This is effing wild:

YieldStar works by giving you a recommendation for how to price a given unit in your building. What the FBI and and investigators have realized is that it acts more like a cartel. You're not really given a choice whether you want to take RealPage's recommendations. They will put a lot of pressure on you if you try to price your apartment lower.

Why would someone want to price their apartment lower than what the market rate is? Isn't that what RealPage and YieldStar are promising here - "we're going to be able to maximize the value, the amount of money that you can get for your apartment. We'll give you a price. And if you stick with it, then everyone wins."

Right, that's what everyone sort of assumes that YieldStar was. But there have been many RealPage executives and software programmers who had gone undercover or have flipped and become expert witnesses for a lot of the class action lawsuits now pending against the company. They say that the current iteration of YieldStar software is really a bastardization.

They give you a price that is way higher than what the actual market rate is. And then you're expected to rent out your unit at that rate. And a lot of leasing agents balk initially at these prices and say, "I'm not going to fill up my buildings at that price."

And so a lot of what RealPage does is try to train leasing agents to stop worrying about occupancy - to stop, as they say, actually bowing down to the occupancy gods and get comfortable with lower occupancy.

...

So as a result, now we have a lot of cities - Dallas is among them; I think that Atlanta's a big one - where RealPage has almost an 80% market share over the number of available apartment units that are priced using it.

And that has given the algorithm an incredible amount of power. And as a result, in a lot of these cities, you have very high vacancy rates across the board. So you've gotten a lot of massive rent hikes over the past eight years, even though vacancy rates are really pretty high.

This actually explains so much, because for years now, NIMBY vs developer fights in Heebieville have had these apparently-incompatible claims:
1. we don't need to build more because there are high vacancies everywhere
2. we must build because rents are so expensive and we need to build up supply.

I haven't been able to make sense of why prices are staying unaffordably high at these complexes with vacancies, but it totally makes sense that they'd fall victim using a weird price-fixing scheme like this.

But also: how does it benefit RealPage to rig the market like this?!

I think Biden will resign, probably soon.

Ajay writes: So tomorrow, probably, something very unusual will happen - a new prime minister will take office after he leads his party to win a majority in the House of Commons in a general election. And if you're thinking "wait surely that's just how British elections always work" - well, interesting story. But I'll get back to that.

This site has compiled all the various predictions and polls. Over tonight it'll also be keeping the forecasts updated as the results come in - the number for each party will be the number of seats it's already won, plus all the ones that haven't announced yet which it's expected to win. (Quite a clever idea.) By 0300, UK time (2200 US east coast) we'll know the result. In fact, the exit poll will be out at 2200 (1700 US east coast) and that's pretty accurate.

You'll notice if you look down the table that there's a "consensus" column - this is "how many seats does everyone agree this party will win?" For Labour there are 230 seats that no pollster or analyst doubts will be Labour tomorrow. That's quite impressive since there were only 197 Labour seats total in the last parliament.

What's more impressive is the "consensus" number for the Conservatives: zero. There is not a single seat in the country where everyone has looked at it and gone "yeah, whatever happens, they're definitely holding on to that one".

How did it get this bad for a party that has, after all, managed to stay in power for the last fourteen years, through four elections (2010, 2015, 2017, 2019)?

Or, to put it another way: how on earth did a party this bad manage to stay in power for the last fourteen years?

Well, they've been lucky in their opponents. In 2010 the UK was coming out of the financial crisis. Pretty much no elected Western leader survived that one - Merkel was about the only exception. And even with that, the Conservatives just scraped in. They didn't get a majority - they governed for five years as a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. From 2017 to 2019 they were in a minority again, despite going up against possibly the worst leader that the Labour Party has ever had. And this is entirely predictable; economics are important and the UK economy has been sluggish at best since 2010, and pretty much every indicator of economic and social welfare has been flat or falling.

Along the way they had two national referenda - on electoral reform and on Brexit. In the entire history of the country, there have only been three. (And a referendum on Scottish independence in 2014 as well.)

Coming up to 2015, then-PM David Cameron gave the FT this gem:

Mr Cameron says he hopes to be remembered as the prime minister who resolves the country's two existential questions in the first part of the 21st century. "One is, does the United Kingdom want to stay together? Yes. Secondly, does the United Kingdom want to stay in a reformed European Union? Yes."

And you can see from that how Cameron and his successors approached the problem of being a not-very-popular governing party with bad, unpopular policies. You don't ask people "who do you like, me or him?" You ask them a different question: do you like strudel or cheesecake? And then, with that result in your pocket, you can campaign as "the only party that can truly deliver cheesecake". So they did (relatively) well in Scotland by being the defenders of Union, and of course they succeeded in 2019 by promising to get Brexit done.

Along the way they've demonstrated that the way to become prime minister is, as I said above, almost never "lead your party to an election victory that produces a majority in the Commons". This has happened only twice since 1970 - Thatcher in 1979, Blair in 1997. Every other PM since - Callaghan, Major, Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak; eight of them - got the job by taking over after the resignation of a sitting PM, or got in on a minority.

The "so what" from that is that there are many electorates in UK politics, just as there are in US politics and the general public are not the ones most likely to give you a job. But playing to the others - party members, MPs, and factions thereof - is how the problems start - the Brexit minority of Conservatives, the far-left of Labour, etc.

Tomorrow should see the dynamic change rather substantially because there will be a very large governing party which should be, for the moment, remarkably un-factional. Time has come in against them; win or lose (and it looks like he will lose) Corbyn will still be 75, too old even for his rather unenergetic approach to politics, and his allies will be retired or nearly so. Galloway is 70, and not healthy; he's got another couple of by-elections in him at best. But splits will emerge, over public spending (in the face of what will probably be sluggish growth) and over Europe. Starmer has promised that he'll never take Britain back into the EU, or the single market or the customs union. This is a mistake. All I can hope is that, Obama-like, he's saying "I agree with you, I want to do it, but you have to make me do it".

Heebie's take: Tomorrow is today!

I have a lot of links saved up, but no appetite for anything grim. But this is so rosy and optimistic that it maybe seems fun to argue about:

Ken Koedinger and his Carnegie Mellon colleagues explored 1.3 million student interactions across 27 different learning systems (from elementary to college, across a range of subjects) with the goal of identifying differences in how quickly students learned from practice.

To their astonishment, what they found wasn't what they (and I) expected. The details were published last year in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in the aptly named paper, An Astonishing Regularity in Student Learning Rate, which I have been mulling over for weeks. Here's a quick overview of the results followed by some of my reflections.

Students' progress in learning new material generally follows a logistic curve as they slowly approach 100% success. Using a logarithm to unravel the embedded exponential produces straight lines. In the graph below, the student represented in red (S1) starts out ahead. S2 (green) starts behind but catches up a bit over 8 problems, learning slightly more per attempt than the red student and quite a bit more than S3 (blue) who starts out in roughly the same place. Importantly, the horizontal axis represents not time but opportunities - the number of questions attempted (with each attempt followed by informative automated feedback.)

The authors expected to see both a wide variety of starting points (y-intercepts) and a wide variety of learning rates (slopes) among thousands of students' paths. They were only half right - students did start with a variety of levels. The unexpected part was the uniformity of slopes. The data showed most students learned at nearly identical rates. Picking up a new component of knowledge required about seven opportunities - with amazingly little variation. That astonishing result held across different age groups and different content. Nearly every data set they examined showed an astonishing uniformity in student learning rates.

Can it really be that we can account for all gaps in learning just by looking at the number of exposures?! I really do agree with the spirit of the article, and try to run my classroom with that framework.

Nevertheless, there have got to be some bounds on the idea that all brains are created equal when it comes to learning. Here's some avenues that occur to me:
- a more agile mind can zip through exposures more quickly than a slower thinker. (However, agility probably improves with quantity of exposures at an early age, as well.)
- A big problem in the classroom is how easily students retain concepts a few weeks later. It's pretty easy to get students to follow an idea in isolation, but getting them to retain it and weave it into a larger picture is really difficult. How far apart can the exposures be before it reveals differences in ability to retain?
- Transference of material from one context to another: some minds seem to do this more easily than others. Exposures in life could play a role, in pulling the two contexts closer together, but some students just seem to really struggle with this.

Mossy writes:

VOA:

The International Criminal Court on Wednesday convicted an al-Qaida-linked extremist for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Mali from 2012-2013. [...] Presiding Judge Antoine Kesia-Mbe Mindua stated that Al Hassan played a pivotal role overseeing punishments such as amputations and floggings during the militants' nearly year-long rule of Timbuktu from early 2012.

Al Qaeda-linked fighters of Ansar Dine also used pick-axes, shovels and hammers to shatter earthen tombs and centuries-old shrines reflecting Timbuktu's Sufi version of Islam in what is known as the "City of 333 Saints". But judges found that Al Hassan had no role in the destruction and acquitted him for charges related to the attacks.

Timbuktu, a fabled desert city and a UNESCO World Heritage site, has been blockaded by armed groups since late August [2023], when the Malian army deployed reinforcements to the region. The insurgents are preventing the desert city from being supplied with basic goods.

We have a server where we've got a lot of kid photos and some videos that I'm super attached to, and it's failing. We're ready to send it off to a data recovery company, but I don't know how to assess the quality of these companies.

Does anyone here feel confident about the quality of a data recovery business that you can point me to? I'm ready to pay what it costs because my heart is kinda on the line.

want to discuss?

We watched Adventures in Babysitting with the kids last week, and now I want someone to write a dissertation on how race and class were handled by the writers in 1987.

The basic premise is that wealthy white suburban kids in Chicago have no idea how to handle themselves in the city. So there's automatically a race component and a crime component to their adventures.

By the late '80s, both of these cops to anti-racism feel pretty standard:
1. The white kids are the butt of the joke when race is the explicit focus. The kids stumble on stage during a blues concert in a bar that is entirely full of black people, and the contemptuous expressions on the faces in the crowd are scathing. Just so authentically scornful that you know the actors and extras were relishing the moment. (The kids win the crowd over with their youthful exuberance and willingness to sing the blues. It's very much an 80s movie.)

2. The crime element does not line up along racial lines. The villains are the members of this high end car theft ring, which is sort of a mash up of white mobsters and black gangs. There's a gang fight on the subway, and both gangs are also racially diverse. Both of those racial mashups look phony and hamfisted, kinda like a Michael Jackson video. The mobster group also has white people in most of the positions of power and black people as the go-fers, which feels like a reveal of the extent of where anti-racism ends in 1987.

And then here's what the writers/directors/producers are not willing to do:
At every step of the adventure, there end up being good guys that seem scary at first, but then end up helping the suburban kids onto the next leg of the adventure. One of the main ones is Joe, who is stealing a car right as all the kids jump into it. Joe is a cute black teenager who works for the mobsters, and helps the kids out of a few tight spots. Referring to Joe and Elizabeth Shue, Hawaii at one point said, "Well, they're obviously going to end up kissing by the end of the movie."

And there's just no way that would have happened. There's no way a 1987 movie that's trying to lightly navigate race issues would land on an interracial teenage kiss. That's for heavy-handed movies who are taking it on as a central issue. Whereas by now, that's something that even Disney can do lightly. (The kiss ends up happening with the handsome frat boy who interrupts leering frat boys, spots the kids $50 so they can get their car back, and gives them a ride to the repair shop.)

Overall, my read is that this was written by writers who knew full well what the racial complexities were and wanted to make it a smooth non-issue in the movie. I think there's something interesting about sampling the path of least resistance at different moments in history, I guess.