Yeah, we know you want to get your kid a laptop, but Christ-on-a-memory-stick!
Nice.
I hope you catch a virus. Not your computer; you, idiot.
Was it any different with Cabbage Patch Kids back in the 80s, or Beany Babies in the 90s?
I blame two parties:
- The media for hyping it up,
- The people for taking the bait and swallowing the hook whole.
People get what they deserve in instances like that.
Tripler
No, I have absolutely no feelings or regards for people that put themselves in materialistic situations such as this.
Who names their kid “Blandine”? What are her siblings’ names, Boringa and Mundano?
I think individual greed can take all the blame here. Nobody in the Godless Liberal Media TM encouraged people to pee their pants or beat off line-cutters with a folding chair.
Why didn’t they just list them on eBay like other school districts around the country do? They may have fetched more than $50. Or maybe they could have had a raffle.
I beg to differ. I find the media at fault for baiting the hook, while knowing the public would eat that same hook at large. Granted, they probably didn’t know it would go to such ends, but the media knows it’s a self-advertising, self-serving enterprise.
Thus, they need to make hype to keep themselves in business. And sometimes, they don’t appreciate they effects of the hype they cause.
Tripler
I f*cking hate the media at large.
Well, speaking as one of the larger members of the at-large media: How the fuck do you turn this into an opportunity to bash the media?
I don’t live in Virginia, so I don’t know how this event was publicized before hand, but regardless, I don’t see how you can fault any stories about this event for how people acted.
The media didn’t set the price. The media didn’t organize the event. The media didn’t freak out and start rushing the gates.
Let’s put the blame where it belongs: on the greedy people who went beyond reasonable actions when they learned about a good deal for a 4-year-old laptop.
There’s plenty of fuckups the media are truly responsible for. Why waste bandwidth on blaming them for this?
I agree with this it is was only for residents of that county, they paid the school tax to purchase the computers let them have a chance to get something back.
That being said, they could of had a raffle or something less likely to cause a blue light special stampede.
Two points:
One, “Blandine Alexander” sounds like a drag queen got it really wrong; and
Two, on whom would Blandine have preferred the woman urinate?
Sure the media need and love hype. I get as annoyed as anyone by some of the crap we see in the media.
But it still doesn’t make the media responsible for the ridiculous actions of the people described in the OP. Even if you can somehow blame the media for the fact that these people knew about the cheap computers, and can thus hold the media partly responsible for the presence of those people at the sale, how the fuck is the media to blame for what these people did? Why should the fuckwits not be assigned responsibility for their own actions?
All right: Media-fucking-shmedia. OK? This is about a pack of idiots.
And what a pack of idiots! They’re four years old and used, these iBooks! That’s like eating a spoiled drumstick from the Jurassic, in techno-time, ferchrissakes. Where are these people when I’m having a yard sale? Shit, I’ve got lots of old crap I need to get rid of! Have a riot at my place!
My scant understanding of the matter is that there are two theories:
-
The school district originally offered the laptops to the teachers for $50. They were then required to sell any leftovers to the public at the same price, to avoid lawsuits over unfair pricing.
-
The school district deliberately set an artificially low price for the laptops so they could justify them as being “obsolete” equipment and replacing them with new Dell laptops instead.
Personally, the decision to ditch the iBooks makes no sense to me. Unless the students were doing high-end A/V work, they should still be more than sufficient for most school-related activities.
Okay, this just plain doesn’t surprise or shock me at all. Offer people something for virtually nothing and they’ll act like idiots. How much of an idiot they’ll act like is directly proportional to the size of the difference between the value of what they have to do (in this case, pay $50) and the value of what they can get (in this case, a freakin’ laptop).
Duh.
I mean, this is the principal that most game and reality shows are based on. It’s pretty simple.
Er, what Loopus says. This happens quite often and isn’t really a surprise.
These people are idiots regardless of the product – they’re the ones filling the pews at the Church of Latter Day Consumerism.
I assume they’re the same idiots who stand in line, excited at the opening of Wal*Mart the day after Thanksgiving, because, “Hallelujah! We can shop!”
I know this shit happens all the time. Funny thing is, the taste it leaves in my mouth never gets watered down. Rather, it builds lke eating chili peppers. The way people will act for the chance to buy shit (or anything) is, in the truest sense of the word, sad. It takes a lot to disgust me, but this is the kind of thing that does it.
Sorry, guys, but I’d be right in line with the iRioters. I would hope that I would be a bit more civilized, but for a $50 laptop that normally goes for about $500 on eBay, I’d certainly wait in line several hours for one.
A $50 laptop provides a little bit of relief in an era of $3.00/gallon gas, $9 movie tickets and $500,000 houses.
I hate the media too, but I think you’re way off the mark on this one. The article mentions nothing about the media. How do they fit into this in any way? Know something that you ain’t tellin’?
Where I grew up (I was in 5th and 6th grade during the Cabbage Patch craze) I can remember not one but many mob scenes exactly like this one whenever a local toy store got a shipment in.
I remember a pregnant woman having been knocked down (and no one helping her up in the crush), old people being shoved to the side or to the ground, I witnessed several knock-down drag-out fist fights between full-grown women who should definitely have known better.
The day my mom and I got lucky enough to get our hands on two dolls, my first choice was literally wrestled out of my hands by one of these crazed mothers. The second box I grabbed, another completely different woman tried to take it out of my hands (I assume because I was a child and she thought I wouldn’t fight back) as well. I kicked her so hard in the shins she screamed, fell against the opposite shelving unit, and didn’t try again. I did have the satisfaction of seeing her limping away, her bare ankle bleeding, and empty-handed a few minutes later as my mom and I stood in line to pay for the stupid dolls.
Nothing new under the sun, people are just crazy.
Either way, though, are we supposed to have sympathy for the people trying to cut in line?
“To the assholes go the spoils” is not the way I’d like to see life play out.
-Joe
$500? Really?
I don’t spend any time on eBay, so i’ll take you word for it. But there’s no way in hell i’d pay $500 for a four-year old iBook.