Readit News> In a first, the satellite combines two synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems: an L-band system that can see through clouds and forest canopy, and an S-band system that can see through clouds as well but is more sensitive to light vegetation and moisture in snow.
Stoller is free to find similarly decisive refutations of arguments Thompson had made (they're unlikely to be forthcoming).
yeah, I never said it was.
Thompson himself says:
> Still, I wanted to spend more time engaging with the arguments of the antitrust housing folks.
he says he wanted to engage with the arguments made by the antitrust left.
which means he chose which of those arguments he was going to engage with.
and he chose to make this a 2-part post about why he thinks the antitrust left is wrong about homebuilding monopolies:
> Thanks for reading. Come back tomorrow for Part 2 of my analysis, where I’ll explain what really happened in Dallas and why I think unaffordability became a national phenomenon if the cause isn’t oligopolies.
now, if there's a part 3 where he talks about RealPage and antitrust as it applies to rentals rather than single-family homebuilding, I'll gladly eat crow.
but until that happens, I'm going to call Thompson intellectually dishonest, because there's a cute little sleight-of-hand trick he's doing here. his opening paragraph:
> The sharpest criticisms of the book Abundance have sometimes come from the antitrust movement. This group, mostly on the left, insists that the biggest problems in America typically come from monopolies and the corruption of big business.
he's saying some of the best criticisms of his book come from the antitrust left.
and that he's evaluated some of the arguments made by the antitrust left and thinks they're wrong.
if you miss the sleight-of-hand, you might come away thinking that he's responding to the best arguments made about housing by the antitrust left.
but he's pretty clearly not doing that. because the "antitrust left" argument against RealPage doing algorithmic rent-fixing (detailed in a 115-page federal lawsuit [0]) is much stronger than the "antitrust left" argument about homebuilding monopolies in Dallas (detailed in a Substack post by some guy)
0: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1364976/dl?inline
'One of the most detailed articles in this space is an analysis of the Dallas, Texas, housing market by the lawyer and writer Basel Musharbash. In “Messing With Texas: How Big Homebuilders and Private Equity Made American Cities Unaffordable”'
Musharbash doesn't mention RealPage either, so go blame him, since he doesn't think RealPage contributes to Dallas's problems.
yes, he's responding to [0] which was written by Musharbash and published in Matt Stoller's newsletter.
and as I said, he's being selective about what criticism he's responding to and what he's ignoring. because Stoller has also published, in the same newsletter, articles about RealPage price fixing [1, 2].
Thompson says:
> The antitrust left, however, claims...
if he's going to say "here's what the antitrust left believes" and then proceed to debunk it, I think it's reasonable to point out that his response is cherry-picking only part of what that "antitrust left" believes.
of course, if he wants to publish a follow-up article defending RealPage, I'd love to read it.
0: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi...
1: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-the-r...
2: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/up-to-a-quarter-of-rental...
ctrl-F "RealPage" - nothing. hmm.
ctrl-F "rent" - also nothing. really?
from about a year ago: Justice Department Sues RealPage for Algorithmic Pricing Scheme that Harms Millions of American Renters [0]
> The Justice Department, together with the Attorneys General of North Carolina, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington, filed a civil antitrust lawsuit today against RealPage Inc. for its unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing and to monopolize the market for commercial revenue management software that landlords use to price apartments.
> ...
> Another landlord commented about RealPage’s product, “I always liked this product because your algorithm uses proprietary data from other subscribers to suggest rents and term. That’s classic price fixing…”
if I hear about antitrust in the context of housing policy, RealPage making it easier for apartment buildings to collude on rent prices is the very first thing that leaps to mind.
it seems like Thompson is being awfully selective about which antitrust-related criticisms he's responding to here. he seems to be focusing exclusively on building single-family homes, and completely ignoring the concrete example of monopoly power being used for apartment rentals, and antitrust laws being used to address that.
0: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
Dershowitz was Epstein's lawyer in 2006 [0] when he was granted immunity from federal prosecution:
> According to the Miami Herald, the non-prosecution agreement "essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein's sex crimes". At the time, this halted the investigation and sealed the indictment. The Miami Herald said: "Acosta agreed, despite a federal law to the contrary, that the deal would be kept from the victims."
Dershowitz was also accused [1] by Virginia Giuffre of being one of the people she had sex with while being trafficked by Epstein. she later retracted those allegations after a defamation lawsuit from Dershowitz.
and now, here's Dershowitz claiming that the "client list" doesn't exist, don't worry about it, there's nothing to see here.
however, if a "client list" did exist [2] it seems like there's a damn good chance Dershowitz would be on it, in some form or another, potentially corroborating Giuffre's allegations and contradicting Dershowitz's denials.
also, a potential release of Epstein-related files from the DOJ might include documents about that 2006 sweetheart deal that would paint Dershowitz in a pretty bad light.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#Non-prosecutio...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Dershowitz#Retracted_sexu...
2: I think there's excessive focus, but for understandable reasons, around the idea of a single "Client List.docx" document, when the reality is much more likely that there are a huge pile of documents seized under a search warrant, and not necessarily one single smoking-gun document.
the article: "collect at least 10 times more data"
I'm not a materials scientist...but a perfect 1:1 correlation between amount of data collected and rate of new material discovery seems like a claim that would require evidence, which I don't see here.
Of course I'm using this. I have a homelab with 12 PI's, this tool helps me play with files between all of them, any way I want. Might not be the world changing usage you were hopping for, but for me it's enough.
did you have your LLM write the Show HN description too?
because you've gone from "We started CallFS" and "our small team" to "I play with it in my homelab"
if this is a homelab-level project, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. but you should be careful not to mislead people, even unintentionally, about the stability/maturity of the project.
especially when the project involves data storage. vibe-coding a game is one thing, if it has bugs then you might miss a power-up or get stuck on a level with no way out. when a vibe-coded storage system has bugs, you're potentially losing or silently corrupting user data.
Crashes come when there was no real business value.
I use AI all day and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
that didn't stop the housing bubble in the 2000s.
likewise, if I argue that Dutch "Tulip mania" [0] was a bubble, "but tulips are pretty" is not an effective counter-argument. tulips being pretty was a necessary precondition for the bubble to form.
the existence of a foo bubble does not mean that foo has zero value - it means that the real-world usefulness of foo has become untethered from market perceptions of its monetary value.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania