20th newsletter, plus two good stories on tech & housing

Hello! I have a few cool links to share, but first I wanted to add 2 little programming notes.

This is my 20th newsletter!

The first one went to 38 people back in February, this one will go to just under 500. Thank you for being one of those people (insert heart emoji).

Behind the curtain

In case you're curious, here is the graph the newsletter platform (Ghost) gives me of sign-ups from the last 90 days - it seems most people join directly from the URL, which aligns with the little jumps happening when I do media bits. Shout out to the 6 of you who found me through DuckDuckGo.

This is where I should tell you what the most popular posts were, but I don't have Google analytics set up (IYKYK), so I don't know, which is really nice. I do know that 60% or so of you open each newsletter, sometimes a little more, and that has stayed consistent over time.

If you think someone you know might like what we do here - there is an "About" page you can share with them, where they can sign up.

Be the best kind of Reply Guy

The other programming note is that you can now reply to this newsletter, and it will go straight into my inbox.

Please do, BTW. I have so far received precisely 3 pieces of feedback, thank you to those lovely people, but even I know enough about numbers to know that that is not statistically significant.

So - tell me what you have liked, what you haven't, if I should keep going, what questions are keeping you up at night, how my posts are always riddled with typos etc.

OK here is some interesting stuff

Some good links.

Slippery slope sleep pods

The Dublin Inquirer have a great story this week about how Irish tech company Phorest - the app you probably use to book your hair appointment - have been denied planning permission to have "sleep pods" in their office for remote workers and people coming over for meetings.

This one had me a bit torn; I get the "slippery slope" argument, and that this is not what the city needs in terms of housing. But I also have managed international teams, and know the mess of trying to get people together for a couple of days.

The kicker for me though was the great quote that author Sam Tranum got from a representative of the Communications Workers Union, that "if Phorest was a unionised workplace, of course, we’d expect management to come to us with a set of proposals”.

My Dad was a union rep, so I have a genetic predisposition to support organised labour. My Dad also spent the first few years of his life in Guinness owned housing. Worker accommodation has come a long way from a 3 bed terraced house in the Liberties to a windowless pod.

Outsourcing the cartel

The Atlantic has a good story about "Algorithmic Collusion" in the housing market in the US. This is the idea that industries can form unfair cartels, and push up prices, not through meeting in cigar smoke filled parking garages, which would be illegal, but by all using the same app to set their prices.

It is well worth a read both for the insight into how the apps work, but also as a warning for those of us in Ireland, already dealing with major crises in the affordability of housing and other scarce goods, to watch out for. I will leave you with the author's slightly dystopian vision of what could be:

More and more companies are figuring out ways to use algorithms to set prices. If these really do enable de facto price-fixing, and manage to escape legal scrutiny, the result could be a kind of pricing dystopia in which competition to create better products and lower prices would be replaced by coordination to keep prices high and profits flowing. That would mean permanently higher costs for consumers—like an inflation nightmare that never ends.