Today in a qualified list of the worst:

Look, I don't want to point fingers,
but these people tick most of the boxes.

Do you know what's just the worst? People who sell pre-orders on eBay at an inflat-huh? Well, ok, yes. That's not the worst. The list of the worst, and not necessarily in order, goes: racism, transphobia, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism, lax gun laws, the gender pay gap, the American healthcare system, white supremacy, police abuse of authority, the pandemic and vaccine-hesitancy, climate change, our eroding democracy, wealth inequality, ICE, and our treatment of people experiencing homelessness. 

And, of course, the Republican Party which probably tops that list because if they weren't a thing we could at least try to address everything else. But you know all this. What I was getting at is people who sell pre-orders on eBay which, now that I've listed all those very real social ills, seem frivolous. And it is, so let me re-frame the question as "Do you know what's just the worst, after all those other things I mentioned?"

No Mitch, don't even. I want to you name one thing the GOP has done lately that wasn't
either designed to secure power for themselves or to make other people's lives more miserable.

Pictured: a Steam Deck
Not Pictured: the ability to play Mario Kart

Right. People who resell pre-orders on eBay. What made me think of this is this story (click here, or don't, I'm not your boss) about the Steam Deck, a handheld gaming PC that PC gamers are super excited about, but to people like me it's just an expensive Switch that can't play Mario Kart. But whatever, the point is it, like all other consumer electronics right now, is probably going to be super scarce when it launches due to some nebulous global chip shortage thing that I don't understand and don't have to, because resellers are going to resell. 

Above: resellers.

They're dirtbags. One of them recently, and absurdly, tried to make the case that they provided a service, but no, they're just dirtbags. Anyway, Valve, the company that makes Steam Deck, in an effort to thwart this, opened up paid pre-order registrations. So for five dollars customers could register for the opportunity to pay Valve to promise that they'll sell them a four-hundred dollar not-a-Switch. It seems a little bleak, but that's the world we live in. To point is that there are no pre-orders for this yet, but that's not stopped anyone from selling pre-orders. Because dirtbags.

At least they're saying they'll take them down.
 This screen shot is from today and they're still up.

Where this gets confusing to me is that eBay--where a lot of this is going on--has stepped in and removed a lot of these auctions. Not because these sellers are being shitty, and not because they're not actually selling a thing, but because the online auction site has a policy that items sold have to ship within thirty days. Steam Deck, assuming you can actually pre-order one, won't ship until at least December. And that's super. I'm glad they're shutting these down. But what I want to know is why doesn't eBay just ban selling pre-orders altogether? 

This actual dork may go down as
one of history's greatest monsters.

There is no scenario in which randos re-selling scarce, unreleased or recently released, unopened items for more than the MSRP isn't parasitism, so why doesn't eBay stop enabling them? The answer is that they like making money, and one of the features of the economic system that's rapidly killing us as a species, is the idea that making money is, in itself, moral. It's some Milton Friedman bullshit, but here we are. "If consenting adults are willing to pay money for goods, who are we to judge?" right?

In additional finger pointing, I think it's
the business people who are ticking the rest
of the boxes. Remember? From before?

Except eBay doesn't have to offer them a platform. Recently they made the decision to pull adult material and they'll take down sales of Nazi memorabilia and all those problematic Dr. Seuss books conservatives suddenly give a shit about, but only under pressure. They're a business. They react rather than act. EBay, like all corporations, is basically a mindless, money making automaton and will just keep doing what it's doing it until public backlash makes it a better business move for them to ban it. Because business is going to business, amiright?

And this is fine as long as we're talking about things like dirtbag resellers, but it's less fine when it comes to all the other social ills I listed up at the top there. See? I'm bringing it back. Take climate change for example. I'm actually hopeful that we will eventually do something about carbon emissions, but the problem is that that's only going to happen once enough rich people's house burn down or get washed away and not a moment before.

"Not a moment before."

-Us, evidently