I have just realised how ridiculous the GPU situation is.

[barlew]

I have a gaming PC and a gaming laptop and I use the laptop far far more than the PC. I thought maybe I should get rid of the PC whilst its still worth somthing.
So I have a quick look on Ebay and cannot believe my eyes. I have an RTX 2070 Super and the particular model I have is selling on ebay second hand right now for between £700 and £800. II bought it for just over £500 brand new. This world we currently live in is absolutely mental!

 

[SpyderTracks]

I have a gaming PC and a gaming laptop and I use the laptop far far more than the PC. I thought maybe I should get rid of the PC whilst its still worth somthing.
So I have a quick look on Ebay and cannot believe my eyes. I have an RTX 2070 Super and the particular model I have is selling on ebay second hand right now for between £700 and £800. II bought it for just over £500 brand new. This world we currently live in is absolutely mental!

We were just talking about this yesterday, it’s not just the GPU market, it seems the idea of “value” has lost all meaning with crazy cryptocurrency prices, companies like GameStop being almost eradicated due to a few traders, and then artificially skyrocketing because of a group of people who weren’t willing to let that happen, even though the company has been close to closing for many years, then there’s NFT’s which for the life of me I just can’t understand where the value is at all, micro transactions in games where people will spend thousands on a gun skin or something that is completely pointless.

It just seems what I’ve been used to most of my life as a value proposition is rapidly going out the window.

On Steam, whenever I play a game I get “trading cards”, which are simply a digital card with a picture. I amass several as I play. I can then post those for sale on my steam account and people actually pay money for them??? The amount that’s earns me back in my steam wallet over the years is significant, I just can’t work out why anyone would want to buy them? Same with trading cards like Magic The Gathering, people will pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for a pack of cards???

In the second hand record market as well though, the amount of records that I bought new only a few years ago which are now worth hundreds of pounds, in a lot of cases they're more valuable than an original Beatles pressing from the 60's in perfect condition.

It seems the world is more cottoned on to scalping in all areas now, it's becoming mainstream practice and seems to be devaluing things across the board by making them exorbitantly expensive. It can't last, it's just not sustainable at all, and IMHO laws need to be put in place to fully tighten down on it.

I just don’t get it.

 

[ubuysa]

NFTs I just don't understand. Who would pay $2.9 Dollars to 'own' Jack Dorsey's first ever tweet? What do you actually own beyond a bit of paper that says that this thing that doesn't really exist in any case belongs to you? It's bonkers.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Sorry to take this a little off topic, but it's a good case in point:

These are my top 10 most valuable records as rated by up to date sales on Discogs which is the world marketplace for used record buying:

Notice all of them apart from one of my original Beatles records are recent releases.

That Beatles copy is an original pressing (my copy is really worn so not worth anything like the full value).

But that top valued one, that's recently sold for around £500 IS A SINGLE - YES ONLY 2 TRACKS!!! Sure, they're great tracks, but it's 2 mixes of the same song. I confess I bought my copy of that in late 2017 and paid £100 but it was a Mint copy brand new, that one that recently sold was NM which had been played several times. As soon as you move from Mint to Near Mint, you devalue by about 50% by normal guidelines.

It's not a bartering system or anything on Discogs, the seller posts the sum they want and people pay it, there's no offering bids or anything like eBay.

Where is the issue? In the fact that scalpers will inflate the price to such rediculous levels on things they know are popular? Or the fact that there are people that will always pay those prices?

Almost all of the rest of them I picked up new only a few years ago from places like Amazon, and aside from the LemonJelly albums, they're all highly likely to be repressed anyway.

 

[jamiephillips909]

We were just talking about this yesterday, it’s not just the GPU market, it seems the idea of “value” has lost all meaning with crazy cryptocurrency prices, companies like GameStop being almost eradicated due to a few traders, and then artificially skyrocketing because of a group of people who weren’t willing to let that happen, even though the company has been close to closing for many years, then there’s NFT’s which for the life of me I just can’t understand where the value is at all, micro transactions in games where people will spend thousands on a gun skin or something that is completely pointless.

It just seems what I’ve been used to most of my life as a value proposition is rapidly going out the window.

On Steam, whenever I play a game I get “trading cards”, which are simply a digital card with a picture. I amass several as I play. I can then post those for sale on my steam account and people actually pay money for them??? The amount that’s earns me back in my steam wallet over the years is significant, I just can’t work out why anyone would want to buy them? Same with trading cards like Magic The Gathering, people will pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for a pack of cards???

In the second hand record market as well though, the amount of records that I bought new only a few years ago which are now worth hundreds of pounds, in a lot of cases they're more valuable than an original Beatles pressing from the 60's in perfect condition.

It seems the world is more cottoned on to scalping in all areas now, it's becoming mainstream practice and seems to be devaluing things across the board by making them exorbitantly expensive. It can't last, it's just not sustainable at all, and IMHO laws need to be put in place to fully tighten down on it.

I just don’t get it.

An ultra-rare Pokémon card has sold for a record-breaking amount!

The elusive and highly sought-after Pikachu Illustrator card is one of the rarest cards in the world.

They were given out as a prize in competitions in 1998, and only 39 of them were ever made - and around 10 are thought to still exist.

A mint condition version of the card just sold for a whopping 25 million yen, or around £183,000 on the Japanese auction site ZenPlus to a buyer in the US.
i mean its just absurd everything has a value to someone but £183,000 on some cardboard with a picture on it i just dont get it

 

[ubuysa]

An ultra-rare Pokémon card has sold for a record-breaking amount!

The elusive and highly sought-after Pikachu Illustrator card is one of the rarest cards in the world.

They were given out as a prize in competitions in 1998, and only 39 of them were ever made - and around 10 are thought to still exist.

A mint condition version of the card just sold for a whopping 25 million yen, or around £183,000 on the Japanese auction site ZenPlus to a buyer in the US.
i mean its just absurd everything has a value to someone but £183,000 on some cardboard with a picture on it i just dont get it

Although not related that sort of reminds me of the apocryphal tale of the redundant engineer.....

A factory needed to make some cost savings and since none of their complex machines had failed in the last five years they made the engineer responsible redundant (yes, I know - but that's not this story!).

A couple of months later one of the machines failed and nobody knew how to fix it. In desperation the factory contacted the old engineer and asked if he would come back and fix it.

The engineer spent a long time looking at the failed machine and then hit it hard with a length of two by four. The machine purred into life.

The engineer submitted an invoice for £5000. This was queried by the factory, after all he'd only hit the machine with a bit of wood.

The engineer submitted a new and more detailed invoice: For hitting machine with wood £1. For knowing where to hit machine and how hard to hit machine £4999.

'Value' is often an intangible.

 

[jamiephillips909]

Although not related that sort of reminds me of the apocryphal tale of the redundant engineer.....

A factory needed to make some cost savings and since none of their complex machines had failed in the last five years they made the engineer responsible redundant (yes, I know - but that's not this story!).

A couple of months later one of the machines failed and nobody knew how to fix it. In desperation the factory contacted the old engineer and asked if he would come back and fix it.

The engineer spent a long time looking at the failed machine and then hit it hard with a length of two by four. The machine purred into life.

The engineer submitted an invoice for £5000. This was queried by the factory, after all he'd only hit the machine with a bit of wood.

The engineer submitted a new and more detailed invoice: For hitting machine with wood £1. For knowing where to hit machine and how hard to hit machine £4999.

'Value' is often an intangible.

Very true !

 

[Bigfoot]

An ultra-rare Pokémon card has sold for a record-breaking amount!

The elusive and highly sought-after Pikachu Illustrator card is one of the rarest cards in the world.

They were given out as a prize in competitions in 1998, and only 39 of them were ever made - and around 10 are thought to still exist.

A mint condition version of the card just sold for a whopping 25 million yen, or around £183,000 on the Japanese auction site ZenPlus to a buyer in the US.
i mean its just absurd everything has a value to someone but £183,000 on some cardboard with a picture on it i just dont get it

In the end, it is a piece of cardboard with real worth less than 1p. I find it unbelievable that people assign value to such things based on hype, when there is no underlying real value. This has happened many times in the past and someone will always be left with a very big loss - South Sea Bubble, black tulips, early Internet company bubble, Bitcoins, etc. The art and antiquities market is based almost entirely on hype and fashion. People ‘invest’ in wine and whisky when these only have any value if you like the taste. They are not true assets, as they do not produce true value.

 

[TonyCarter]

Although not related that sort of reminds me of the apocryphal tale of the redundant engineer.....

A factory needed to make some cost savings and since none of their complex machines had failed in the last five years they made the engineer responsible redundant (yes, I know - but that's not this story!).

A couple of months later one of the machines failed and nobody knew how to fix it. In desperation the factory contacted the old engineer and asked if he would come back and fix it.

The engineer spent a long time looking at the failed machine and then hit it hard with a length of two by four. The machine purred into life.

The engineer submitted an invoice for £5000. This was queried by the factory, after all he'd only hit the machine with a bit of wood.

The engineer submitted a new and more detailed invoice: For hitting machine with wood £1. For knowing where to hit machine and how hard to hit machine £4999.

'Value' is often an intangible.

That's why I believe I still have a job.

Some times it's simpler/cheaper/safer to keep me available constantly on a fairly normal daily rate, than have me come in to spend an hour doing something that no-one else can (or wants to) do and charging the client an extortionate hourly rate and expenses for the 3-4 hour drive each way and the hour for fixing their problem.

I treat it as a retainer, to ensure I'm immediately available for this client with zero notice.

Been there so long that I'm surprised they haven't asked me to become an employee.