11 cents to describe the project in the current directory is ridiculous.

I built software for this industry (not at realpage) for 10+ years and can explain why price compliance is a big deal.

The reason is that there is a fundamental principal vs. agent problem in the fee-based property management industry.

Usually an investor buys a building and then hires a separate corporation called a fee-based property management company to manage the property. The management company gets to keep 8-10% of the rents that come in exchange for doing all the management work. (there are situations where the owner and the manager are the same corporation but they are less common and are called owner-operators)

The fee-based management company and the building owner have different interests. The building owner wants to maximize net operating income, which usually means maximizing revenue. The fee based manager wants to maximize their earnings, which is the 8-10% of the rents minus paying for all the management work to happen.

On first glance you might think these are similar interests, but when it comes to choosing the price they are not the same. If a rental price is optimal, it takes a bit of work to rent it out. The housing unit will sit on the market for a little bit and be shown to a lot of people before you find someone willing to pay the price. If, on the other hand, the price is 10% below the optimal price, it will take very little work to rent out and will be taken by the first person who comes to look at it. In this case "little work" means the management company can save money by paying fewer staff members.

So, property owners want optimal prices and property managers want prices that are slightly lower than that.

Revenue management algorithm compliance is a solution to this principal agent problem. The building owner insists on it being used by the management company because he doesnt trust the management company to choose prices. He doesnt trust the management company to choose the price because they are motivated to lower the price in order to reduce their workload.

High price algorithm compliance is important to realpage because it is how the owner makes sure the manager is choosing prices that maximize the owners interests, rather than the management company's interest. And the owner is the person who chooses to enforce the pricing algorithm, and thus the true customer of realpage when it comes to revenue management algorithms.

This goes into more detail: https://developers.google.com/identity/passkeys

As far as I can tell: it's a system of private keys stored on devices, in order to transmit a key you also need to unlock a device (e.g. phone) with some other method like a PIN or fingerprint/face scan. Combine those two things and it means a would-be hacker would need both the physical device as well as the local authentication for that device (PIN or biometrics).

The paragraph in the section, "What are passkeys?" tells me that they: are new, are easier, let me use biometrics, and are resistant to attacks. But, it doesn't tell me what passkeys actually are.

Compare passkeys to traditional authentication factors. What's a password? A secret word or phrase that only you know. What are biometrics? Parts of your body that can help uniquely identify you, like your fingerprint or retina. What are hardware tokens? They are physical devices that give you codes that verify that the person logging in has the device on their person.

What are passkeys?

Until they develop a way to explain what passkeys really are, I question how quickly they will be adopted.

Bing has an inner monologue by default

Related anecdote: I've recently had a banking app on my Android that would close itself after reporting that I had "Flappy Bird" installed on my phone and that it was malicious which of course isn't true. (It's the original authentic version of Flappy). That said, it is very eerie that the banking app would scan my phone for other apps. I didn't log in and uninstalled the app. It was either it or Flappy Bird.

What is the alternative? For Gmail, I take the precautions of configuring mobile phone, authenticator app, backup email address, and printed out codes. What else can I do? Is it really better to use several different email addresses?

For Facebook, I’m currently completely locked out. I have the right username and password, but the email accounts I used to create the Facebook account are disabled now, being university accounts.

At one point, Facebook wanted my credit card or driver’s license as proof to tenable the account, which I wasn’t comfortable with. Then it got paired down to three randomly chosen connections that I needed to contact outside of Facebook. Once chosen by Facebook, these contacts cannot be changed. For me, it included a deceased person and two people I haven't even seen since high school. Now, it just wants to validate the email addresses with no other options.

So now what? Nothing in my control ever went wrong. I know my account, I am the person, and I have the username and password. It would be nice to be able to just call a number with a human on the other line to verify that it is me.

We've entered the era of "death by scale". We and the government allow these companies to treat customers and people as statistical entities. They don't give a shit if their products either flat out don't work or ruin a customer's life for "only" x percent if x is small enough.

AWS will email you for months and months about billing issues before they terminate anything

What is this fud? Both AWS and Azure won't suspend your account for several months, even with charges failing. Especially not if you're communicating with them. It's incredibly easy to get a hold of human support in case of the other clouds.