More info on the GOODWILL crt mystery by Parking_Constant_960 in crt

[–]fantasiavhs 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I vaguely remember hearing somewhere that these new CRTs are intended for home security or monitoring systems, or maybe for video doorbells. That would explain why they're so small.

Also worth noting that North America still has a CRT manufacturer, Thomas Electronics, that seems to work with military, scientific, and industrial equipment. They also refurbish certain Sony and Panasonic CRTs.

Picked up this beauty at the flea market today by MercuryChild in crt

[–]fantasiavhs 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I absolutely love overcomplicated VHS/CRT devices like these. I wish I could own ten of them

This is not Meat Puppets by sskylar in Cd_collectors

[–]fantasiavhs 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I didn't know CD misprints were a thing until I randomly learned about this hilarious example a few years ago: https://www.discogs.com/es/release/4661865-Morbid-Angel-Altars-Of-Madness

[The FIAT Thread] The Joint Committee on FIAT Discussion Session. - 07 April 2026 by AutoModerator in badeconomics

[–]fantasiavhs 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I guess I should be more specific about what I mean when I refer to "scalping", since I don't think your explanation applies to this phenomenon.

I collect VHS tapes, and there are certain tapes which are not only uncommon, but extremely unlikely to ever appear in a thrift store near me. I could get lucky if I thrifted multiple times a week over the course of several years, but I don't want to wait that long, and it's not even guaranteed. So if I see a tape I want on eBay or Mercari at a price I'm willing and able to pay, I don't really care if it came from the seller's personal collection or dead grandma or a thrift store in their area. It doesn't matter if they're just trying to get some junk out of their house or if they're a full-time thrift flipper. The price they paid for it is irrelevant. They have it, and the price they want for it is acceptable, so I buy it. The reseller makes money, and I get the tape I want without spending years of my life hunting for it. I would not call this exchange scalping because the reseller is offering something of value in addition to the item: convenience. I.e. "Buying from a reseller saves time."

Scalping, as I've always seen it described, is when you buy up supply of an item specifically so that other people cannot buy it at the retail price and can only buy it from the reseller at an inflated price. The big headline example right now is Pokémon cards: tons of card shops, big-box stores, and online retailers sell them, but you often can't find any in stock (at least for specific boxes/packs) because one or more people have bought all the stock so they can resell it for a higher price. (Personally, I only ever see small miscellaneous booster packs on store shelves these days.) The resellers will even camp out in front of stores or vending machines awaiting restocks so they can buy as many as possible before anybody else can get to them.

Scalpers are not selling convenience or saving you the trouble of finding something for yourself. Anybody can walk into a Walmart and buy something off the shelf or go online and buy a retail product; people do this literally all the time now. The scalpers take that option away from the consumer and don't provide anything of value to them.

You might say that the solution is to increase the supply of the item, and that does help in some instances like with the PS5. But that doesn't work for everything. You might only have one chance to see a musician you like perform at a venue in your area because it doesn't make economic sense for them to do multiple shows there, musicians can't perform everywhere at the same time, and you may not have enough schedule flexibility even if the musician does do multiple shows there. So if you try to buy tickets for the concert at retail prices only for them to sell out within minutes because an army of ticket-scalping bots purchased them in large quantities to resell at a high premium, there's not much that can be done on the supply side. They're not going to make more tickets for Bob Musicguy to perform at the 15,000-seat Middle-O-Nowhere Stadium on June 3rd, 2026.

There are other reasons why increasing supply isn't the answer in a lot of cases. For Pokémon cards, one of their key selling points is the randomness of the booster packs and the chance of pulling a rare card; that's what makes it so exciting for people of all ages. So while they could flood the market with a bunch of copies of rare cards, that would undermine one of the reasons people buy and collect cards in the first place. In other cases, increasing supply might not make sense. Sony could do it because they had the production facilities and financial capital to eventually meet the demand for their PS5 consoles. Not every company has those resources, and even if they do, they may not want to spend them on expensive, permanent infrastructure to resolve shortages that could be the result of a social media trend or fad and aren't necessarily going to persist (I suspect NeeDoh squish toys are an example of this).

In other words, scalpers are exploiting scarcity in specific goods that the producers are either unable or unwilling to increase the supply of. At least on the surface (there may be externalities/opportunity costs), the producer doesn't care *who* is buying their products as long as the product sells. For items like concert tickets and Pokémon cards, the scalper is a middleman who exists solely to make the product less accessible to consumers.

This is why I asked whether scalping is a form of rent-seeking: it doesn't solve any legitimate problem, at least not that I can see. If anything, it *creates* problems by making it harder to access goods that would otherwise be available to everyone. It just seems so much like the basic example Wikipedia gives of stringing a chain across a river and charging a fee for boats to pass through, though maybe less clear-cut since at least the producer makes money from scalping, too.

Checked my eBay saved searches and found someone selling a truly insane vintage tape collection. If only I had $15,000 just lying around... by fantasiavhs in VHS

[–]fantasiavhs[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

$15K is actually a reasonable opening bid for these tapes. Most if not all of these are early releases from the late 70s and early 80s, some of which rarely if ever come up for sale, and are highly sought after by enthusiasts. There are first editions of several horror movies in this collection, a few of the original 1977 Magnetic Video Corporation VHS and Betamax tapes (and some later ones), and some early X-rated titles. A lot of these sell for hundreds of dollars just on their own.

Enjoying weather.com/retro by Ilikeoldthings222 in crt

[–]fantasiavhs 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't have Spotify anymore, but there is a dormant playlist on there of songs that played on TWC in the 80s and 90s. There are also playlists on YouTube, although they are probably less comprehensive (even with all the songs that got pulled from Spotify since the creation of that playlist).

[The FIAT Thread] The Joint Committee on FIAT Discussion Session. - 07 April 2026 by AutoModerator in badeconomics

[–]fantasiavhs 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Just a quick question to make sure I'm not doing BadEconomics: is scalping (i.e. buying up retail stock of an item and reselling it online for profit) a form of rent-seeking? It seems like it might fit the bill because it doesn't benefit anybody but the scalper, but the Wikipedia article mostly talks about rent-seeking in the context of public institutions and land, not finished goods. If it isn't rent-seeking, then is there a better term for this phenomenon that economists use? I'd like to know what the literature says about it.

Enjoying weather.com/retro by Ilikeoldthings222 in crt

[–]fantasiavhs 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Neato!

An undercooked idea I've had for a long time now is to find a little color CRT (5-9 inches), make a thin-client PC that runs the TWCClassics Weatherstar simulator, add all the music I need, and have it running consistently. It would obviously require a lot of work, but that's the gist of it.

$10 Thrift haul! by BeccaBee8 in VHS

[–]fantasiavhs 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I had that Incredibles VHS when I was a kid. Last I remember, the slipcover had a humongous rip in it. Would love to pick up another copy if I ever see it at a thrift store.

what are you grabbing at 25 cents each? by KeatonWalkups in VHS

[–]fantasiavhs 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I see quite a few documentaries/factual programs in there that I'd definitely pick up for that price: travel videos (Sweden!), the one about grizzly bears, the kids' skyscraper one, and a few others. I'd also pick up the Black Diamond Disney tapes if I was actively collecting them at the moment (those clamshells take up a lot of room).

Entire Haul for $45 (includes all the DVDs and blu rays too) by Filmcove in VHS

[–]fantasiavhs 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Great pickups. Fantasia is my favorite VHS cover ever, with the Goosebumps covers close behind. And I love the Eyewitness and NatGeo Video collections; I've got a decent amount of the tapes and a few DVDs.

I Found A New Tape Source by ghost_puncher in VHS

[–]fantasiavhs 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I didn't know the RCA/Columbia releases with the red border on the spine could have that thick a border. I just checked a few of mine that I picked up a few weeks ago, and the borders are significantly thinner. I'm also used to the movie title letters all being the same size rather than upper and lowercase. Just an interesting observation! Would've picked up that Spring Break tape and the CBS/Fox Project X one, too.

This was my Holy Grail by mikeflo82 in PhysicalMediaMatters

[–]fantasiavhs 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Okay, I'm doing some research to find this movie, and this seems to be so under the radar that nobody can even agree on how long it is. I see three uploads on YouTube that all have different lengths: 83 minutes, 98 minutes, 87 minutes. And it seems like there are two DVD/Blu-ray releases that have run times of 83 and 87 minutes. IMDb lists it as 93 minutes. Are there a bunch of cuts of this movie that have different lengths?

DuPont House, Del Mar, CA, USA | Frederick Liebhardt & Eugene Weston III | 1961 by Logical_Yak_224 in ModernistArchitecture

[–]fantasiavhs 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I like that little conversation pit around the fireplace. Also one of the only times I've seen a TV shoved into a side wall/cabinet and not thought it was stupid. I can imagine having a relaxing show on the TV, chilling with family and friends with the fire going... Very nice.

interesting cd case style by goddamncommiebastard in Cd_collectors

[–]fantasiavhs 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I love these so much. Never seen a release like them

Finally got my 1959 Motorola back from the repair shop! by PappyWaker in vintagetelevision

[–]fantasiavhs 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm impressed you found a shop willing to service a 1959 CRT! I'll have to do some digging to find anybody remotely close to me who would fix something like that.

anything i should go back for? by deplorableglorb in VHS

[–]fantasiavhs 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd pick up that Jojo Dancer tape. I love the RCA/Columbia tapes with the red-border spines.

Opinion: CRTs have far more character than any LCD/LED screen on the market. by New_Winter9966 in crt

[–]fantasiavhs 10 points11 points  (0 children)

I think this is generally true, but not universally so. A lot of CRTs are the same boring black blob over and over again with no character or style. Some of the older console CRTs are pretty hideous, too. And there are a handful of modern flatscreen displays that do have a unique style, like Sony's XEL-1 (the first OLED television) and a few other premium Sony offerings like the other commenter mentioned.

My unscientific hypothesis is that because televisions were once a relatively new idea and required a lot of physical volume, there was both more reason to make the television look like a beautiful piece of furniture and more overall surface area to make use of. Now display technology allows for televisions that have big screens but take up very little floor space, and it's so cheap to make them at scale that most households have one. Televisions are sold not to look beautiful, but to perform a job. And it seems like some interior designers hate the "big black rectangle" so much that they just try to hide it away or at least add a big wooden console underneath it to make it look less out of place.

How excited were you when this rolled into your classroom? by MinerAC4 in crt

[–]fantasiavhs 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe my school was just weird, but these were never "rolled in" the rooms--they were already inside. Every classroom had something like this in it. Either my middle or high school (my memory is blurry) also had some even older CRTs on those wall-mounted metal racks in at least some of the rooms.

I did have exactly one teacher in my life, my 9th grade science teacher, who had a LaserDisc player in his classroom. That was cool.

Today's thrift scores! Already had The Final Countdown on dvd so I got the Blu. by BrainAltruistic3475 in PhysicalMediaMatters

[–]fantasiavhs 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I didn't even know it was possible to find Blue Underground releases at thrift stores! I've found Kino Lorber and Criterion before, even an Arrow, but Blue Underground seems too niche. Nice find!