DL Open Thread: Saturday, August 24, 2024

Mentally-Unfit Candidates Unite Under The Trump Banner.  What could possibly go wrong, especially since Kennedy hadn’t made a campaign appearance since early July?

Doesn’t CNN Vet Its ‘Undecided’ Voters?  Nope.  Here’s the story of the one allegedly undecided voter on their panel who, following Harris’ speech, said he was now for Trump:

A man introduced as an undecided voter during a CNN segment following Kamala Harris’ speech on Day 4 of the Democratic National Convention has a history of supporting MAGA online. CNN host Gary Tuchman said all panelists claimed to be undecided voters at that time.

Rosado then confirmed he wasn’t ready to vote for Kamala Harris. Moments later, he raised his hand, indicating that he was ready to make a commitment. When asked, he stated that he was now voting for Trump.

The Trump campaign quickly seized upon Rosado’s comments, using them as an attack on Kamala Harris. Several pro-Trump accounts amplified his comments across social media.

MeidasTouch has uncovered that, despite telling CNN that he was an undecided voter who just decided to vote for Trump, Rosado has a substantial MAGA social media history, including a video of himself shooting an AK-47, which he purchased.

An owner of such a weapon is unlikely to be undecided, as Kamala Harris has expressed support for banning assault weapons. Rosado’s social media history, reviewed by MeidasTouch, reveals that he has been posting pro-Trump content for years.

To me, there is nothing dumber than giving these so-called ‘undecided’ voters any oxygen whatsoever.  They,almost by definition, are stoopider than people who have paid attention and made up their minds.  They’re also attention junkies. Call it what it is–reality TV–which means that there’s nothing real about it.

A couple of interesting pieces I read recently–Michael Lewis on Sam Bankman-Fried; Kurt Andersen on his college drug-dealer:  RFK, Jr.   Any doubts that he was weird back then should be dispelled by this anecdote:

As a teenager in Nebraska, I’d smoked cannabis and dropped acid before I got to Harvard in 1972. Sometime during my freshman year, I tried cocaine, enjoyed it, and later decided to procure a gram for myself. A friend told me about a kid in our class who was selling coke.

The dealer was Bobby Kennedy. I’d never met him. I got in touch; he said sure, come over to his room in Hurlbut, his dorm, where I’d never been, a five-minute walk. His roommate, whom I knew, was the future journalist Peter Kaplan—with whom I, like Kennedy, remained friends for the rest of his life. He left as I arrived. I wondered whether he always did that when Bobby had customers.

“Hi. Bobby,” Kennedy introduced himself. Another kid, tall, lanky, and handsome, was in the room. “This is my brother Joe.” That is, Joseph P. Kennedy II, two years older, the future six-term Massachusetts congressman.

Bobby Kennedy wasn’t famous, but he was the most famous person I’d ever met.

He poured out a line for me to sample, and handed me an inch-and-a-half length of plastic drinking straw. I snorted. We chatted for a minute. I paid him, I believe, $40 in cash. It was a lot of money, the equivalent of $300 today. But cocaine bought from a Kennedy accompanied by a Kennedy brother—the moment of glamour seemed worth it.

Back in my dorm room 10 minutes later, I got a phone call.

“Hello?”
“It’s Bobby.”
“Hi.”
“You took my straw!”
I realized that I had indeed, and had thought nothing of it. Because … it was a crummy piece of plastic straw. But Bobby was pissed.
“There are crystals inside it, man, growing. You took it.”
Growing? The residue of powdered cocaine mixed with mucus formed crystals over time? What did I know. It reminded me of some science-fair project.
“So … you want the straw back?”
“Yeah, man.”
I walked it back to his room. He didn’t smile or say thanks. It was the last time I ever bought coke from anyone.

DOJ Goes After Rent-Gouging App:

The Department of Justice and eight states on Friday sued the maker of rent-setting software that critics blame for sending rents soaring in apartment buildings across the country.

The civil lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Greensboro, North Carolina, accuses Texas tech company RealPage of taking part in an illegal price-fixing scheme to reduce competition among landlords so they can boost prices — and profits. It also alleges the company took over the market for such price-setting software, effectively monopolizing it.

“RealPage has built a business out of frustrating the natural forces of vigorous competition,” said Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter at a news conference Friday with top department officials. “The time has come to stop this illegal conduct.”

The antitrust lawsuit is the latest — and most dramatic — development to follow a 2022 ProPublica investigation that examined RealPage’s role in helping landlords set rent prices across the country, an arrangement that legal experts said could result in cartel-like behavior. Since then, senators have introduced legislation seeking to ban such practices, tenants have filed dozens of ongoing federal lawsuits, and San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors moved to bar landlords from using similar algorithms to set rents.

Oh, guess who is knee-deep in this price-fixing scheme.  This guy:

Beginning in about 1998, to bring about meaningful change to the rental industry, Harlan Crow pushed a group of investors to form a consortium comprising of real estate and technology companies to build the RealPage Platform, ² he is one of its originators.

In 2002 AI-powered platforms like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft entered the $12 trillion rental housing industry. Driving the sector in all 50 states is RealPage, the primary provider of AI technology.  They own and operate the industry-wide common pricing platform (referred to as Platform) where up to 95% of all rental units are priced. Through the Platform, landlords access and share all data on their applicants, tenants, and properties. Nationally, they provide pricing for 20 million rental units. Today the rental industry has been wholly transformed into a data-driven economy predicated upon the theory that landlords no longer compete on price.

Harlan Crow’s influence over the rental housing industry is powerful. Greystar CEO Bob Faith detailed that over the decade’s Crow has formed a tight-knit group of managers that now dominate the industry. Just how powerful is that reach? Our concentration study concluded that half of all rental units in the metro Seattle area are priced by a small group of 13 managers who all originated from–the ‘Crow Empire.’

Gotta go.  The doors await.  (Can you say KAM-vass?)

What do you want to talk about?