I was impressed by most of this article in Curbed, which did some actual reporting on the discrepancy between landlords saying rents in New York City were surging "because people came flooding back" and the fact that, according to all data, people did not actually come flooding back. The reporting goes to impressive shoe-leather lengths -- the author even contacts the New York City Water Board for clarification on how much waste they processed in 2021! Then comes the end, which identifies the culprit as The Algorithm -- specifically, that of RealPage, a Texas-based "property management software" company that sells software-as-a-service to computerize the process of landlords doing landlord shit -- and leaves it there. This section of the article contains a lot of "it's hard to know who all their customers are" and "if this happened, it could do this" speculation, but few specifics. Naturally, I wanted to know more.

(source: RealPage's training video for AI Revenue Management, 2022; it just gets more infuriating from here, folks)

I wish discourse around game lengths didn’t have to be “short game bad, long game good” and also “short game good, long game bad” it should really be “short and long games are both bad because video games are for children and children are the worst”