$133k doesn't buy nearly as much as it used to. And it depends on where you live.

"upper class" never meant a relative income percentage. It has always meant a lifestyle. "Upper middle class " means you can afford a three or four bedroom house in a safe location with good schools, that you can absorb a series of financial shocks like dead appliances and car accidents without trouble, that your whole family has decent health insurance, that you can choose to go on vacation every year to a foreign country and still save for retirement. And so on. Wealth capture to the very rich has made us all poorer.

Are you seriously claiming the economy has improved in the past few years?

This is a valid retort. But let us not think that lawyers are struggling: once they get to be a "partner" in a firm they are likely making $1 million/year. And the entire context of the discussion is that they aren't relying on staff like they used to. Back in 1980, a lawyer had staff members who ran down to the court house to get documents, bring them back, photocopy them, staple them, file them, make phone calls. Now all of that is 100% automated, plus now they have AI.

I'm not sure the legal overhead is quite what it used to be.

Disclaimers like this apply to Excel, TurboTax, GCC, ChatGPT, and more: The user is ultimately responsible for the application. The manufacturers always disclaim responsibility.

You can get companies to stand behind products and accept liability or sign a Business Associate Agreement - but you are going to have to put it in a contract and pay extra for it. This is why the product you buy at Home Depot and the one the government/military/NASA buys has a very big price difference even if it is the exact same part.

Every industry does this.

From Housing inspectors and plumbers, to software products - it is super common. I just had plumber put this into their contract for replacing a cast-iron drain with PVC. Then I had the tub reglazed and they did the same thing. There are often two prices, based on if you want a guarantee behind it or not. I paid a structural engineer to inspect the foundation of my prior to purchase. While he said the cracks were normal setting, the price was $200 for the inspection + verbal assessment, or $600 to put it in writing and stand behind it. In the last two weeks I've gotten this same thing from a tax preparer and a property attorney. Free advice from the tax preparer, but if we want him to file it and sign it there was a price. The attorney told me what to say in court, but quoted me a price to put it on his letterhead or to show up and say it.

Hello, friend!

Didn't they announce a plan to simplify, remove bloat, and make Windows behave a little more like what people wanted? This doesn't seem to be fitting that announcement. Though it does seem to fit Microsoft's nominal trajectory.

One of two things in most cases. 1) You get a massive number of nag boxes telling you your machine isn't compliant and is now vulnerable and the only solution is to "upgrade" to a newer system. 2) Try to install anyway and fail, leaving you trying to sort out how to roll back to a known-good configuration from before the attempted update.

The AI companies have figured out the game. They're promising rich people they can continue to become richer without having to pay poor people even the little bit they pay them today. Those rich folks can, in turn, rig the game so that the AI companies can continue to suck down resources ever faster, including tying governments into it, using regulations only to prop up the biggest players, and hold out the smallest players, and creating propaganda that far too many believe that if you try to slow them down, you must be the enemy due to AI now being a national security concern. Honestly, if you can separate from being a human being having to live through this period of time, it's both brilliant in its building momentum, and monumentally stupid because it seems the only way it stops is when we completely run out of resources to feed it. Which is probably not going to be a fun moment in time.

> It isn't anyone's fault but your own if you accept a too-low offer.

If the alternative is starvation and the offer is too low because of a manipulated economy it absolutely is someone else's fault.

1. Raw work: 8 hours
2. Work with unchecked AI: 8 minutes
3. Work with check AI: 16 minutes

I don't get why people choose option 2 over option 3.

They stocker making $15/hour needs to work extra hours to survive. Why does the lawyer making $500/hour overwork?

Funny how understanding and maintaining have seemed to be opposing forces in this timeline.

It's a tech talk show. He's hedging his bets that owning it will maintain a "relationship" with it that favors OpenAI over other AI competitors at the very least. And, despite his protests, which traditionally point the way toward his future roadmaps, he'll always have the option of "nudging" the hosts toward what he considers correct conclusions, now that he owns the show outright. It makes perfect sense, in Sam Altman's ever climbing series of scams.

He only cares that it's making a *LOT* of money for the already wealthy. If it completely breaks the world to do that? So be it. He never made any secret about what he wanted to do, but his followers weren't smart enough to realize that they were useful only as long as he needed their votes and that most of them were never in the chosen club to be benefactors of his stated policies.