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.
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.
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".
I think we agree? If you're saying that software should be more "easy to use tool" or "craftsman tool" and less "use latest flashy tech concept to replace people", then yes.
I am a systems engineer and software developer, and I have worked on multiple healthcare related systems including one for a major hospital system.
I wish I had more access to nurses during the process. I was always told they were too busy. I just wanted to observe, as I do with any client I write systems for, and was denied. I can say that at least 2 other groups were working on the exact same project as I in the hospital system, and we "won". We all worked in isolation from one another, I discovered the others by accident.
The top of major healthcare systems is wasteful and full of "little kingdoms". The ideas that "AI is going to help" and "nurses need to feel heard" are basically incompatible. Throwing money at artificial brains is always to substitute real ones, and the concept itself is contradictory to employee development. Why train a bunch of nurses endlessly on a subject when you can train an AI once?
We're supposed to be improving & developing people's lives here, not improving a box. For centuries we've found new ways of thinking that have made us better at science and medicine. Computers could do that, but we're not using them to teach each other. We're using them to replace one another.
It may sound silly, but I've reached the point that the theory Dune puts forth seems right.
Epstein was a horrific person.
Joi Ito and MIT accepted donations from a wealthy donor. So what? They logged them as anonymous. They had no part in advertising any good will gained by Epstein. Epstein also helped broker other donations. This is a good move for any institution. I've yet to see any evidence of Epstein exerting control over the curriculum or management of MIT.
If Epstein was able to drum up press from his donations, where was the due diligence of those that reported on him? Why not bring up the accusations then?
The idea that no one had any idea about this until the court records were unsealed is utter nonsense, as is this attack on Ito. Before being at MIT he was an angel investor known for finding unlikely funding sources. He continued that tradition at MIT.
I'm not usually one to rant, but I'm getting a bit sick of media outlets behaving like they don't have a duty to understand the subjects they are writing about. While in the past it may have only been "techies" who understood these things, at least the general understanding of how privacy rules have developed exists in the populace. All of us read these articles and give the author the "laymans" excuse like a southerner excuses their grandparents' racist vocabulary. I'd like to make the situation very clear:
This article is clickbait, it's attempting to inflame readers by misinforming them and/or feeding common misconceptions. As journalists we should expect more of them. I do. We shouldn't allow ourselves the luxury of accepting "that's just the way journalism is now". It wasn't always this way, and it doesn't need to be.
I beg of readers: know when you are being played to raise agendas based on false premises. The author just wants to stir up the public so they have more to write about later. If by some chance the author believes anything they wrote, then perhaps NBC should consider moving them to the obits.
Do: Take work that involves causes you can get behind. At these pay rates, you can be picky.
Don't: Build deceptive products. Mortgage backed securities were created by programmers who lied about their randomization process.
Do: Analyze business to make products that assist people, making them more efficent and/ or less stressed.
Don't: Believe or let stand others belief that positions held by humans can be totally automated out. Perfect example is the automated telephone operator. Customers hate them, and companies still end up needing someone to answer the phone.
I can assure you this is 100% false. These techniques were being used in the wild on cloud provider(s) at least as early as June 2017. I witnessed this myself.