My wife and I made a big mistake of renting from Invitation Homes. For those unfamiliar with this company, during the Great Recession several investment firms bought a huge number of single family houses. Which they've continued to do since then.

IH is reported to have over 80,000, yes 80,000 single family houses. There are a couple other companies like this.

While it's not a monopoly the sheer number of rentals they manage has driven up the cost to rent. Looking at comparable rentals many are now limited to either IH rentals or houses from the other companies.

The model has a number of high fees including a a furnace fee for cheap filters sent out every three months.

What really sucks is the maintenance service. We've had foundation problems that my wife became an utter pit bull with them. This week we're dealing with a main line problem. IH sent out a laborer with a scope, the guy was super nice and found two bellies. Well the equipment he had doesn't record the scope, he had to reschedule so his boss could bring the right one. Today the company contracted to do the work claimed to have arrived, two minutes later started the work, and less than five minutes completed the work.

The level of collusion between the Wall Street Slum Lords is massive. They've reduced the supply of single family houses, provide horrible customer service, and more.

I'm not a fan of government control but this is one area that something needs done. As far as I'm concerned there needs to be a limit to how many houses a company can own. I'm talking less than 100 and likely closer to 20.

Summarizing emails is a great use case even if it is a business function. Very early next year the powers that be for our conferencing platform is going to be integrated with an AI feature. If a call is recorded, it'll write up a summary based on not just was said but anything that was done over a screen share. The tech side, I've used it to troubleshoot some code and especially complex regex.

Which shows the Sad Puppies were right. Tor was the leader of the selection process going wonky.

When you dig into what happened with Sad Puppies, the answer is it was the overreaction of the entrenched junta. They tried to convince everyone that the Hugo awards were all sunshine and puppies. The math proved that they hadn't been for a long time.

Now if you want to talk about the Rabid Puppies, they can only be called a hate group.

Percentages by themselves are useless as are raw numbers.

Let's say you're making 500,000,000 widgets a year and have a defect rate of 2%. That means you are either trashing, reworking, or selling at a discount 1,0000,000 widgets a year.

On the flip side, let's say you are making 100 widgets a year and increase your production to 500. That's a 400% increase.

Without both sets of numbers you can't draw any conclusions about what the changes in numbers mean. It does get more complicated depending on what is being measured and that's a whole different topic, related but different.

The Wall street slumlords have dramatically impacted housing prices. When one company alone owns over 80,000 houses, that is a huge issue.

This is worse than the era of company housing. I really regret selling my first house to one of these companies.

It's time for massive regulation and fees on these companies.

This attitude I really don't understand. Does it really impact you if you've already paid off your loans and others get forgiveness?

It doesn't. All you have is a sense of superiority and entitlement. Be happy for others people when they have good fortune.

The problem isn't student loan debt being forgiven. That's almost certainly a bonus to the economy. Especially for low socioeconomic people who started, didn't finish for one reason or another. Now they have loans negatively impacting them in a number of ways starting with credit reports. Forgive these loans and there is an group of people better off. Especially since let's face it, any income increase they get is going to end up in immediate circulation.

The next thing that has to happen is student loans need to become much harder to obtain. Part of the massive increase in college costs is because there is so much easy money for the institutes to get. Without this change, we'll enter a new cycle.

It's not surprising that the Hugo's would be held in China. I highly suggest finding neutral l articles on Sad Puppies. Most were hit pieces but the reality is showing the utter corruption of the Hugo's.

The professional landlords are bad, but the subset of Wall Street Slumlords is worse. 80,000+ homes for Invitation Homes. Maintenance is horrible. Scummy tactics around "convince" fees to manage things like water and trash.

Not only should it have a transponder on. It should also have the Luneburg lenses installed to massively increase RCS.

I got in on the early release of the first Echo and have serval newer models at home now.

The biggest thing that any of the Echo's lack is something amazing, like spreadsheets made computers great at the office. Then the Internet made home computers amazing for the general population.

Now we use our Echo's for playing music, kitchen timers, showing our Ring doorbell, showing our Blink cameras, and lastly controlling some smart plugs for lights. If we weren't renting I'd do more automation.

Give us the general population something like a spreadsheet or Internet and you'll see a change.

I've used the paid version of Lastpass for quite some time. As someone who's done cybersecurity for over 25 years, I've looked at risks and beneifts.

Pro's:
Cloud based with plug-in's for browsers, apps for iPhone and Android which meet my requirements for access.
Encrypted storage
More and more places you can enable MFA, even the weak SMS adds a significant level of risk mitigation

Con's:
Cloud password managers have had problems, my level of fame just doesn't make me a large target
Doesn't have bring your own encryption as far as I know

The vast majority of time I hear people talk about not willing to use cloud based solutions, the risk analysis just doesn't support not using one. It's like saying you won't wear a seat belt and install a 5 point harness in your car. Are you safer with the 5 point, yes you are. Do you need the 5 point harness for daily driving, nope.

No one has asked the important question. Has the feral cat been observed yet, or is it dead and alive?

Developers are some of the worst people to give elevated rights to.

IT encompasses so many roles that it's an ineffective solution to say IT should have admin rights.

Even when a user has elevated rights it should be through a separate account.