Clarence Thomas is another great example, George Bush was angry he was going to have to nominate a black man because he was as you might imagine kind of racist so he picked the most incompetent and corrupt black man he could find and rammed him through the Senate.

I think Judge C has had some of the most brilliant legal reasonings in the past century...thank God for him on the court.

I rate him second only to Scalia....

They do point out that it varies by location, but really their number range is terrible. "classified a family of three earning $133,000 to $400,000 in 2024 dollars as upper middle class." From the HUD Section 8 income limits [huduser.gov], expensive places the lower end of that is considered low income, like San Jose 143,600 qualifies for Section 8, versus cities like Akron where 72,250 is low enough to qualify. Location, location, location.

You know, there is a TON of land and cities between the coasts,,,,,with tech jobs and reasonable costs of living....

You do not need to live in NYC or Silicon Valley or anywhere in CA for that matter to earn 6 figures and have. A VERY comfortable life and work in pretty much any industry you can name.

There are plenty jobs of all types with good pay in areas with reasonable costs of living....

Remember the US is a very large country....there's opportunity everywhere...and living outside of NYC doesn't mean the alternate is rural and on a farm...lots of smaller cities out there that are much nicer to live in, not only fiscally, but healthier and calmer too.

I'd say the better argument is that we should be evolved enough now to know that a highly successful capitalist economy is maybe not the best goal for human happiness, even if it does seem, empirically speaking, to produce the most powerful economies on the planet.

Well...I'm pretty happy,

But sure, you can say capitalism sucks...BUT, it sucks a whole lot less than every other type economy ever tried on earth to date.....

Well, in this case, a distinct lack of needing to compile shaders.

And consoles have been 'PCs in fancy cases' since the OG Xbox. Arguably the Dreamcast.

I would assume, that the fines are on top of all damage compensation these crooks will have to pay. I am also a bit unsure, whether the crooks will have the funds to both reimburse their victims and pay the fines, especially now, when they rightfully face decades of FPMITA prison. Not sure, whether raising the fines would have any effect on the actual outcome.

I am fully aware, that very few years from now we'll be laughing at the models we use today, just as we laugh at the hallucinating mess we admired so much two years ago. GPUs will improve, CPU memory bandwidth will go way up, we'll have Raspberry Pi like systems which can do quality inference. I look forward to using each and every one of them.

However: some people want to run lobsters today, and they are mostly left out to dry for now. These folks paid a few dozen dollars per month to perform mundane tasks like creating optimized grocery shopping lists or scheduling appointments, and now their operators are about to discover the true cost of these toys. Few of these operators can afford the quoted "US$ 1000-5000 daily".

Qwen 3.5 is light years ahead of llama 3 and deepseek, but no comparison to Claude Opus 4.6. Sorry. Plus: the full 35B model requires either a massive GPU (in the multi thousand $ range), or at least a lot of RAM (which is currently a bit pricey). Either way: I have the strong impression, that OpenClaw will lose quite a few users over this.

Sorry to rain on your parade, but qwen is no match for Anthropic's premium models. I've used both for coding relatively easy stuff, and qwen 3.5 puts lots of bugs even into three page shell scripts, while Claude's code can often be taken as is.

Why does this matter a lot? The biggest threat against lobsters is "prompt injection", and only top of the line LLMs are moderately resistant to it. Running an OpenClaw install based on an entry level LLM can be very risky once you give it access to passwords or personal data.

Anthropic evidently knows this, that's why they see little risk when they massively jack up their prices. Those dropping out now were never the type of people who would ever throw significant money at the effort.

It is something to do with 2 X chromosomes...?

The MAGA true believers are just like that drunk guy in the strop club that believes the stripper really loves him.

Wow, just realized it has been YEARS since I last went out, cut loose and had fun at one of the local "strop" clubs here in New Orleans....