Find out the news that made @majua88 realise she wants to see athletes hold hands instead of compete... There’s a company out there called RealPage and RealPage’s goal is to help landlords increase revenue by gathering “competitive” rent data from other rental properties so landlords can set the highest rent the market can bear. If you thought Mark Zuckerberg was the only person capable of harvesting the power of algorithms for pure evil, you’d be wrong. RealPage’s algorithms have been so “successful” at increasing rents that last year real estate executives celebrated a 14% increase in rent at the RealPage’s conference. Yes there is a conference where rich people get together and celebrate ruining our lives. In fact there are countless conferences where rich people celebrate ruining our lives. Here, in the place called the United States of America, the most famous conference for rich people to celebrate ruining our lives is the congressional session. It’s when members of congress come together in their cutest outfits, pretend they are solving our problems instead of making them worse, then get wine drunk at 4pm. The wine drunk part is not shown on C-SPAN. RealPage should be illegal even by capitalism’s standards. I know capitalism doesn’t seem like it has any standards, but one thing that it claims to be good at is “competition” – which I find very unappealing, because why would you compete if you can just take a nap instead. Capitalism claims that through competitive markets, consumers win, but RealPage letting landlords share the price of rent with each other in order to increase rent sounds like open collusion to me. It’s the equivalent of Olympic sprinters holding hands so they can cross the line at the same time. I think it would be very cute. Everyone would win and go home happy. I’m sure capitalists would not find sprinters winning together cute though because capitalists don’t want us to work together; they want to be the only ones to work together. Capitalists know if we worked together like they do, we would be more powerful than they are and get rid of rent forever.