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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • wattytoPeople Twitter@sh.itjust.worksOpt out now.
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    12 days ago

    I will use PayPal when making purchases, mostly to keep from giving my payment information directly to yet another company that could handle it improperly.

    Not to say that PayPal wouldn’t misuse the information too, but it’s one company that might misuse my information vs many companies, so I’ll go with the one.




  • I found this a bit confusing, but I think the core of this is really that Waffle House staff don’t get a choice on whether or not they buy a meal during their shift. Is that right?

    I kind of got that gist from the article, but nothing super clear. It said that employees pay for the meal whether they eat it or not, which if you ordered food and didn’t eat it, that’s kinda on you. I think it should be saying that they are charged for the meal whether they ordered it or not, if that’s what is happening.











  • “Zillow was found to be price fixing”, you say this as if there was some legal investigation. There wasnt. There were a bunch of salty realtors cherry picking data and confusing correlation for causation. The fact of the matter is, Zillow overpaid and underpaid for houses, and eventually lost millions of dollars during COVID era market swings, recognized the risk of the business and shut it down after only 3 years.

    The ibuyer business was intended to take on all of the burden of buying and selling houses to make it easier for consumers to move.


  • “That’s what one real-estate agent claims in a video that went viral on the social-media platform TikTok”

    Hardly a compelling source.

    " he’s suggesting that companies such as Zillow are using the data they glean from people’s perusal of home listings on their sites to make decisions about which houses to buy as iBuyers."

    Based on what exactly? Zillow used publicly available information about houses, just like everyone else does. Zillow traffic patterns had nothing to do with it and really wouldn’t even be useful for that. Buying decisions were based on home value and forecasted ability to resell, not derived interest based on page views.

    “Gotcher later argues that the company will buy 30 homes at one price, and then purchase a 31st home at a higher price. “What that just did is create a new comp,””

    False. Zillow literally excluded houses that it bought from its comps to avoid that bias. I know because I wrote that code.


  • Zillow over payed for houses, then couldn’t sell them as quickly as expected because the COVID housing market took a down turn, and so they sold them at a loss, lost millions of dollars, and closed the house buying business. They also made plenty of low offers or under-payed for houses at times. They were trying to break even on home value on the hole, but couldn’t reign in the wild swings of gains and losses. Their entire business model was based on the seller fees, not on the house value.

    In any case, they closed that business in 2021, and has since sold the rest of their inventory.

    I don’t see how that would have a lasting effect on housing prices though. I’d attribute it more to a housing shortage due to people buying up real estate, and keeping it as rentals. Even when operating, Zillow aimed to resell houses within 3 months, not hold on to them as investments.