1,460 karma · joined December 2, 2013
First, the service is being provided to the landlord (listing, tours, etc.), not the client, for all listings these days (I don't know any young person who has ever used a renter's agent, except maybe if it's provided in a relocation package). The renter has no choice in which broker to use to find/transact w/ the property, so there's very little price pressure for these broker fees.
Second the information asymmetry - the terms of the fee are completely opaque in the listings, and are not disclosed basically until signing unless you press brokers earlier. So there's basically no competitive pressure pushing these fees down, since it's basically a "junk fee" from a user experience perspective tacked on at the very end (and not listed on listings), and the landlord - who IS in a position to negotiate on price - doesn't care.
I don't buy the argument that there will be some long-term price hike in rents as a result of this decision - people who rent for 1-5 years already are paying a MASSIVE "net effective" premium for having an additional month's rent tacked on up front - but also it strongly incentivizes tenant retention (e.g. by being more responsive, keeping prices lower, etc.), because the landlord does not want to have to eat a broker's fee next listing.
This sounds like a joke, and it is. But this is actually what happens in practice (with less rigorous random disposal).
In most teams, not everyone is on the same page:
- There are people with varying levels of experience, some may not currently have enough background to fully understand all the aspects that a plan addresses.
- Many/most people have the tendency to let their various biases creep into team-level decision-making. For instance, if someone had a bad experience on a previous team using technology X, they are less likely to support using X today independent of X's suitability for the current situation. And people tend to have a massive bias towards their own ideas rather than others' - so when two competing ideas are presented, one's own ideas are often preferred to others' ideas.
- Especially in larger organizations, there may be political motivations for pursuing one plan over another plan - both for management and for workers. "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" and "resume-driven development" and "launches get promo more than landings" are a few examples that come to mind that I've seen.
Unless you're on a golden A-team of contributors who are all incredible and on the same wavelength (this does happen sometimes! if so, cherish it!), you're going to have a mix of people with a mix of motivations+biases+experiences, incapable of reaching consensus around the "true" best plan in a reasonable amount of time.
Making decisions in a reasonable amount of time is CRUCIAL to team performance. Obviously, sometimes you make a bad decision quickly when you might have arrived at a good decision with more deliberation+debate+waiting for consensus. But in my experience, the benefit of avoiding these "bad" decisions from time to time is dramatically outweighed by a team's ability to decide very on things very quickly and commit to a plan (and therefore execute).
Famously, section 5.11 of the CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual [1] describes some pretty timeless ways to ruin an organization's productivity - all kinds of behavior that are kind of indistinguishable from the behavior I've seen arise from "disagreeing and not committing" in organizations.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
Having information about which git has was used, as well as the time it was published, is part of the source distribution so an output can contain references to these inputs and still be deterministic w.r.t. those inputs.
If you REALLY want to know when/who built something, you could add in an auxiliary source file which contains that information, which is required to build. Which is essentially what compilers which leverage current time do anyway, it's just implicit.
Edit: I found the merges for sorting (Jan 2022) [1] and hashing (Jan 2023) [2]. Both of these are very plausibly in the training set for GPT-4, which was frozen sometime in March 2023.
[1] https://reviews.llvm.org/D118029
[2] https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/commit/74eee2aff683cc7d...