Seems like someone went with the wrong headline. Having 4 other officers out of the Sherrif's Office living out of state is the bigger story (this is noted at the end of the story). Tennessee & Texas? That seems nuts. In comparison your Police Chief is doing his best, at least he's there.
We've seen plans like Stargate before. No matter how well intentioned, this will be the result. It's a robbery of the people the telecom and tech industries have pulled repeatedly.
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.
I got to talk to one of the wealthiest apartment owners in my state a few years back. He gave me a lot of details of his financial formula, which was really interesting.
But one thing is found critical is that he always made sure his apartments were priced at the low end. He’d rather make sure they were all full all the time instead of dealing with volatility.
The man is hugely successful and they just named one of the colleges after him at my University.
RealPage's formula is largely the opposite of that.
Before RealPage, most large landlords would aim for 97-98% occupancy and set their rents accordingly.
RealPage would encourage landlords to instead aim for 90-95% occupancy by setting higher rents. Most of the time, this turned out to be a more profitable strategy, even though it makes property managers nervous because they feel like empty apartments = lost money.
It is very basic maths as well (that evades most small time landlords).
100% occupancy at 90% of the market price with high quality tenants makes you more money than 80% occupancy + agent advertising / finding fees at full market price with bad tenants.
While this makes sense, I also see how RealPage likely got caught up and thought this was business insights they were selling as a data aggregator. (Being devil's advocate, I don't know much about their knowledge or ignorance.) Something that is all to common of a business practice these days. If the "here's our number" was whispered back as a "score" instead of a price and the cost was denominated in interest rates instead of dollars, wouldn't it be similar to the credit scores we all have? Is that a form of collusion as you define it?
> I also see how RealPage likely got caught up and thought this was business insights they were selling as a data aggregator
Almost everyone I've met who has ended up in trouble with the law in business got where they are by this exact pattern. When they get caught, it's usually just naked, obvious crime. I've seen:
* Trading fake invoices between subsidiaries to increase top-line revenue leading to fraud charges.
* Fake billing between companies to paper over private use of a business jet.
* Medical billing software where diagnostic codes were optimized by matching the procedure to the highest paying service scenario. i.e. making applying a bandage be a emergency surgery bandage application which would be billed at 9x the price of a normal office visit.
* Lots of startups that started with a forward looking "were' going to build invention x" only to discover two years in that invention x is not possible. Instead of pivoting, the founders double down on invention x to raise more money with a "we're close" or "we are commercializing as we speak" pitch.
* Taking loans against customer owned securities. Behold infinite non-diluting cash, and infinite jail time when caught.
In every case, the pattern was completely ok from the founder's point of view, but when you look at the practice in total it was pretty easy to see crime.
Well, RealPage had a "policing agent" that made sure that RealPage customers were using the RealPage rate, and if not they were kicked out of the cartel.
Businesses doesn't get kicked out by Experian if they grant a loan to someone with a low Experian credit score.
Is it strange to be glad that, in that scenario, that those were the consequences for being a data aggregator? I have a deep cynicism about the work of data brokers and the large flows of data that, in the wrong hands, end up being used for surveillance.
I think it's under-studied how information and markets interact. There was the great "markets are efficient if and only if P=NP" paper. Basically the insight was that prices are information and a market is (supposed to be) a computing mechanism for finding "optimal" transactions. Price discovery is often difficult. It is natural for participants to outsource it to computers. But if all those computer services are run by the same company .. suddenly you have a single agent setting prices, not a market.
> wouldn't it be similar to the credit scores we all have
Wow, have never thought about this. Yes, yes they are similar... That's why I get basically the same interest rates across all financial institutions. There's no competition, basically they're communicating to "price fix" a rate.
Though I doubt America would raid the holy grail of capitalism, financial institutions
Credit scores don’t discourage competition. Competition can still exist within brackets.
The reason rates don’t differ much is because most of the rate is determined by factors outside of the lenders control. There’s a pretty small margin for them to compete on price with each other with. That’s why rates on stuff like mortgages are basically commoditized.
Insurance companies have been doing this for years. Feed data into an algorithm controlled by third parties (and what’s more, share data about people who’ve been terminated, coordinate benefits, etc).
It gives the property management insight into rates charged for similarly sized and accommodated properties within their area. It starts as a means to compete in a market where rates aren't posted on the walls. Very quickly as the software becomes industry standard the dynamic reverses, and multi-property owners use it as a form of data-washing, knowing their competitors use the same software, as a means of price fixing without "speaking" to one another.
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.
Believable. I spend a lot of time on this screen and it's been killing performance & Webex sessions. Another place to find this sort of problem is to show full log after a build.
While this is not new news, these sort of things do warrant reminding of every once in a while to keep it fresh in the new generation's minds. I worked for a few ISP's late nineties/early 2000's. I distinctly remember the day the image of the closet door was received by us all, indicating the first direct wire tap of the backbone fiber near MAE East. After that most of us tech support types tried diligently to inform the public, and even found ways to route around MAE East. No one believed, and very few cared to learn about their routing. These days it's nearly impossible to find a clean unenveloped route.
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.
Everyone here is at least a little misinformed regarding their software and it's simulation abilities. They have control systems with the data they need, and this data is fed into the flight scheduling & monitoring UI. Their tech works, it just gets bashed on because it's different than a lot of other airlines. Used properly it can account for these things.
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.
> Nothing I've said here is privileged, in fact most airlines operate this exact way.
I consulted for a few large carriers and this was my conclusion also. In fact most very large American enterprises have all the same issues. With airlines the problems simply become really visible all at once really quickly when things go wrong.
For the folks here on HN whose experience is mainly in Silicon Valley: it's hard to appreciate how little the execs at these companies care about software. They don't care, not even a little bit, and they definitely don't care what your opinions are. Their priority is growth, the stock price, and answering to the board (not necessarily in that order). The only carrier I heard about that cared for their IT was Continental and they were bought by United.
Compounding the issue is how staffing works at these companies. Being a full-time employee at an airline is considered attractive because you get benefits including cheap airline tickets. My understanding is that the airline ticket perk used to be much more awesome than it is today.
In any case, airlines bend over backwards not to have full-time employees. Depending on the company they have a vast army of contractors (on shore and off shore) who are on a revolving door policy lasting from 6 to 18 months. These folks come in, get trained up for a few months, turn around tickets in a grueling and dehumanizing environment, then they get to take a hike for a while until they can come back on another short-term stint. I had a colleague who had been full-time at SWA, he said his job literally only consisted of training people up on the systems, he rarely wrote much code himself, he was there to 'keep it all together.'
But honestly, the current crisis is not a surprise. The IT systems at big American enterprises are truly horrific. It is decades of homegrown software "integrated" with decades of acquisitions where systems are smashed together on short timelines in service of quarterly goals.
If you want to find the true culprit here, look up at the broader structure of the economic system. This mess is created by how we run the economy.
> A human made the decision to widen the guardrails. There aren't a ton of people allowed to do that…
Assuming this is the case, where folks can override during an incident like this, it sounds like the simulation tooling doesn’t have a human loop interface to demonstrate potential effects post override.
Does that type of simulation interface exist in the industry? And would it have helped?
Thank you for this, the article's conclusion felt very generic, especially after reading the sample group was 200 nurses. Not that Sturgeon's Law is scientific fact or anything, but the observation on it's face rings true. Asking the question alone influences the answer, just like Sturgeon's Law requires an "expert".
