Kickoff For March 24, 2025
Here we go again. Another final (full) week of another month. They just seem to be set up and knocked down faster than we realize. We can't stop time. We can only go along with its flow.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
Landlords Are Using AI To Raise Rents — and Cities Are Starting To Push Back — Wherein we learn how renters in the U.S. are often at the mercy of software created by a company called RealPage, and about the efforts legislators are making to fight against it.
From the article:
According to federal prosecutors, RealPage controls 80% of the market for commercial revenue management software. Its product is called YieldStar, and its successor is AI Revenue Management, which uses much of the same codebase as YieldStar, but has more precise forecasting.
Racing's Deadliest Day — Wherein we learn about the tragedy that befell the 1955 edition of the 25 Hours of Le Mans endurance race, and how that began the push that (albeit slowly) changed the safety standards of motorsport.
From the article:
Not that the lessons of 1955 ended here. In many ways, they were just beginning. The Le Mans disaster laid bare the grand illusion that motorsport had evolved beyond the bloodiness of its early years. The primitive scenes of violence from the grandstand area, which appeared in newsreels around the world, made it gruesomely clear that the sport’s safety standards had failed to keep up with the increasing speed and deadliness of its cars.
You won’t believe this — Wherein we're introduced to a slightly different way of trying to fight the effects of disinformation, and about the arguments for and against that approach.
From the article:
Because most people still encounter far more real information online than misinformation, even a slight increase in their distrust of truthful content could outweigh the positive effects of inoculation.
Unplugging Is Not The Solution You Want — Wherein Matt Klein argues that instead of shunning technology and trying to escape the various ills it pushes upon us, we should just accept it all of that as a necessary part of our lives.
From the article:
This is not tolerance, complacency, minimization or desensitization, but acclimation. Acclimation to better situate ourselves, reclaim control, and make more sustainable decisions with our technology. The shit’s not going anywhere clearly.
A Rock-Star Researcher Spun a Web of Lies—and Nearly Got Away With It — Wherein we learn about behavioural ecologist Jonathan Pruitt, a researcher who faked data to boost his profile and prospects, and about how that affected no just the perception of science but also the reputations of the younger academics drawn into his orbit.
From the article:
It can be hard to find the locus of integrity when it comes to academic publishing—it’s a system that benefits from looking the other way. Some academics are happy when papers are published even when those papers have errors; journals might prefer to avoid retractions that could cast aspersions on their evaluation process; and universities sometimes bury details about misconduct to avoid seeding doubts about their prestige.
What happens when the internet disappears? — Wherein s.e. smith discusses, from a personal and professional perspective, digital decay, its effects, and ponders why it's happening at an increasing rate these days.
From the article:
The loss of content is not a new phenomenon. It’s endemic to human societies, marked as we are by an ephemerality that can be hard to contextualize from a distance. For every Shakespeare, hundreds of other playwrights lived, wrote, and died, and we remember neither their names nor their words. (There is also, of course, a Marlowe, for the girlies who know.) For every Dickens, uncountable penny dreadfuls on cheap newsprint didn’t withstand the test of decades. For every iconic cuneiform tablet bemoaning poor customer service, countless more have been destroyed over the millennia.