL;DR out of 3 presale invites I secured tickets to 2 shows, mid lower bowl in Austin ($199ea) and pit for MSG last show night ($199ea). i consider this a successful outing.

More detail:

Got presale invites for 3 shows: Sept 21 (MSG), Oct 2 (Austin), Oct 13 (Chi). I think I signed up for 10-11 shows during presale registration so maybe 30% success rate there.

The Austin & Chicago show presales were at the exact same time (?? why.) Due to date and venue preference I focused on Austin. Cleared & blocked my schedule for this time, got in the waiting room 10min early as advised, and got into the queue at 658 people in front of me. I wanted to get close seated tickets (like first ~3 rows lower bowl), so when I got in I started looking at those, while also trying to add pit tickets to my cart just in case. (Note: Even after re-entering the queue and trying for ~40min, I did not get pit tickets for Austin. Maybe this is obvious but it seems like if you want pit tickets, focus on snagging those first).

Every.single.ticket pit or otherwise i tried to add to my cart for 25min straight was "snagged by another fan". maddening. Finally found 3 seats which were exactly what i wanted (yay!) first row seated! and clicked through to checkout... only to see that Those tickets were $1144 EACH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT IN THE PLATINUM PRICING. Abandoned in cart.

Back into the bloodbath and ultimately checked out with 3 mid lower bowl tix @ $199ea. Sec 119: $1144, Sec 117: $199. Okayyyy.

20 minutes later i queued for MSG, prayed and refreshed, refreshed right at <1min in the waiting room, got into the queue with only 258 people ahead of me. Entered, went right for 3 pit tix, got them on first try (!!!! PURE LUCK PLUS REFRESHING TIL MY FINGERS HURT) for $199ea and checked out breathing a gigantic sigh of RELIEF and gleeee.

Final thoughts:

this was my first REAL go-round for this; all my previous harry tickets (2019-2022) have been aftermarket purchases. $199 is not cheap but it is the cheapest Harry ticket I have purchased so far. I envy the twitter stans who can get aftermarket face value tix and not get scammed tbh, couldnt be me

Even if someone had an unlimited budget this process also requires the privilege of time/flexibility of schedule and just plain old LUCK

Sorry i cant share more insights into Chicago since TM really fucked me in making that sale the exact same time as Austin??? But by the time I logged in there seemed to be an extreme few amt of tickets left, and they also seemed more expensive than the Austin tix (but less so than MSG).

Austin venue is smallest (15K) with MSG being mid (20K) and United Center largest (23K) so thats a good thing to consider in terms of how close the seats are, etc

it is insane to me that a pit ticket and a mid lower bowl ticket are the same price, and a seat BETWEEN the two is over $1K. fuck dynamic pricing.

in the same fuck-dynamic-pricing vein: the equivalent mid lower bowl ticket that i got for $199 in Austin was $900 at MSG. Ugh.

it may mean nothing but i think continuously refreshing your TM screen while in the last ~1min of the waiting room has a chance to secure you a higher spot in the queue. could be wishful thinking. also ritualistic chanting seemed to help. kidding... or is it?

[odinsblog]

Damn, I wanna laugh, but I can’t even front like this isn’t happening in America too. Capitalism is a bitch.

[liberalsarecool]

Capitalism's inefficiencies and manufactured scarcity make socialism all the more necessary.

The roads don't pave themselves.

[fuckyeahisawthat]

Thinking about Heaven and Hell and how Heaven has vastly more resources at its disposal. When Hell wants to spy on Aziraphale and Crowley they have to send an actual demon Upstairs with a physical camera and zombie henchmen to take one (1) picture. When Heaven does it they can effortlessly pull receipts on all of human history without leaving the C-suite.

And that’s by design, isn’t it? Because Heaven is not the good side, they’re the victors. They won the war. They kept the executive floors, literally and metaphorically, and Hell got kicked down to the crappy basement.

Hell is defined by scarce resources and the behaviors an environment of scarcity produces. It’s shitty and dark and crowded; everything is old and broken and frustrating to use. Scarcity engenders infighting, scrabbling for resources because there isn’t enough to go around, backstabbing and deal-cutting and shoving down anyone weaker than you to get a slightly better position. Taking out your anger over your shit conditions and what you lost on human souls and on other demons alike. Demons are crabs in a bucket, constantly pulling each other down. (And, like the crab metaphor, their situation is manufactured. Crabs do not naturally occur in buckets. Someone put them there.)

We see that Gabriel, separated from the memory of his power and privilege in Heaven, is not fundamentally an asshole. The assholery is instilled by the system he lives in. In the same way, we don’t really know what any of the demons would be like outside the system of Hell. Beelzebub experienced the most modest amount of friendly camaraderie and understanding and decided it was worth risking everything for. Crowley, who has spent the most time outside the environment of Hell of any of them, is not vicious and cruel toward humans the way we see many of the other demons being. And it’s not because he’s special; it’s because he’s been able to spend time in an environment where his compassion and kindness and admiration for humans can breathe a little when no one is watching.

I highly suspect that the structure of Heaven and Hell and their current relationship to Earth and humanity (and Aziraphale and Crowley) is not going to survive s3 intact. There is simply no way for Aziraphale and Crowley and Earth to be safe and free from metaphysical threats with the system the way it is now.

There are several ways I could see this resolving, but the most metaphorically rich and theologically bananapants option would be…something that permanently heals the rift between Heaven and Hell.

Not undoing the Fall so that it never happened. That can’t be done on a societal level any more than on an individual one. The war still happened; the damage was still done. But some kind of mutually agreed disarmament. A radical redistribution of ethereal resources. Taking down the metaphysical border wall. Unrestricted fraternization between demons and angels who are really more alike than they are different. Maybe abandoning the executive floors and the basement entirely, and meeting…somewhere in the middle.

[omg-physics]

So, like, universal basic income.

One of the things I’ve heard people say is how, you know, you need income as a motivation to make people work. And I’ve heard some great arguments against that.

But also.

There are a lot of low-paid jobs that actually make the world a crappier place. Like, if we could just pay everyone in the fast fashion industry to stay home and not go to work, the world would be a much better place. If we paid people enough that they didn’t need to work in factories, then large-scale manufacture of crappy stuff wouldn’t be feasible anymore.

Like, we’re basically in a post-scarcity society. We have more than enough food and clothing for everyone. This manic capitalist mindset where we force people to go to jobs they hate to remove value from the world is insane, right?

And maybe if we instituted this we’d lose fast food corporations and stuff. But I bet they’d be replaced by small restaurants run by people who are passionate about what they do.

[intersectionalpraxis]

Poster in the original X post states: "Under capitalism, food isn't produced to feed people, its produced to make a profit. When it's not profitable to feed people, we let them starve. Even when our labor has conquered scarcity, capitalism must manufacture it in order to justify its existence." [image description: Bobby from the American television cartoon show King of the Hill sits on a rock atop what I presume to be the moon or another planet -in the background there is a dark sky with stars beaming. The caption above appears just above Bobby.] Further context: a person sent this message to me to further describe the scene of Bobby in the image above (I added in the colour description -thank you!) : re: the bobby king of the hill meme, he is colored [a light pale blue] and put in the comic panel as dr manhattan from watchmen when he has vacationed to mars due to his detachment from/maybe contempt for humanity

Do you know what else puts this into perspective for me too? The United Nations has estimated (many times over the years) the amount it would take to solve world hunger, and if you look at the military expenditures of some of the most powerful countries in the world, which excess in billions and close to trillions of dollars together, on top of billionaires in this world living well beyond their means, you know how easily it can be to ensure people are getting proper access to food and resources their entire lives, but it's still a global humanitarian issue -people are STARVING all around the world, but so many governments would rather allocate expenses/their budgets to the military. Because if these people in power and affluence really wanted to, world hunger would be solved -and they'd still be rich. The way this entire world has been set up will always be baffling and cruel.

[captain-price-unofficially]

Video published by Al-Qassam Brigades (Hamas) allegedly showing them tracking an officer in the elite Shaldag unit, Yitzhar Hoffman, before he was killed by a sniper. Hoffman is said to be responsible for the siege and storming of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza.

Translation:

A unit of the occupation forces is holed up in Gaza City. The images obtained exclusively by Al Jazeera allow the location of the concentration to be determined. The field command center was established in a sports club, about one kilometer away from Al-Shifa Hospital, and located within the Jawazat area, which witnessed fierce clashes between the Israeli army and the Resistance factions for weeks.

This is Yitzhar Hoffman, a platoon leader in the Shaldag Special Unit. He was responsible for drawing up a plan to besiege Al-Shifa Hospital and then storm it last November. According to photos obtained by Al Jazeera, which are being shown for the first time, the Al-Qassam Brigades monitored Hoffman's movements after storming the hospital. At the end of last January, the Al-Qassam Brigades waited for the Israeli army to announce the killing of Hoffman so that they publish pictures of the operation and identify the targeted person.

The Al-Aqsa flood was not the first confrontation in which the Qassam Brigades used sniper weapons. The developed Al-Ghoul rifle that mimics the specifications of the Austrian-made Steyr rifle, caliber 12.7 mm, has the capabilities and features of an assault rifle with an adjustable system, to transform from an assault rifle into a sniper rifle.

The Al-Qassam Brigades were able to manufacture it locally and it bore the name of one of the most prominent symbols of military manufacturing in Al-Qassam: the martyr Adnan Al-Ghoul. With the rifle, Al-Qassam produced the appropriate ammunition to enhance the rifle’s effectiveness and feasibility.

The ammunition was manufactured with three specifications:

1- Training that enable the preparation of fighters within the special units.

2-Ammunition designed to target flammable materials.

3-Used to deal with the armor and fortifications used by the Israeli army.

The impact of the locally manufactured weapons is show on battlefields, in a way that the bullet penetrates the helmet worn by the soldiers and explodes after penetration. The bullet can also penetrate the protective vest, which is supported by a metal plate that shatters when hit to cause damage to the upper area of the body. It can also penetrate and disrupt devices and systems used by the occupying army.

To put the weapon into use, the Al-Qassam Brigades trained special units of fighters within its combat formations, as the photos obtained by Al Jazeera show. Training takes place after selecting fighters who have qualities that enable them to withstand long periods of waiting to capture a potential target, the ability to work under extreme pressure in difficult field conditions, the flexibility of concealment, determining the importance of the target and making the decision of execution.

The Qassam had previously used sniper weapons in field combat in battles before 2007, when it seized medium-caliber rifles like the Russian Dragunov and Brezhnev models and the Belgian FN FAL rifle. But it suffered from limited availability, scarcity of ammunition and its high cost. Then, heavy snipers including the Austrian Steyr and the Chinese M99, were brought into the Gaza Strip through supply lines. And documented operations were carried out using them.

The Ghoul rifle is the latest weapon in the resistance’s arsenal, which according to Al Jazeera’s information, recorded a verified hitting distance of 1800 meters in Al-Aqsa Flood Operation.

[disabled-is-not-a-dirty-word]

I was thinking about the post regarding Thick It misuse that I reblogged earlier, and decided to make a handy flowchart for people that want to buy and/or use various disability products intended to mitigate the symptoms of a disability that they do not have. I saw far too many comments that simplified the problem down to either "abled people buying and using disability aids always harms disabled people due to increased scarcity of the product" or "increased demand for these products by abled people will lead to increased supply, which in turn helps disabled people." I'm afraid that, as always, the truth is a little more nuanced than that.

[ID: An image of a flowchart. The header bubble reads "Should you buy / use a product that aids a disability that you do not have?" and has an arrow beneath it pointing to the following bubble which asks the question "is this product specifically made for the sole purpose of aiding a person with said disability?" The "yes" arrow leads to a bubble that says "you probably shouldn't buy it. Products that ONLY benefit disabled people are often low in supply and may be difficult to manufacture." The "no" bubble asks "is the product difficult to produce?" and has the possible answers of "yes, it is a product of a highly regulated industry, is just generally difficult to make properly, or contains a limited resource" and "no". The "yes" bubble reads "you should not buy / use it. Supply will not be able to make up for demand, and the prices will likely increase while product availability decreases." The "no" bubble asks "will the increased demand cause a shortage of this product?" The "yes" bubble asks the question "will a temporary shortage of this product cause significant harm or inconvenience to the disabled people that it was made for?" which has a "yes" bubble that reads "please do not use / buy this." The "no" answer for this question leads to the same bubble as the "no" answer for the previous question which asks "are you buying / using this item as a Gag Gift or for entertainment purposes. The "yes" bubble reads "please reconsider your reasoning for buying / using this item. Turning disability aids into jokes worsens the stigma for the people who need these products." The "no" bubble says "there is nothing wrong with buying / using this product." /End ID]

[aurosoulart]

sometimes I get NFTbros trying to get me to sell my work as crypto bullshit and NOTHING shuts them up faster than me saying

‘oh actually literally all my AR art is published under public domain! no single person can own it because technically it’s owned by everyone :))’

they hate not being able to manufacture artificial scarcity