I agree. The history of price-gouging laws is mostly a history of political posturing.

Independent: JD Vance is now the least popular VP candidate in modern history – even below Sarah Palin

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-b2597445.html

Only the best people. Or in this case, the only person who would return Trump's calls.

Hillbilly Eulogy really not having a fun time these days

Its price gauging according to the communist candidate

Technology has shifted the landscape on this, since you can use automated monitoring of pricing and adjust prices accordingly. This with a scope, reaction time and speed that was simply not possible before.

When several chains do this, it can ultimately end up doing exactly the same as a cartel would through collusion, adjust prices to where there isn't competition, which is a big loss for the consumer. It might not be undisclosed phone-calls and handshakes of the cartels of past, but the net result could end up the same.

Transparency and oversight into such practices is therefore important.

Oh the implicit collusion sidedoor to marxist hell has been opened.

With very quick pricing available competition *still exists* and you can price slightly lower than your competitors and keep track of that even better and do the same things you would do in competition, strike a balance between margin per unit and market share depending on competition pricing and so on and on.

No reason to think that if it is fast you get more (or any) implicit collusion, especially in ultra-fragmented markets like food.

"oversight into such practices" means immense bureaucracy and a legal handgun pointed to the head of the people in charge of pricing, who at any moment could be held accountable to having to justify any single choice to people who have no clue about them, and to justify which you have to explain in extreme detail how your company works, just giving another group of unelected deadweight "civil servants" even more power over the actual people who provide prosperity to society (the private sector).

And those civil servants will always vote left, their jobs depend on it.

No thanks.

This is the exact opposite of what happens.

It works in both directions and while in a lot of cases it might result in competitors trying to undercut each other, the behaviour t_d is talking about absolutely does happen and has been studied in academic papers (e.g. this paper about gas prices in Perth, WA where there was found to be tacit collusion between many companies that resulted in increased margins and profits for all of them) . It's especially prevelant in e-commerce markets, where algorithmic pricing is a well known phenomenon, with the famous example of two automatic pricing algorithms looking at each other's prices and resulting in a book being priced in the millions of dollars. Obviously that's not an example of it working in any meaningful way but it does show that algorithmic pricing that results in higher prices is a thing that companies do.

Sounds like the programmer(s) didn't understand recursion.

To understand recursion,

In case you all wanted a catch all reply to the Corporalisimo

What you are referring to isn't what most people mean when they use the term price gouging.

It also is not obvious to me that the ability to change prices rapidly is inherently anticompetitive or bad for consumers.

Well, I don't think anyone has said it is inherently anti-competitive.

But it is important to remember that the purpose of these largely automated systems isn't just meant to determine how low you can price goods, they are also meant to determine how high you can price goods. And that is where things start to get funky, especially if we're talking about a type of business with high barrier to entry so that those already present in the market have little fears of new competition.

Like Willd said in this post, this phenomena has both been observed and studied. Markets where it occurs are called oligopolies. The main point is that to see if it is occurring and prevent it you need oversight and transparency into pricing practices.

If people want to call it price gouging or not is pretty much irrelevant.

Man, tough crowd. That recursion joke is a killer at parties.

If it doesn't work, you should just tell it again.

Wait, isn't that what you're supposed to do with every joke?

NYT: Trump Says Civilian Award Is ‘Much Better’ Than Medal of Honor

The former president said Thursday the reason was because those given the nation’s highest military award are “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”

At a campaign event at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., billed as a discussion about fighting antisemitism, Mr. Trump recounted how he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Miriam Adelson, the Israeli-American widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Ms. Adelson, who attended the event, is among his top donors.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/16/u...ary-honor.html

At this rate the only contingent who will still vote for Trump come November are members of his immediate family. And he might want to look over their shoulders at the ballot box to make sure that's even true.

Surprised he didn't mention that he likes casino owners who don't die. Although I suppose in this case it doesn't matter since his wife is still around to send money.

Isn't this just business?

pro tip

if google thinks it's funny, it's not

that is not what an oligopoly is. It could be, but what you said is not a requirement. here is the definition

"An oligopoly (from Ancient Greek ὀλίγος (olígos) 'few' and πωλέω (pōléō) 'to sell') is a market in which control over an industry lies in the hands of a few large sellers who own a dominant share of the market. Oligopolistic markets have homogenous products, few market participants, and inelastic demand for the products in those industries.[1] As a result of their significant market power, firms in oligopolistic markets can influence prices through manipulating the supply function. Firms in an oligopoly are also mutually interdependent, as any action by one firm is expected to affect other firms in the market and evoke a reaction or consequential action.[1] As a result, firms in oligopolistic markets often resort to collusion as means of maximising profits."

Fine. I'm basically the Carla of 2+2.



(Also, obv I know about the recursion Easter Egg in Google. I've posted before here IIRC. Oh, how we all laughed.)

It is starting to look like North Carolina will be removed from likely Trump to toss up or likely Harris in Electoral maps moving forward.

ok so lets say you bought a house and you got a good rate and now your home is overvalued 5 years later as the market adjusted. In another 5 years your homes value will have returned, maybe ten years, and you will likely be able to get a lower rate.

If you are in dire need of money you can rent out rooms/ the whole house to make your mortgage. but seeing as how your mortgage didnt change, you should be able to afford your payment, unless you lost your job, but that is not part of this example.

So after ten years, you have paid off a third of your mortgage and your house is worth as much as you paid for it.

or you can sell your house when its value drops. Now you have to rent and you dont save any money.After five years you want to buy a house again, and so you have to come up with a bunch of money down. your rate is also higher than what it used to be. After five years you have now paid off 1/6 of your mortgage, and you have had to make two down payments. much more expensive than keeping your house when it was upside down or worth less than you paid for it

or you could sell your house and rent forever, saving no money and have 0 equity built up after ten years

so yes, please explain to me again why it really matters when your home's value drops?

I don't need to read the article. Conscious parallelism has been a topic of scholarly and judicial discussion in antitrust circles in the United States for at least the last sixty years.

Are you planning to live in your car, squat in an abandoned building, or flop on your friend's couch indefinitely after you move out of your home?