eBay sniping

On Friday, April 25, 2003, at 02:05 AM, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: There will never be any true or even consistent determination of a thing's "objective value". It's a null phrase, an impossibility. "Value", by its very definition, is purely subjective. Any attempt to assign an immutable quantity will fail. Even the criteria you've used as constants are variable, and subject to personal interpretation. "True" scarcity? You intend to verify each unit produced, and verify the destruction of each unit not known to still exist? It's not possible. Regional and *perceived* scarcity are much more relevant factors to real current value than some assigned global scarcity. A good example is the plight of the DEC collectors in Australia and New Zealand, who would commit unnnatural acts for a working VAX. Meanwhile, I have a stack of them in storage, besides the several I use at home. I would drive across town to rescue another VS3100, but I doubt that I'd pay cash for one. Understand that I'm not nit-picking. I'm trying to demonstrate that the "artificial" influences on eBay, realtime auctions, the feeding frenzies I've seen at swap meets -- they are _valid_ factors in the value of any product, and doubly so with collectibles. My PDP-11/53's "true" "objective" value would have to be nil. There's nothing it can do that can't be done more efficiently by a later PDP-11, and nothing *I* do with it that I couldn't do in SIMH, much faster and at a much lower real expense. Its value is *entirely* emotional, and entirely subjective. That's the whole point, isn't it? Doc