183 karma · joined July 8, 2012
Illegal collusion and price fixing happens when owners of competing companies communicate to set prices.
Apartments prices were historically a highly volatile compared to their lease lengths. One would have to own a majority of the apartments in a market to gain the data necessary to know things like upcoming tenant renewals, apartment renter influx/outflow, etc to combat things like mass-tenant exodus to a nearby apartment complex offering $100 less rent per month. This industry has been historically very competitive.
Realpage does the colluding for them inside a database and whispers back "here's our number".
How are non-participating properties punished? Debt Servicing. Try getting business loans for these properties without running Realpage's tools.
Look at the investors and board members of RealPage, InvesTran, etc. and those in the property management companies. They are a very small circle hiding normally illegal activity behind algorithms.
Encrypting or obfuscating illegal communications doesn't suddenly make them legal. Neither does charging money for the privilege.
This part of RealPage's offerings is a commercial price fixing collusion tool, plain and simple.
- Disclosure: I formerly wrote software for and was employed by RealPage, though not on this specific product.
Folks, it's never been rumor. No, not every packet you send is recorded. But the US government's systems are always decades ahead of any pattern matching tech you think you've seen, and those rule sets and capture filters are almost certainly run on all your traffic. Being a joint enterprise of public/private entities, that shadow version of you exists for the involved groups and governments to review, analyze, and run tests against.
If you use systems that ask your personal preferences, collect personal information, or collect your location data: lie absurdly to it constantly. Being random about it gets your more diverse advertisements, and being more specific about it across platforms makes it easy to spot when something is trying to advertise on the sly, or when your info gets somewhere it shouldn't have.
You can't stop the NSA finding out stuff about you, if they want it, they'll get it. But why make it easy on any of the fuckers? If they want to sniff your business, let them smell the whole asshole.
What causes things like this is overbooking. Overbooking happens in more than just butts in seats. If you're not going to have enough ground crew to handle your SLA on flights, flights should be preemptively cancelled to keep them under that SLA. Airlines keep that SLA as low as safety permits. The max is set by the FAA at 3 hours for domestic flights and 4 hours for international flights (both ends).
Southwest's software is doing it's job, it has adjustable tolerances. It will even take into account weather conditions reducing ground crew therefore raising SLA. But, the effect of the weather conditions on the ground crew is also adjustable by humans. As a matter of fact, while one would think it would just reference historical data, that's not exactly true. It references predictive models that are adjusted by experienced individuals. Those individuals can be ordered to adjust the parameters outside their honest assessment to allow for steps at the beginning of the process to operate smoothly.
Weather prediction has a horizon. Southwest allowed excess bookings beyond that horizon, or they allowed excess last minute bookings. This weather event was massive and one-sided, yes, but it was also completely predictable. A human made the decision to widen the guardrails. There aren't a ton of people allowed to do that, I can think of maybe 3.
Disclosure: I wrote software for SWA many years ago. Nothing I've said here is privileged, in fact most airlines operate this exact way.
I wish I had more access to nurses during the process. I was always told they were too busy. I just wanted to observe, as I do with any client I write systems for, and was denied. I can say that at least 2 other groups were working on the exact same project as I in the hospital system, and we "won". We all worked in isolation from one another, I discovered the others by accident.
The top of major healthcare systems is wasteful and full of "little kingdoms". The ideas that "AI is going to help" and "nurses need to feel heard" are basically incompatible. Throwing money at artificial brains is always to substitute real ones, and the concept itself is contradictory to employee development. Why train a bunch of nurses endlessly on a subject when you can train an AI once?
We're supposed to be improving & developing people's lives here, not improving a box. For centuries we've found new ways of thinking that have made us better at science and medicine. Computers could do that, but we're not using them to teach each other. We're using them to replace one another.
It may sound silly, but I've reached the point that the theory Dune puts forth seems right.
It could be much faster, but it's not going to beat native without some sort of distributed behavior.
If Epstein was able to drum up press from his donations, where was the due diligence of those that reported on him? Why not bring up the accusations then?
The idea that no one had any idea about this until the court records were unsealed is utter nonsense, as is this attack on Ito. Before being at MIT he was an angel investor known for finding unlikely funding sources. He continued that tradition at MIT.
This article is clickbait, it's attempting to inflame readers by misinforming them and/or feeding common misconceptions. As journalists we should expect more of them. I do. We shouldn't allow ourselves the luxury of accepting "that's just the way journalism is now". It wasn't always this way, and it doesn't need to be.
I beg of readers: know when you are being played to raise agendas based on false premises. The author just wants to stir up the public so they have more to write about later. If by some chance the author believes anything they wrote, then perhaps NBC should consider moving them to the obits.
Don't: Build deceptive products. Mortgage backed securities were created by programmers who lied about their randomization process.
Do: Analyze business to make products that assist people, making them more efficent and/ or less stressed.
Don't: Believe or let stand others belief that positions held by humans can be totally automated out. Perfect example is the automated telephone operator. Customers hate them, and companies still end up needing someone to answer the phone.
Weeks into his employment the developer came to me and asked if there was anyone he could report work complaints to. I gave him contact information for the state's employment agency. It took another week before I realized that he needed to be informed that the state agency protects him whether he's a citizen or not, and that he wasn't trying to report a former employer.
I know many talented people who have come to the US on H-1B clean and have been successful. I, too, do not blame the workers. The employers are abusing the system, and if it continues there must be much stricter oversight.
So yes, quit using various unnecessary means of supplying binding references to the DOM and serve & send your HTTP correctly. But none of youo ever will.