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Enlightened blogspam

November 25, 2010 By Stephen Smith

I’ve always said that some day spammers are going to become so creative in their filler content that it actually becomes better than the median good-faith commenter. Well, that day has finally arrived!

From some Romanians spamming for a Bucharest car rental service on two articles on rent control from a few years back:

Since under rent control the price is set and there are many applicants, a landlord has the incentive to choose tenants based on other factors. A landlord will more carefully examine applicants’ credit history and income, which a good landlord should do, but lends toward biases against younger applicants. A landlord may decide renting families is less desirable, or may prefer to rent to attractive young females. Often times, racial preferences have influenced renting decisions, which typically worked against minorities. Thus, rent control can exacerbate segregation problems because landlords choose not to rent to people who would change the demographics of an area.

…and this one:

The best way to end it is to phase it out gradually, by only ending rent control for future rental units. this will increase incentives to build new housing units while not increasing incentives from current renters to oppose the legislation.

Both snippets appear to be cribbed from Adam’s article on rent control on FreedomPolitics.com. Pretty impressive for automated blog spam! So if you’re ever insane enough to want to rent a car in Bucharest, here’s your place!

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Bucharest, meta, rent control

About Stephen Smith

I graduated Spring 2010 from Georgetown undergrad, with an entirely unrelated and highly regrettable major that might have made a little more sense if I actually wanted to become an international trade lawyer, but which alas seems good for little else.

I still do most of the tweeting for Market Urbanism

Stephen had previously written on urbanism at Forbes.com. Articles Profile; Reason Magazine, and Next City

Comments

  1. travis laduke says

    November 26, 2010 at 6:44 am

    http://xkcd.com/810/

  2. Stephen says

    November 26, 2010 at 9:53 am

    Is it possible that I subconsciously misappropriated an xkcd cartoon as my own prediction about the future? Ooh, wouldn’t that be embarrassing…

  3. Snoopyflick says

    November 28, 2010 at 3:11 am

    Would this mean that someday comments will be dominated by spammers, and intelligent discussion be the blogger and the spammer. Maybe one day a spammer will just start their own blog, leading to the dystopia of spammers as the intellectual blogosphere.

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