when physicists push back against simulation theory using the notion that it would take a universe worth of energy to simulate a universe, they are assuming the same physics are at work in the real and the simulation.

when we make up a game world, it has its own rules and restrictions, some emulated from our world, some unique to the simulation.

There is nothing stopping our reality from being a simulation by beings operating under entirely different rules of physics and simulating something on the scale of the universe is their version of No Mans Sky - a procedurally generated universe defined by algorithms and not hand crafted.

and within no mans sky, players have recreated basic games. give them more tools and they can create more complex games within the game - simulations within the simulation.

18 year old moving anywhere is never an issue - you nailed it with the tech bros. its remote workers with DC money moving here and pricing people out because rent suddenly isnt 5k for an 8x8 box.

did 11 years in food service, whole heartedly agree.

my company has been offshoring to india for the last year now, my team just got hit. but its ok, we wont see offshore mistakes financial impact for 3 years when the medicare audits hit and we start losing hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars from what my team has been doing flawlessly for a decade +.

but hey those 10 $38k salaried positions were really a drag on the bottom line and medicare is totally forgiving.......

>but it isn't hard to see what people are charging these days and adjust your price accordingly.

yes but normally you are trying to acquire tenants. how do you get more renters? provide more value either through amenities, price or both. then competing entities do the same and lower prices or give you more bang for your buck. the last thing you want to do is raise prices when no one else is because you will inevitably lose tenants.

but what if there were a centralized entity that scraped all the data, inflated prices X%, then went around pressuring people to increase their rents to match "market" data and annoyed the hell out of anyone who didnt or tried to compete and lower their rent while telling them they are doing the same to their competitors so dont worry about competition.

if that happened you could raise rents dramatically in a short time frame with zero fear because no one else is going to undercut you.

thats called a cartel. theres a very famous one that you probably have heard of, they collude to control the supply and price of oil instead of letting competition exist, OPEC.

the bigger issues you alluded to with supply being gobbled up and consolidated under large companies? thats what enabled RealPage to pull this off. i would be willing to bet RealPage is backed by one of these larger companies that has gobbled up supply and this was their way of driving up the price rapidly.

go watch Mindhunter on netflix.

its a fictionalized story based on the book by one of the guys that pioneered the profiling of serial killers with the FBI - the agents in the story are made up but the killers they present are true.