[HN Gopher] DOJ will examine whether RealPage helped landlords c...
___________________________________________________________________
DOJ will examine whether RealPage helped landlords coordinate rent
increases
Author : RadixDLT
Score : 152 points
Date : 2022-11-25 16:42 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.propublica.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.propublica.org)
| InFlightThrow wrote:
| Isn't this _exactly_ how wages are set in tech?
|
| Google, Amazon, Meta, etc. all report their payroll data to a
| centralized third party who then reports back to them what they
| should be paying their employees. Sure, companies can choose to
| nudge those numbers up or down, but it's exactly the same thing
| landlords are doing here.
|
| We need to make colluding to keep rent high and wages low
| illegal.
| luckylion wrote:
| Wages in IT are high for the same reason that rents in these
| neighborhoods are high: demand is far greater than supply.
|
| It feels great being on the supply-side and getting crazy
| money, but it feels bad to be on the demand-side and having to
| pay crazy money. And everyone will say that one of these is
| perfectly fine and the other is outrageous.
| socialismisok wrote:
| No, I think the point being made is that it's bad to set
| wages this way. If every company is colluding, then wages are
| being kept artificially low. (Even in tech, where engineers
| are in demand.)
|
| Neither of these is fine.
| luckylion wrote:
| The salaries are high because of supply and demand. Big
| tech companies collude to "keep them low" because they are
| high.
|
| Nobody here has a problem with their salary being high,
| they feel it's totally fine because it benefits them. It's
| only when they experience the other side that they're
| outraged and want regulation.
|
| Which is totally natural and fine, and I'm not saying it
| shouldn't be allowed or whatever. But we should still be
| aware that that's what it is.
| SSchick wrote:
| Collusion / price fixing as a service.
|
| I'm sure a decent chunk of HN's population has lived or lives in
| properties that are or were using RealPage.
|
| Rant/Anecdote ahead:
|
| We have recently decided to rent from a house from a private
| landlord after equity (a RealPage customer), "offered" us a 15%
| rent hike which they considered "reasonable" after massively
| cutting staff, service, security & amenities during covid.
| Practically every other building in the area (downtown Redmond,
| WA) has increased prices in unison so there is basically 0
| competition.
|
| These companies have turned areas they operate into upscale meat
| grinders that lure you with a "welcome" price only to
| systematically hike up your rent way beyond inflation. To slowly
| push you out if your salary doesn't grow faster to equal to their
| hikes.
|
| Many of our friends have similar experiences.
|
| Imo corporate landlords need to be heavily regulated and need to
| be broken up.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| It's really just supply and demand. There aren't enough homes
| and landlords know it. If there are 2 families for every home
| you're gonna have a bad time, no way around it. Only solution
| is building more.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| In the case of housing, the tight timeframes for buyers and
| the low opportunity costs for sellers do not allow for a
| "fair" playing field.
|
| If sellers collude, they can hold out for a few months or
| even a year without a problem. But buyers are rarely in that
| position.
|
| Technically, it is a supply and demand issue, but the
| feedback loop takes so long that it needs some other force to
| keep it humming long term without sellers pushing society to
| the brink of disaster.
| SSchick wrote:
| The building we moved out of started doing referrals again,
| about 15% (according to a person I talked to at the leasing
| office) of their apartments are currently empty and they are
| still hiking prices, this isn't supply & demand, this is
| price systematic price gauging.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Anecdotes are fun, and I'm sure many landlords are doing
| this, but the data does not generally show it. Nyc is
| sitting at 4% vacancy, only 1% above all time lows.
| sethd wrote:
| > I'm sure a decent chunk of NH's population has lived or lives
| in properties that are or were using RealPage.
|
| It took me a sec to realize you were referring to Hacker News
| and not New Hampshire. :)
| jseliger wrote:
| We should deregulate the housing-construction market to
| increase competition and decrease prices:
| https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388
|
| This is fundamentally a problem with housing restrictions.
| loeg wrote:
| We can do both!
| fallingknife wrote:
| Unfortunately, the government knows they don't have to do
| this because the public is dumb enough just to blame the
| landlords, because that's who their checks go to.
| loeg wrote:
| > These companies have turned areas they operate into upscale
| meat grinders that lure you with a "welcome" price only to
| systematically hike up your rent way beyond inflation.
|
| This was the operating model of large landlords before
| RealPage, too. I happen to believe RealPage likely facilitates
| illegal collusion, but it's not like large commercial landlords
| were saints before.
| switch007 wrote:
| > Imo corporate landlords need to be heavily regulated and need
| to be broken up.
|
| A big issue at least here in the UK and Ireland is that many
| politicians are landlords.
|
| How do we fix that...
| bombcar wrote:
| Corporate landlords math out things and only do it as long as
| it's profitable.
|
| Private single-family landlords are often content renting as
| long as they get more than the mortgage. And if you're a good
| tenant they often don't bother checking comps at all until they
| have to rent it again.
| blululu wrote:
| For a large operation it is complicated. The profit
| maximizing strategy starts to become more entwined with
| interest rates and taking out loans with properties as
| collateral. The price of your rent can be higher than the
| market rates on housing because housing is more or less a
| byproduct of a financial services scheme.
| nradov wrote:
| Huh? Large landlords are unable to raise rents
| significantly above the local market rate, unless they have
| an effective local monopoly or collude with other
| landlords. Rent prices are not byproducts of a financial
| services scheme. When landlords ask for rent much higher
| than the market rate, tenants eventually just move out.
| bombcar wrote:
| Landlords can get a bit above market (basically market +
| cost of annoyance at having to move) but not much beyond
| that.
|
| But a substantial percentage of the population seems to
| think they could charge $10m a month and everyone would
| just have to take it.
| jeffbee wrote:
| People just abandon the whole concept of supply and
| demand when talking about housing, even though it clearly
| applies. Landlords can't charge more than a market-
| clearing price and they won't charge less. Tenants can't
| pay less and won't pay more. Collusion, either by
| landlord syndicates or tenant strikes or whatever,
| doesn't materially affect the market rents. The only
| things that really matter are local supply and demand. Is
| there a growing industry, an expanding population, and a
| lot of immigration into your area? Prices will increase
| if housing isn't built to compensate. Plain and simple.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > Landlords can't charge more than a market-clearing
| price and they won't charge less.
|
| I think your posts are great, to the point, a no-nonsense
| economics approach to the question, and I largely agree
| with them.
|
| However, I'm wondering in this beautiful free-market
| world ---
|
| What value is being provided by RealPage?
|
| The costs to the landlords I could find online seem low,
| but with startups it's hard to tell what the "profitable
| equilibrium price" of the service would be. For only
| $10/month it would seem to be nothing more than saving a
| few hours of labor for each property. (Which might be
| better seen as ~$100+/rental event or something, since
| the leases are probably lasting at least a year, but
| still...)
| davidw wrote:
| jeffbee is correct:
|
| "Supply skepticism and shortage denialism are pushing
| against the actual solution to the housing crisis:
| building enough homes."
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/us-
| housing...
| nullc wrote:
| Lemme guess, were you working in google leadership when
| they were conspiring with Apple to unlawfully fix wages?
|
| Market forces are not magic pixie dust. The actions of
| market participants are what create the market in the
| first place. Colluding to fix prices, assuming the
| collusion is widespread enough absolutely impacts prices.
| That the buyers ability/willingless to pay limits the
| maximum amount of rent extraction (har har) doesn't
| change this fact: the equilibrium in the presence of
| competitive pricing is still different than in its
| absence.
|
| Even partial collusion can still have an effect similar
| to removing the units from the market, and this effect is
| outsized when the market's supply is already very
| limited. Say a collusion only controls 400 units in a
| market of 20,000 (like, say, mountain view)-- you
| wouldn't argue that demolishing those units would have no
| substantial impact on prices, so you shouldn't argue that
| removing price competition among them wouldn't either.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Apple, Intel, Adobe, Google, Pixar, and Intuit
| collectively control a huge share of the local employment
| market for software developers. That puts their collusion
| into a different category altogether.
|
| Why cartels can't work in industries with numerous
| competitors is literally an Econ 101 topic. Historic
| cartels only succeed with majority market share and high
| concentration among a few players. We don't see anything
| like that in real estate. Not even remotely close.
|
| Your example also doesn't make sense to me. A cartel
| controlling 2% of the inventory of apartments in a city
| holds a few apartments off the market. This would indeed
| raise the equilibrium price, but doesn't benefit the
| cartel participants. All the excess profits in that
| scenario are flowing to non-participants. It's the
| perfect backwards cartel!
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The shape of housing also really matters.
|
| The modern chunky 5+1 is only really affordable to build
| for big landlords. Smaller landlord apartments are much
| smaller, often the size of a subdivided house.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| > Collusion, either by landlord syndicates or tenant
| strikes or whatever, doesn't materially affect the market
| rents.
|
| Why? What is the logic behind this statement?
| jeffbee wrote:
| There are just way too many landlords to make it work.
| There is no single dominant landlord and no number of
| landlords small enough to fit around a conference table
| that controls a significant portion of the housing stock.
| Staying with my city of Berkeley, the notoriously abusive
| (seriously, Google it for some extreme horror stories)
| Everest Properties holds only 354 units. There are 30
| different apartment owners who hold at least 100 units
| and 6000 total landlords. There's just no way with that
| diversity of ownership that collusion would amount to
| anything.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| The allegation seems to be that RealPage was providing a
| service to solve the coordination problem you're
| elucidating.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Unless all rent prices are made public in real time,
| buyers (and small sellers) do not have sufficient
| information to determine what market price is.
| nradov wrote:
| Huh? Buyers (renters) have real-time information on
| asking rents through sites like Craigslist and
| Apartments.com. Have you not seen those sites?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Asking price is not the sale price. It is apparently
| valuable enough for landlords to provide to RealPage, and
| then in return get a pricing suggestion.
| jeffbee wrote:
| In my city we have a rent registry. Tenants have perfect
| market information if they want it. This does not give
| them pricing power. Objectively, Berkeley has one of the
| worst housing crises in the nation. 3Bd/1ba 1000sqft
| apartments are advertised at $7200/mo. Rents have
| quadrupled in real dollars in 25 years. This is a result
| of government strangling the construction market and
| nothing to do with collusion or hidden pricing.
| runnerup wrote:
| Yeah I think this would work much, much, much better in a
| city that didn't have a complete housing emergency crises
| like Berkeley.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Of course, real time price information only conveys
| movement of supply and demand curves, it does not
| alleviate insufficient supply and/or demand.
| raegis wrote:
| > This is a result of government strangling the
| construction market and nothing to do with collusion or
| hidden pricing.
|
| Actually, many apartments near prestigious UC schools
| (Berkeley, UCLA) are priced to be affordable for two
| students per bedroom. This is how some undergraduate
| students have been renting for decades, from my own
| personal observations. A $7200/month 3 bedroom can house
| 6 students in bunk beds. So at $1200/month per student,
| this is more than affordable for their upper middle class
| parents.
| jeffbee wrote:
| You've just circumscribed the population of students
| eligible to attend those universities to include only
| members of upper-middle-class American families. Perhaps
| you can see that is problematic.
|
| Again, these prices have _quadrupled in real dollars_ in
| only 25 years. Any notion that this is normal for a
| college town is incorrect.
| nradov wrote:
| Berkeley, Los Angeles, and surrounding areas are hardly
| college towns. It's just unrealistic to expect cheap
| market-rate housing near Cal and UCLA.
|
| The solution should be for the UC Regents to build more
| on-campus dormitories, reduce enrollment at overcrowded
| campuses, and build or expand campuses in areas with
| fewer geographical constraints and lower housing costs.
| Costs are much lower around UC Riverside and UC Merced.
| There ought to be another campus in Fresno or
| Bakersfield.
| dnissley wrote:
| I've found they're also far more likely to be absentee, and
| far more likely to discriminate on the basis of whoever
| happened to burn them in the past. They're also more volatile
| -- many are new to landlording and if it's not working out
| and they get a good offer they'll just sell meaning you've
| got to move.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah, there are definite downsides.
|
| Most small landlords make _less_ than appreciation when
| it's all said and done - and if appreciation dries up many
| will sell out.
| conductr wrote:
| Corporate landlords have large portfolios and more likely
| experienced the new "risk" that the government allowed people
| to not pay rent for almost 2 years IIRC. It's hard to
| objectively try to analyze the situation and ignore that whole
| snafu.
| ilyt wrote:
| Right, but you got fucked over by private landlord, that just
| happened to use some service to coordinate it
|
| The service might be the tool used to perpetrate the problem
| but regulating corporations won't help much here, if they are
| gone landlords will find a different way to coordinate
| aaomidi wrote:
| You're not wrong. We should get rid of landlords and replace
| them with housing cooperatives.
| googlryas wrote:
| What's stopping anyone?
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| It is always easy to ask others to do the moral thing.
| andrepd wrote:
| Since credit and money creation is privatised, it is only
| available to for-profit ventures. Good luck obtaining
| credit to build an apartment building, if all you have is
| a contract signed by 100 people promising to take on
| 1/100th of the debt.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Reverse this - get 100 people to take on construction
| loans to bud a co-operative to live in, and then
| refinance after completion. You'll have no problems -
| except people don't want to take the risk of owning.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Most folks aren't interested in housing cooperatives- too
| much work, they want to be able to move without strings,
| etc.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| > We should get rid of landlords
|
| How? Please elaborate.
|
| In places that did this, usually a new set of more evil
| landlords took over after mass killing:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement_(China)
|
| "Landlords had their land confiscated and they were
| subjected mass killing by the CCP and former tenants,[2][3]
| with the estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of
| thousands to millions.[4][5][6]"
|
| This should probably be required reading for everyone
| before they comment on housing:
|
| "Housing Breaks People's Brains"
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/us-
| housing...
|
| The problem is a simple lack of supply not evil landlords.
|
| Not convinced?
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/02/as-
| national...
|
| > In fact, fewer than one-fifth of rental properties are
| owned by for-profit businesses of any kind. Most rental
| properties - about seven-in-ten - are owned by individuals,
| who typically own just one or two properties, according to
| 2018 census data. And landlords have complained about being
| unable to meet their obligations, such as mortgage
| payments, property taxes and repair bills, because of a
| falloff in rent payments.
|
| Edit: And of course, a comment with references is riddled
| with downvotes with no responses :), so predictable , while
| the original with an emotional "get rid of a class of
| people" stays positive.
| andrepd wrote:
| Nobody is arguing for mass killings of landlords, so your
| comment is getting the minimum-effort responses it
| deserves.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Interesting that you thought I'm suggesting mass killing.
|
| I think honestly you should look into why you thought
| that's what I'm talking about?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| > How? Please elaborate.
|
| Ignoring all other factors, it's quite easy. The
| landloard-tennant social relation is able to exist
| because the legal system has a system of laws backed the
| threat of violence to secure and perpetuate its
| existence. To deconstruct the social relation as such,
| one would need to catalog federal, state, and local code
| to identify which clauses establish houses, apartments,
| condos, etc as private property and remove them. Voila!
| the legal construction of landlords no longer exists.
| without the threat of state violence, landlords cease to
| become a social category. If this sounds terrible to you,
| please refer to the first clause of this comment.
| indymike wrote:
| > The landloard-tennant social relation is able to exist
| because the legal system has a system of laws backed the
| threat of violence to secure and perpetuate its
| existence.
|
| So, if no one can own the property, then high rent will
| be solved with a state monopoly?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I think it's a little bit of a false dichotomy and a
| deficit of creativity that the only two conceivable
| ownership models for housing have to be private or
| public. There are an infinite number of ways to conceive
| of housing, than those two. Just try.
| carom wrote:
| We could simply remove density restrictions. Landlords
| are not your enemy, and hear me out on this one, single
| family homes are.
|
| Zoning limits the competition for property to single
| households. I can compete and win against a lot of single
| households for land. I could not compete with 10
| households looking to build apartments. It is illegal to
| build ten apartments on most lots though, so good for me
| I guess.
|
| Landlords own land and make it available to others to
| use. They generally want to build more housing because
| they like money. They are a strong ally in the fight for
| more housing (which means cheaper housing). Single family
| homes are the enemy.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I fundamentally believe that markets do not function
| correctly for goods with inelastic demand and have a
| lower bound that when crossed result in a loss of human
| dignity. I'm not sure there is a way to convince me
| otherwise. This seems to be a core way in which I process
| the world and relate to other humans. Changing this would
| mean that I would relate to people as a means rather than
| an end and I don't have a way to operate ethically in
| that world.
| carom wrote:
| Housing doesn't have inelastic demand though. If the city
| gets cheaper (+capacity) more people can live in it. As
| well, if it gets too expensive people are priced out and
| leave. Ask any state about the Californians moving there.
|
| We are already at the lower bound. We have already lost
| human dignity. You either need to afford 1k per month or
| be homeless. This homelessness is to spare them the
| indignity of living in a 350 sqft efficiency?
|
| Build more housing. Remove parking minimums. Remove
| minimum unit sizes. End density restrictions. 8 units on
| every lot.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Housing has plenty of inelastic demand and it's getting
| worse[1]. This isn't a controversial statement.
|
| 1. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/declining-elasticity-
| us-housi...
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| > To deconstruct the social relation as such, one would
| need to catalog federal, state, and local code to
| identify which clauses establish houses, apartments,
| condos, etc as private property and remove them
|
| So if I purchased or built a house with my work, then it
| is not longer mine?
|
| > If this sounds terrible to you, please refer to the
| first clause of this comment.
|
| Which is "Ignoring all other factors, it's quite easy"
|
| Exactly, this works only in imagination land.
|
| Thanks for ignoring my links to CCP China where they
| exactly followed what you prescribed and ended up killing
| landlords.
|
| Summarizing, there is a problem X (= housing), scientists
| say solution is Y (= more supply). But common folks say
| solution is Z (= confiscation of other's labor and
| property).
|
| Z has been attempted in other societies for X and always
| resulted in bloodshed. I ask how can this not happen
| again if we follow Z and I get a response that is just a
| slightly more detailed plan for Z.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I feel a lot less for landlords than I do for people who
| die from lack of housing at all. The former could simply
| choose to not be landlords, the latter cannot simply
| choose to live in a house.
|
| The question was how to get rid of landlords, I answered
| that. What I'm attempting to dispel is the myth that
| landlords are some fundamental aspect of nature or
| reality - they aren't. Landlords are a product of a
| specific form of ownership and the legal structure that
| supports it. Those two things are choices even if they
| seem to you they aren't.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| So your landlord priced the unit too high, you are moving to a
| competitor... sounds like the market working as expected to me?
| SirSavary wrote:
| No where in the comment did OP say they were moving. They
| also stated explicitly that competitors were virtually non-
| existent:
|
| > Practically every other building in the area (downtown
| Redmond, WA) has increased prices in unison so there is
| basically 0 competition.
| Brystephor wrote:
| > These companies have turned areas they operate into upscale
| meat grinders that lure you with a "welcome" price only to
| systematically hike up your rent way beyond inflation.
|
| In my experience with downtown Seattle, the high end luxury
| apartments this rings true.
|
| I had an apartment that I was renting for ~$4k a month and gave
| me like 1 month free. The building then decided when it was
| time to renew our lease, I should pay an additional $400 a
| month. I moved out of that apartment and then they relisted
| that apartment for $3700/month with a 1 month free offer.
|
| My next apartment was $2300/month. Same thing, 1 month free.
| Come lease renewal time (1 year later), they said the new rent
| would be $400 or $500 higher (a 17% or 21% increase). Recently
| they've decided to give an "exploding offer" where the new rent
| would only be $2500/month with 8 weeks free if signed by X
| date.
|
| TLDR: 10%+ rent increases are the norm for my building. I've
| never actually paid the full listed amount for rent though when
| you take the concession into consideration.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Regulation might work but it's complicated and expensive. The
| best thing you can do against landlords is abundant housing
| supply. Collusion isn't going to work in practice in the face
| of 20% local vacancy rates.
| andrepd wrote:
| Perhaps it wouldn't, given a Georgist LVT.
| carom wrote:
| LVT benefits landlords because they are properly utilizing
| their land. They are operating much closer to its potential
| value than single family homes.
| segmondy wrote:
| What if RealPage is not an American company? What will DOJ do?
| Tell them not to serve American customers? Tell American
| customers not to use it?
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _Lawsuit filed against rent-setting software RealPage_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33317414 - Oct 2022 (50
| comments)
|
| _Rent going up? One company's algorithm could be why_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33224502 - Oct 2022 (279
| comments)
| brookst wrote:
| I mean the whole RealPage pitch to landlords is that it will help
| you extract more rent by raising prices to keep up with everyone
| else who's using RealPage.
| michael1999 wrote:
| People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment
| and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against
| the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
| davidw wrote:
| I don't believe that company is a 'force for good', but I don't
| think they would be able to corner the market in the face of
| actually abundant housing, either.
|
| It's like we keep looking for the bogeyman that's driving up
| prices so we don't have to face up to the real problem: our
| cities' policies that prevent homes from being built, and our
| neighbors who support them.
|
| If you'd like to join an organized effort to fight for housing,
| these are good groups:
|
| * https://yimbyaction.org/2021/
|
| * https://welcomingneighbors.us/
| andrepd wrote:
| There are housing price crises literally all over the world,
| even in places where restrictive city policies are not an
| issue.
|
| I'm sure supply constraints make it worse, but the underlying
| problem is financial in nature: because of making housing a
| financial asset.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| Where is there a housing crisis with no restrictions on
| construction, and how much construction has been happening
| there relative to population growth?
|
| Compared to the Bay Area, there are many, many places with
| vacancies at 80% (Weed, CA) to 99% (Detroit) lower prices.
| The problem is that everyone wants to live in a few good
| employment markets with _local_ housing shortages imposed by
| zoning.
| davidw wrote:
| The housing crisis is _far_ worse in places where artificial
| constraints make it so.
|
| In general, the financial side of things drives the
| constraints, rather than the other way around. If I view my
| house as an investment, it's in my interest to see a
| constrained supply so that the value of my house goes up, up,
| up.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I think a productive step would be to force companies like
| realpage to publish all of their rents and history in real time
|
| And then make a model that shows actual supply and demand in
| the area
|
| This would be the first time that uniform data would be
| available thanks to SaaS companies
|
| To skip the legislative issues of categorizing these kind of
| companies to begin with, it Could come with a settlement offer
| with DOJ
|
| I think I'll wrote to the DOJ about it
| kactus wrote:
| I used to use RealPage OneSite when I worked in facility
| maintenance. As recently as 2018, it was an old clunky webapp
| that only worked in Internet Explorer.
|
| At the time, I was like, why has no one disrupted them yet? but I
| later realized building boring, complex software like this is
| hard, and convincing an org with hundreds of satellite offices to
| switch is even harder.
| ecommerceguy wrote:
| And yet crickets out of anyone from the DOJ regarding the massive
| fraud that is happening everyday in crypto. I have no faith
| whatsoever in law enforcement anymore. Its all politics and
| thumbs on scales.
| mjburgess wrote:
| Part of the problem with crypto is "elite capture", ie., the
| political class seem to have jumped behind it as with, eg., AI,
| quantum computing, self-driving cars etc. --- without realising
| that it's a pyramid-style hype phenomenon rather than a
| "innovation-style" one.
|
| To defend them, it's really really hard to tell -- many
| technical people are economically incompetent and have been
| "captured"; and political people are far from either
| economically or technically competent.
|
| However, of course, there's also a significant amount of money
| funnelled from this scam into political pockets. I'd say it's
| 80% the former, 20% the latter.
|
| In any case, if the gov were to come down against crypto,
| they'd wipe the entire industry out. That would be a high-risk
| move from the political elite class _on any ordinary
| technology_ , let alone one they've been captured to support.
| est31 wrote:
| SBF was the second biggest individual donor to Biden's
| election campaign, and he donated 8 times as much in the 2022
| midterms to democrats. Newspapers close to democrats have
| made very positive pieces about him and his scam. Now after
| the collapse, the government is still after him. He will
| probably meet the fate of most upper class blue collar
| criminals, with low security prison for a low single digit
| number of years.
|
| The political class protects you if you bribe them, and you
| can get really rich thanks to such cooperations. They will
| defend your shady real estate deal, your NIMBY-ism, your neo
| feudal constitutional amendments from 1978, or pro-corporate
| legislation. But this has limits, e.g. when you appear in
| newspapers as someone who has scammed tens of thousands.
|
| I do think however that a thing such as "good" (in the sense
| of quality, not in the sense of impact on the world) elite
| capture exists, even for crypto currencies. Ultimately we
| might end up with one or two private crypto currencies that
| have managed to bribe the elites of the gun owning apparatus
| well, and then that apparatus will use the guns to eliminate
| the crypto currencies that didn't manage to do such elite
| capture. We might end up with privatized, state sanctioned
| currencies, just as large parts of the banking system are
| private, or how certain parts of the elite got first row
| access to massive Fed loans while the masses had nothing. In
| the end, elite captured crypto currencies will just be the
| people with guns deciding to use a different mechanism to
| distribute the goods the guns are protecting, instead of
| being the innovation the pro-crypto people have been dreaming
| about that deprecates the need for people with guns.
| mjburgess wrote:
| Sure, but there's also a single-dotted-line from the crypto
| libertarian "brogrammer" class to the republican party
| elite.
|
| I have the sense that a democratic legislature (Warren, et
| al.) are a lot more hostile to scams perpetrated against
| the naive. It is why, eg., sports betting failed to pass in
| California.
|
| One thing which often goes missing, somehow, in the
| discussion of Trump is he's a scam artist and perpetrator
| of old-fashioned pyramids. Not in some political muckraking
| kinda way, but in a has-gone-to-court-and-been-found-out
| kinda way.
|
| My point being that SBT's donations should not be
| equivocated with endemic scam-artistry in certain segements
| of the elite -- which is a far more serious matter .
| est31 wrote:
| You do have a point. SBF might be an interesting case
| because he tried to get protection from democrats even
| though republicans might have been more receptive to him.
| michael1999 wrote:
| TBH - I consider that people in crypto opted out of the normal
| system of rules, and expecting the taxpayer to spend zillions
| of dollars investigating offshore entities conducting obvious
| ponzis is a waste of money. Crypto == lawless, and demanding
| help from the fiat system after the fact is embarassing.
| farseer wrote:
| Rent is unavoidable and essential to a dignified life. Crypto
| is for people with some spare cash who want to buy a thousand
| lottery tickets. The priorities of DOJ are correct. They are
| there to save you from the greed of others, not from your own.
| roflyear wrote:
| Why is this even needed? It is easy to look at the market and
| also to just look at CPI numbers and boost your rent.
| d23 wrote:
| Is it just me or are there a lot more stories about the DOJ and
| FTC cracking down on abuse by actual big players lately?
| tiahura wrote:
| Just you.
|
| The stories, like this one, are about the the DOJ launching an
| investigation.
|
| Wake me when they win the trial and survive appeal, or even get
| meaningful concessions in a consent decree.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Hmmmm... I wonder whether they will find any conclusive evidence
| that the platform which promises to help landlords extract every
| penny possible from their properties, using data from surrounding
| properties, that was being used by practically every major
| apartment complex, was possibly being used to raise rents... and
| whether this highly complex product with their proprietary
| algorithm could've had a feedback loop on it's own raised prices.
| Such a difficult case to figure out... /s
| puffoflogic wrote:
| This is a literal conspiracy theory, but since it plays to the
| right set of biases I guess it's cool on HN.
| johnhenry wrote:
| This fits the strict definition of "conspiracy theory" -- a
| theory that a group of people are working together in secret
| (or "conspiring") to achieve a specific goal.
|
| You're attempting to apply a connotation -- that the theory is
| unfounded -- that is usually associated with the term, but not
| definitive. This is particularly troubling in the face of the
| evidence presented.
| voidwtf wrote:
| I believe that, in modern English parlance, the idea that the
| theory is unfounded is the primary meaning. I doubt the
| strict definition was ever considered here.
| Step888 wrote:
| https://www.realpage.com/lp/harness-data-to-drive-results/
| voidwtf wrote:
| Any further explanation how it's conspiracy theory?
|
| Those of us that rent, or have rented, have direct experience
| with rent hikes far exceeding cost-of-living increases and/or
| inflation. I am in a much better situation now, but previously
| rented a location that went from 740/mo to 1100/mo over the
| course of two years. This was pre-pandemic in 2012 - 2014 and
| coincided with similar rent increases across the city.
| puffoflogic wrote:
| It is a theory alleging a conspiracy. What part of that needs
| further explanation?
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