> Why should "whoever has the most money" or "whoever is willing to pay the highest price" be the fairest way to ration scarce resources?
It's not the fairest, but it is definitely better than arbitrary. If Alice is willing to pay $5 for a widget, and Bob is willing to pay $50, it's likely that Bob values the item more than Alice does.
It's also possible that Alice is simply poor, of course, but I can't imagine how a practical system could take this into account without also destroying incentive structures.
>I think "whoever gets through the website order form the fastest" is a perfectly reasonable (if often frustrating) way to ration scarce resources. You get in line, as a person, and get to buy some limited quantity for your own personal use.
This is arbitrary, IMO. Might as well hand them out to whomever can win a race in Mario Kart.
How is that any less arbitrary than "whoever has the most money"? You only think that's not arbitrary because that feels customary, and is essentially a foundation of capitalism. I don't see how "making end customers pay more while lining the pockets of third parties who provide no added value" is any less arbitrary.
If you still think first-come-first-served is too arbitrary, then how about some sort of lottery? A new batch of N units arrives at the warehouse, and then people have a week or something to drop their name into the lottery. At the end, Adafruit pulls N names out of the hat, and they get devices. That eliminates any unfairness around a FCFS ordering period starting at an inconvenient time for some people, or around people's internet connection being too slow to get through the order process fast enough. Adafruit could still try to implement measures to avoid that lottery winners aren't bots, or that people don't enter the lottery some large amount of times, or whatever.
> If Alice is willing to pay $5 for a widget, and Bob is willing to pay $50, it's likely that Bob values the item more than Alice does. [...] It's also possible that Alice is simply poor
That's exactly the point here! One of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's goals is to get decently-powerful, hackable, educational computing into the hands of people who usually can't afford it.
Sure, if we were talking about a Lexus or Mercedes-Benz, this doesn't matter quite as much; it's not a big problem if scarcity raises their prices. But for Raspberry Pi, raising prices hurts one of the important demographic targets of their product!
>How is that any less arbitrary than "whoever has the most money"?
Because when you're talking about a discretionary purchase like this, it's less "who has the most money" and "who is willing to sacrifice the greatest proportion of their disposable income".
I'm not saying the scalping isn't scummy, but it genuinely is a better way to distribute scarce resources than a lottery or first come first serve. On average, the person willing to pay a scalper to get their hands on something (which is not just expensive but degrading) needs it or wants it more than someone who isn't.
>One of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's goals is to get decently-powerful, hackable, educational computing into the hands of people who usually can't afford it.
If that is genuinely their main goal, then they're doing a woeful job as an organisation! For the price of a base model Pi 4, one can get a refurbished desktop with an i5 (!!!) processor, 500GB HDD and 4GB of RAM. Blows the Pi out of the water.
Maybe I'm a little bit biased here (I spent a decent chunk of my life designing a low-cost USB Oscilloscope, sold with free worldwide delivery, and almost all of my customers have been wealthy tech-enthusiasts from the Western world) but outside of IoT/Education, I don't really see the product being used as much more than a toy for rich people.
It's not the fairest, but it is definitely better than arbitrary. If Alice is willing to pay $5 for a widget, and Bob is willing to pay $50, it's likely that Bob values the item more than Alice does.
It's also possible that Alice is simply poor, of course, but I can't imagine how a practical system could take this into account without also destroying incentive structures.
>I think "whoever gets through the website order form the fastest" is a perfectly reasonable (if often frustrating) way to ration scarce resources. You get in line, as a person, and get to buy some limited quantity for your own personal use.
This is arbitrary, IMO. Might as well hand them out to whomever can win a race in Mario Kart.