Why are people paying these stupid tube prices?

My Schiit Saga with the 6SN7 tube buffer will embarrass a lot of high price preamps. Yes. Bettered my ARC SP6B, no slouch. This stuff is really good. No waste of tubes.

@mulveling  it is a prevalent pattern to see folks rolling rare vintage tubes into cheap chi-fi or even cheap Schiit amps, especially headphone gear. Especially 6SN7 and 6922. It always rubbed me the wrong way too. What a waste.

Quite so. In economics an analogy has long been called "tragedy of the commons".  A slightly edited quote from Wiki -

a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use,^[act independently according to their own self interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action.

The value of the tubes to the community is much higher than the prices they are being traded at privately.

Starting to feel like there’s a "go green" agenda or something! 😉  Politician: "Just go out and buy a digital/solid state amp."

Wow, I own a DS2 preamp, a Levinson 27.5 amp, and I own Schiit headphone amps, one has Siemens tubes, the other a E-6SN7, with good Focal headphones these cheap Schiit amps are pretty formidable in sound quality. The E-6SN7 tubed amp is the best, but these are not NOS. The Siemens amp is collecting dust, and the tube was before I bought the amp. I have a lot of old tubes, 12A?7s, 6DJ8s, 6SN7s, and more collecting dust. I have probably listened to all of them for at least a short time, so I can't sell them as NOS, other than a few Chinese 6SN7 and Russian KT88, and various 300Bs, so I must be the worst of the worst, listening to alleged NOS tubes, and making them slightly used just to determine how they sound, and them sitting on them. I also have a home made KT88 amp I haven't even plugged in...

Once a week I get the Audiowaygone update. Today this caught my eye and caused quite a bit of amusement. So people who are accustomed to bragging rights prices and 60k audio cables are now complaining about high prices. IF you idiots had not paid these prices to begin with and act like money is no problem you would have found the scalpers would not have shown up to begin with. Stick your hand out flat on the table, hit it with the hammer again and tell me it still hurts when you do so.  You can't teach the unteachable.