Information, while real, is intangible. It has no physical properties (Plato started pondering this curiosity millennia ago, about a realm where perfect concepts existed, for example straight lines and other geometry). What the information is encoded in however, can have physical properties.

So, what is the information encoded in? Is it just the electrons on the wire, the radio waves in cellular or wifi?. What about the server and cables and switches? Dark servers and wires aren't the Internet. It has to have power flowing through it all, and with that, electrons encoded with information, to transmit that information.

The core function of the Internet is the transmission of information. Electricity flowing through the wires only, with no information encoded, wouldn't be the Internet. It would be a vast network of USB chargers.

But if we ignore the weight of the cables and servers, why only look at the weight of the electrons? All have to work together to transmit information. The electrons are the actual medium in which the information is encoded, so I think it's fair to just look at their weight.

However, if we want to get as close as possible to the core functionality of the Internet, information transmission.... the information weighs nothing. It has no physical properties. It's intangible.

They don't have to. It's the ones making the assertion that have to prove their assertion.

True.

Fact: RealPage has information on rents from the landlords that use its service.

What RealPage has said about its service:
__________________
1. [...] In its own words, RealPage “helps curb [landlords’] instincts to respond to down-market conditions by either
dramatically lowering price or by holding price when they are losing velocity and/or
occupancy. . . . Our tool [] ensures that [landlords] are driving every possible
opportunity to increase price even in the most downward trending or unexpected
conditions” (emphases added).

2. In fact, as RealPage’s Vice President of Revenue Management Advisory
Services described, “there is greater good in everybody succeeding versus essentially
trying to compete against one another in a way that actually keeps the entire industry
down” (emphasis added). As he put it, if enough landlords used RealPage’s software,
they would “likely move in unison versus against each other” (emphasis added). To
RealPage, the “greater good” is served by ensuring that otherwise competing landlords
rob Americans of the fruits of competition—lower rental prices, better leasing terms,
more concessions. At the same time, the landlords enjoy the benefits of coordinated
pricing among competitors.
__________________

The updated DOJ complaint against RealPage is here.

I'm not saying this because I think anyone reading it will believe that. I'm just screaming into the void at this point. I don't think we have any chance left. The people who should be securing our rights or bickering too much to do anything about it and leaving a power vacuum so that the 0.1% can devour us all. I think America is finished. I think the whole civilization is finished with it. I'd love to be proven wrong but so far everything's on track for a worst case scenario.

The DOJ lawsuit against RealPage (surprised it's still on the DOJ site) talks about how RealPage does this.

One other thing that the rental industry has managed to do, in addition to colluding via rental information aggregators, is to actually legalize uncapped additional fees on top of rent, fees that are meant to mimic utility payments (these are called "RUBS fees" - Ratio Utility Billing System fees). This is in addition to multiple capped fees. Now, these are just additional fees, not utility payments. Landlords do not provide legally binding breakdowns of what portion of rent is used for what expense and what is profit, so renters have no idea of what the landlord uses these additional fees for, other than being additional revenue (renters pay for all their utilities, all landlord utilities, all landlord expenses plus profit, with their rent). This is another scandal, uncapped rent.

The way the rental industry manages to do this without legal challenge is to dispatch lobbyists to state legislatures to legalize this.

Looks like they're going to use their lawyers to keep colluding, and lobbyists to spread legalized uncapped fees.

I'm surprised these things don't violate the Consumer Protection Act or other consumer protections. But the rental industry is well capitalized and they manage to keep from running afoul of it.

Interesting 9 minute video snippet of Linus speaking with Dirk Hohndel, and giving his thoughts on Rust.

Including the video link would have helped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bb3-bjgf88

A very informative video snippet: Linus speaks with Dirk Hohndel about Rust in the kernel. Two key takeaways:

1. C is a simpler language ("it's one of the reasons I [Linus] enjoys C"), Rust is more complex. On the other side, Torvalds goes on to say, "Because it's simple, also very easy to make mistakes."

2. "If you're doing operating systems, you really don't have very many choices of languages: C, C-like language, or Rust.

You've got a huge, heavily tested code base that's decades old, full of myriad edge cases and weird cruft but it works correctly. It's built in an old language that starts with a "C".

Changing it correctly would require documenting all the requirements, building 20 million test cases, and require people skilled in the existing language and the new language, and they need to be highly conversant in both. And dealing with unexpected hurdles that couldn't be foreseen by the world's top programmers, like the maintainer describes (If Linus didn't see it, or other maintainers, it couldn't be seen until you got right on top of it).

You can call what keeps it going inertia, but everything has inertia, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

"Few top executives have been more vocal in making the case for working from the office than Jamie Dimon, the veteran CEO of JPMorgan, who – as early as 2021 – sought to restore pre-pandemic working habits. “And everyone is going to be happy with it,” he told a Wall Street Journal event that year. “And yes, the commute – you know, people don’t like commuting. But so what?” - https://www.theguardian.com/bu...

I guess... nothing.

They do pay your wage. JP Morgan has been the beneficiary of great government largesse. And it took some convincing for labor to get a better deal from business owners.

They do pay you, and thus get to dictate a lot. But they don't own you. And labor can try to get a better deal.

Is not a threat to me or anyone I know.

Anybody who can just walk up to somebody they've never met and shoot them in the back is probably not the kind of person you want loose on the street anywhere.

Special operations commandos would like a word.

I think Luigi has the same internal controls as a commando. This wasn't a robbery, or for other personal gain, like a simple criminal. This was violence for a greater mission.

The only way to fix housing is to build housing.

It's not clear that the cause of this is a lack of housing. There are as many housing units per individual and per household as there were at the height of the first housing bubble, the last maximum. If the problem is too many investors with too many housing units, you can't build your way out of that.

Now... if they're undercounting immigrants, of which we had a surge, both legal and illegal, then perhaps that wouldn't show up in the official number of housing units per household and per person.

The question is not the 88 dollars, it's the precedent it sets for future collusion and price increases. It won't stay at 88 dollars if they can get away with it.

Question the collusion, not the result of the collusion. The collusion results in landlords having too much power, like any monopoly. The software enables the de facto monopoly.

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answer." - Thomas Pynchon.

This is why free market fundamentalism (the belief that a free market unregulated by government always generates socially optimal outcomes) doesn't work: companies don't only compete in the marketplace but in advertising and law. The response might be, "if only there were no law applying to business, it would lead to socially optimal outcomes" - well, then mafias could thrive (for example), and businesses (collections of people) would be free to be lawless.

So - laws must apply to business. And business will compete in the legal arena to obtain maximum advantage.

Something happened in the aughts, the years 2000-2009. The various financial bubbles sparked or peaked, medical, education, housing. Personally that's when I noticed the quality of durable goods declining dramatically. A new social paradigm took hold, driven by companies seeking to extract maximum value without regard to longer term company performance or product quality. Income inequality grew. There was some sort of paradigm shift, I suspect in business schools and in monetary policy, which has been wealth-extractive to the majority of society.
 

I know workaholics. They have been blessed/cursed to find a task which engages and consumes them fully. They are typically highly successful, in whatever field they are in. Their vocation is their avocation.

What they fail to realize is the vast majority are not, nor will ever be, workaholics. People can be very energetic, but on hobbies (their avocation), not their work (vocation).

Considering they require the cooperation of the masses to realize their vision, and the masses do in fact, feed and protect them (Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her bodyguards), they should take into account that not everyone's vocation is their avocation.