Yes, you lose a very important part of the free market. Price is information. It tells producers what to make and what not to make. When governments subsidize things or distort prices then we get shortages or the wrong things made. When we discriminate against some groups that group is hurt directly but there are others indirectly hurt. When governments offer preferential pricing they almost invariably screw things up worse than they normally screw up. In Canada, it is almost impossible to get off welfare. If you are on welfare you get money, extra subsidized healthcare and most importantly you pay well below market price for housing. Getting even a part time job will cost you your home.

1. A fair price is a price that two parties agree to assuming no duress caused by the other party
2. A fairer price is one where one party didn't gain an unfair advantage through a monopoly or failure of a free market - real-estate agents inserting themselves in a transaction, monopolists, government intervention..
3. Fairer is a price where the buyer and seller offer the same price to anyone
4. Fairer is when both parties know what information the other has
5. Fairer is when both parties have similar bargaining power and neither party is sticky, i.e. has a significant preference to buy from the other party - company store, specialized workers with only one employer (NHL, NFL etc), renters already in a unit.
6. Fairer still is when both parties have the same information

Ideally we always have the first 5 and at least some parity on the last. The less fair a market is, the less efficient it becomes. Item 4 actually helps both parties by reducing uncertainty by the buy and increasing the price for the seller.

I'm wary of supporting bills like this because governments have a tendency to support policies that break these conditions of fairness and while they seem as if the policies would help "the little guy" in practice they often do the opposite. Rent controls and zoning regulations have been a horrible to younger people and have created most of the homeless problem in Canada (we regulated away flop houses, the housing of last resort). Rules on insurance have caused insurance companies to stop offering insurance. Regulatory burden has lead to regulatory capture in many industries and a huge barrier to entry in others. Unnecessary licensing drives up costs and restricts young workers from entering many trades. The track record of these laws is terrible. This one seems like more virtue signaling than anything else. No brick and mortar store will raise prices based on who you are, although they may have selective discounts. On line stores are already doing this but since their servers aren't in the jurisdiction I don't see how this will help. Finally, voluntary price discrimination is helpful. When I travel by air in the livestock section my flight is partially subsidized by the people paying 10x as much as me in first class. So we have more regulation but I'm not sure we are better off.

Birol dumbed it down for the media. Normally the EU has about 40 days worth of jet fuel in storage or transportation within the EU. The issue is that the EU is using fuel faster than than it can be replenished. In the next 42 days they expect to be only able to replace about 12 days worth of fuel. So on day 43 they will have only 25% of the fuel they need if they don't start rationing soon.

Unfortunately rationing or raising prices is difficult in the short term, tickets are already sold, and price rises are deeply unpopular. EU politicians are already reducing taxes and releasing reserves to keep the price of petrol low. The politicians are effectively removing the price signal that there is a shortage. Probably not the wisest thing to do economically but the voters will reward it. When the fuel runs out they can blame Trump even though the EU will do nothing to mitigate the problem. Trump doesn't have a monopoly on stupidity.

If you were willing to pay $400 for tickets for yourself and your kids to see a concert would you really wait till the tickets were $200 and risk not getting them? This is entertainment, discretionary spending. Most people will not try and game the system. Most people are risk averse and will want to plan their evening in advance. This also means the artists who might not sell out likely will even if the last seats sell for only $5. It even makes it possible for bands that wouldn't normally be viable to tour be able to tour. It's like the airplane that holds 100 people and costs $10,000 to fly between two cities. I might not be able to find 100 people who will pay $100 for a seat but there might be 9 people who really need to go. I can remove 5 seats form the plane, create 10 first class seats, sell 9 first class seats at $500 each and then offer the rest of the seats $75. Those 9 people get to fly in comfort, everyone else gets a cheaper flight and if I sell 75 of the remaining seats I turn a profit with a 90% full plane. Everyone wins.

Scalpers are a market failure. I already said that. Instead of throwing out the free market and replacing it with what - communism? Ration tickets? Lotteries? We need to figure out what the market failure is and how to correct it. In the case of scalpers the original seller is selling the product at less than what the scalpers think they are worth. The problem is that the original seller doesn't know the market price. Information has a cost. In the old days, scalpers were a good thing for both artists and fans. The artist didn't have a good way to know the true price but the scalpers gave them a reliable sale. The scalpers took on the risk that they might not be able to sell the tickets. TicketMaster breaks this. They sell themselves the tickets on the secondary market and if they don't sell them they return the tickets to the primary market. So then you get unsold tickets that some fans might have bought at the original price and the venue/artist gets screwed out of the sale and any secondary sales like beer and merchandise.

Today, with the internet, the market failure can easily be fixed with a Dutch auction. The artist will get the most money, all the tickets will sell, the fans willing to pay the most will see the show and no middle men will skim anything off.

If you want one of the 50 front row seats to Taylor swift and there are 50 people willing to spend $2000 on the seat, you are not going to get the seat for less than $2000. The market price for the front row is what the 50th highest person will pay.

Live Nation/Ticket Master are a scourge to the artists. The fans will always pay the market price. The artists were the ones getting screwed.

A Dutch auction is probably the fairest way to sell concert tickets. The sale price for the front row of Taylor Swift could start at $50,000 and slowly drop to near zero the day of the concert. However many fans would cry foul. They want the ticket for the price they want to pay, not the most that someone else is willing to pay. Live Nation/Ticket Master make most of their money by putting themselves in the middle of the market inefficiency created by entitled fans. Until the artists are able to sell at the fair market price their will always be a place for scalpers and leaches like Live Nation.

Sony outsourced the remote to a company called Universal Electronics (UEI). The other remote you have, regardless of the brand on it was also made by UEI. 40 years ago UEI bought a company that had a database on how to control all the TVs at the time and the few VCRs. They quickly became the only company that could make the controllers for the TVs, VCRs and satellite boxes. Then the TV manufacturers gave up making their own remotes and farmed it out to UEI. Now the TV makers couldn't even make a remote if they wanted to. The TV makers' internal processes are so messed up that UEI has to reverse engineer the TV to make the remote. UEI was a cash printing machine when every TV, DVD player and cable box needed a remote with 30 buttons. They were a monopolist to a market that didn't even have a high barrier to entry. Now they are blowing their brains out trying to make internet of things stuff but internally their engineering has degenerated to the point that they can't finish anything.

Female education is correlated with women having control over their bodies. So initially giving women more say in when they marry and how many children they will have does decrease birthrates.

However, we have been past that affect for 50+ years now.

What we see today in most western countries is a huge redirection of consumption of goods and services from young workers and the creation of new capital, to older workers and retired people. The rich aren't consuming more, the elderly are. They consume housing in the most desirable locations, they consume healthcare at rates 10x that of the youth, they get golf, vacations and other entertainment subsidized by the youth. We run huge deficites to pay for the elderly who will never contribute to paying the debt back down.

Our youth are poor and in debt. They need to spend 4 years on a worthless degree just to get past HR screening for a job. They have terrible housing options thanks to boomers restricting the housing supply to ensure their homes go up in value faster than inflation. Young men are increasingly isolated and marginalized. Who wants to have kids with a 25 year old man with few friends, lots of debt, living in his parents basement?

You can fix corruption. I've been an embedded programmer on constrained devices for over 30 years. Mostly as a contractor fixing messed up projects. The quality of embedded projects slowly declined in the 2000s and 2010s but has fallen off a cliff over the last 5 years. It used that the quality of embedded developers was higher than enterprise developers (there was a higher minimum bar just to get your code to run). It used to be that you had to plan and organize your projects and the projects were run by engineers. You used to get support from your suppliers. In the 2010s part suppliers gave up on support and direct you to forums. When you do get documentation from suppliers you have to guess at which parts are correct and what steps they have left out. I had one formerly reputable supplier fail for 3 months to get "Hello World" to work on their dev board.

Then there is the management of projects. Now the de facto person in charge is the one in charge of the Jira tickets. They decide what tasks get resources and they decide which engineers do what tasks. They can't understand a development plan, they can't build the code, they usually can't even use the product. What they can do is take bugs from testing, create tickets and assign engineers to the tickets. Their only metric is how fast tickets are resolved. They don't care if the engineer they assign knows nothing about the project

The most successful embedded engineers today
Don't put useful comments their code (they may describe how the code works but the code says what it does)
They never document (and most projects don't even have a single place to put documents or have a way to find them)
They are good at volunteering for easy or high visible tickets
They close bugs by creating global variables that track the condition of the bug, then adding a function that is called all the time, a function that then checks the globals for the error condition, prevents (or masks) the error and then (hopefully) cleans up the globals without creating too many other bugs.
- This means they never have to understand the code. If there is automated testing they might never even need to know how to use the product.

My gf used to run an electron microscopy lab. I can safely say not a single team using the lab had sufficient math skills to write any papers that used statistics, which was all of the biology papers. The math skills of the biologist was so woefully bad that my high school age son would regularly get messaged to help teams with fractions. The worse part is, poor math skills was rewarded because they lead to unique results.

The material science people were only marginally better.

The cost of installing wind isn't the economic driver. It's the spot price when the wind blows. In Ohio, Pennsylvania and Ontario the wind blows the hardest a night in March and April. This also coincides with the lowest demand for that region. The spot price actually would go negative. Offshore wind, in the most valuable locations, blows the hardest at peak demand times. On January 26th this year the spot price for electricity in Boston hit $0.66/kWh. In February 2021 prices in Texas hit the price cap of $9/kWh for several days. So generating electricity at the correct time is very important.

Also we are dumb as f$#k in how we manage the grid and are incapable incentivizing residential and commercial electric consumers to match their demand to supply.

Side note. We still can't economically store electric energy. Batteries and pumped hydro still have too high of maintenance costs to recoup their costs even with the large swings in prices. They are both currently used more for grid stability. There will come a tipping point, when batteries become less expensive and have more charge cycles when we will see a huge increase in grid battery storage.

A programming language is a language that you use to explicitly describe what you want a computer to do. If you can't describe what you want the computer to do no amount of AI or new fangled language will help. I sort of liked Rust over C in that it stops idiots from doing stupid things (and smart people from accidentally doing dumb things) but in the end all it does is makes the idiots slightly harder to spot. You and your company actually need to sit down and figure out what you want before hammering on the keyboard or you will always get crap.

Anyone with a good lawyer and lots of money can get out of a conviction now if they show any of their location data was harvested illegally by a third party and the US government bought that data and might have used that data to gather further evidence. As if the US justice system wasn't already a two tier system...

In this case OG&E and their investors wanted the new solution. They had already invested money, taken the risk and seen a return far beyond what they expected using the new pricing model. Everyone involved saw this as a revolutionary shift to matching demand to supply. It would have significantly increased the value of semi predictable renewables like wind and solar. For the public utility regulator, who's job it is to keep rates low, this should have been a no brainer. They were just unwilling to even consider changing the utility profit model that has been in place in all of North America for the last 100 years. I have never been so frustrated in all my life.

Trigger warning - this comment contains political stupidity that may anger technical people. Before May 1, 2025 the spot price of electricity in Ontario, Canada, Ohio and Pennsylvania would vary in March between $-0.02/kWh and $1.50. In the summer it might break $5/kWh. Other than a few industrial consumers, most people didn't pay this. The over price consumers paid during low demand paid for the subsidized price they pay during peak demand. This removes any incentive to switch when you consume electricity. Today, with the added fees that are charged per kWh, the change in price between peak demand and low demand, don't make it worth anyone's effort to shift when they consume electricity. I'm not going to finish doing laundry at 1am for a 20% savings in electricity.

I once worked on a pilot project to have people pay closer to the spot price and to give them the ability to automatically shift some demand. At the end of the month people were given the old billing price and the new spot price method and only had to pay the lesser of the two. The median savings for people who took advantage of the new pricing was $50/month (people in Oklahoma have huge air conditioners and no home insulation). The monthly savings to OG&E were non trivial per customer and they would have saved 2.2B by not needing to build peaker plants.

The politics of how Electric utilities are funded meant this wasn't viable. OG&E's profits are guaranteed to be 12% of whatever capital they have built. The 2.2B in peaker plants were already approved and would have increased OG&E's profit by 260M a year. Investors would have borrowed at 3.75% (US prime rate in 2016) and gotten a 12% return. Expanding the pilot from 100,000 homes to all of Oklahoma, if successful would have meant not having to build the peaker plants. The Oklahoma regulator would not budge giving OG&E any reason to go with the cost saving approach so the project was scrapped and the peaker plants built.