Rov_Scam
14hr ago
I'm not saying they have too many lawyers. I'm saying that if their products were as good as they claim they are, they'd be able to make do with fewer lawyers. They claim 88% of legal tasks can be automated, and legal employees are among the most expensive. What kind of advertising is that? You can use our software to automate your legal work and save! Except we have more lawyers on the payroll than the industry average, and when litigating we hire white shoe firms whose lawyers are of the type who have their secretaries print things out for them. If the technology isn't saving Anthropic any money then why should we believe it will save anyone else money?
You can cite all the reasons why you think Anthropic needs a bigger legal department, and maybe they do, but keep in mind that there are other companies that have other unique issues that Anthropic doesn't have to deal with. For instance, they don't get sued all that often. I represent a subsidiary of a global machinery company based in Japan that got sued a dozen times last month. For one thing. In one jurisdiction. They're getting sued somewhere, for something, multiple times per day. The US arm of the parent company, whom you've certainly heard of, has five people in its in-house legal department. To be fair to Anthropic, once a company starts getting sued constantly they usually hire national coordinating counsel to manage their litigation for them, but they still have to prepare assignments to local counsel and accept service, and do all the other boring things that come with the territory, as well as monitor the litigation and grant settlement authority.
Anyway, of the six openings they're advertising, two deal with vendor contracts, one with datacenter construction, one with customer contracts, one with international compliance and one with "frontier" issues, i.e. problems that don't exist yet and don't have clear answers. M&A and lobbying are the kinds of things that get contracted out and that the in-house team doesn't do much hands-on work with. It's more like the counsel would occasionally meet with/provide reports to a senior member of the legal team, maybe a junior member occasionally supervising it, but not something anyone is doing full time.
Rov_Scam
15hr ago
I understand what you're saying, but I've actually looked at the job openings, and they're nothing like that. Of six openings, exactly one, [Frontier Counsel], is involved with unusual, cutting edge issues. The rest are just boring stuff like contracts and datacenter construction. And this position appears to be new; Deputy Counsel has an announcement of the opening on her Linkedin from 3 weeks ago, and it may or may not be filled yet, so it's unclear if there is even anyone dedicated to this full-time at present.
Rov_Scam
15hr ago
The problem I have is that they don't act like they believe AGI is imminent. They say they do because they have to; if they didn't then people would stop giving them money. Just take the legal industry; Anthropic released a report earlier this year that claimed 88% of all legal tasks could be automated by AI, though only a small percentage of those tasks were actually being automated by Anthropic's customers. Meanwhile, they're telling students at a top law school that they should learn to splice cable or something because first year associate jobs will be automated away. Aside from the confidentiality concerns of Anthropic monitoring law firm AI use, and the fact that first year associates have been useless for as long as they've existed, Anthropic's own hiring practices do not suggest that 88% of legal work can be automated away by AI.
I can't find reliable totals for how many lawyers Anthropic employs, but they hired 24 last summer, and I'm sure they had some on the payroll prior to that. A gander at their website also shows several open positions, though these all have different titles and multiple offices listed, so it might be more of a constantly hiring situation. I can't find reliable estimates on their total employee count, but I've seen everything from 2500 to 4500 employees. If they currently have 30 lawyers working for them and 3,000 total employees, that's one lawyer for every 100 employees. That's, to put it mildly, and insane ratio. For comparison, Wal-Mart has 155 in-house attorneys and 2.1 million total employees. FedEx has 60 in-house attorneys for 370,000 US employees. Tech companies have higher ratios, but not that high; Apple and Google are in the 1/200–300 range. These numbers are estimates, of course, and I'm not trying to make the argument that Anthropic doesn't need all these lawyers or that they're hiring more than necessary. My point is that AI doesn't seem to have reduced their reliance on in-house attorneys in comparison to other companies, and this is at a company that should, and supposedly is, having their attorneys make extensive use of their AI tools.
The other thing is that when you look at these job openings, they all have extensive experience requirements. The lowest I saw was 3 years experience, and a few required 10 to 12 years. This is common for in-house positions. There were also a bunch of oddly specific experience requirements, which are often more in the "nice to have" category than anything else. The one requirement that was common to all positions and obviously non-negotiable is that the candidate have an active license in at least one state. Now, I am licensed in three states, and meet absolutely none of the other requirements, though I have been working for 10 to 12 years in wholly unrelated fields. Something tells me that if I were to apply for one of these jobs and somehow got an interview, telling the hiring team that I had mad AI skillz that would allow me to complete 88% of my work and get up to speed on the remaining 12% quickly would not impress them. Then again, being a true believer was one of the requirements, so who knows.
Rov_Scam
17hr ago
Would you, personally, be in favor of a ground invasion involving 400,000–500,000 US troops? How many US killed in action do you think we should be willing to commit to? 5,000? 30,000? 50,000?
Rov_Scam
18hr ago
Is Trump's invasion un-American and irresponsible? I'm not sure what it's supposed to accomplish. If he wants to remove the Islamic Republic and ensure that they never get nukes, he isn't going to do that by lobbing missiles at them. He needs to put an invasion force together of about a half-million troops to occupy the cities and find and permanently destroy all of the nuclear sites, and make a firm commitment that they will not leave until the mission is accomplished, even if it takes decades. Of course, he won't do that, because it would be incredibly unpopular, but his current stance amounts to some sort of permanent dicking around, and his own intelligence tells him that. If he stops the war and resigns then Vance or whoever might be able to do a sufficient amount of groveling to avoid the worst of the repercussions.
Rov_Scam
19hr ago
I understand the cringe at @FiveHourMarathon likening it to religion, but there is something apocalyptic about the idea. Not in the sense that it's world-ending, but in the sense that there's something vaguely amazing that's supposed to happen that will change humanity, etc. How are we supposed to know when we've hit AGI? Sam Altman or whoever saying so isn't going to move the needle much, as it will just be perceived as a cynical marketing ploy. If it hits some benchmark that's great but I'm sure by some benchmark we had AGI in 2023. Besides, these benchmarks are all industry inventions, anyway.
OF course, no one in the industry would ever say that we've reached AGI, because that would instantly shut off the money spigot and expose them all as frauds, even if they are true believers. As soon as they describe a product as AGI the expectation level would skyrocket, as this is their supposed end goal, but when the sun goes up, sun goes down, moon goes up, moon goes down, and a month later they're still stuck with a 3% conversion rate, a trillion dollars in debt, and a product that the tech gurus all agree is slightly better than the last iteration, it's over. At that point, no one has any reason to give AI companies any more money.
So if it does happen, it has to happen in a big noticeable way that nobody can ignore. It also has to be an unalloyed good approaching luxury gay space communism, because if it's anything else, Altman et al. are fucked as well. I honestly don't understand the glee with which AI promoters predict that 50% of all "knowledge jobs" will disappear within a year. Hell, the Chief Legal Officer of Anthropic went to Stanford Law School earlier this year and basically told the students that they should all drop out. Do they not understand basic economics? Do they not understand that 50% of the highest-paid workers getting laid off in a year's time would create an economic disaster the likes of which we've never seen? Do they not understand that this will have a ripple effect into non knowledge-work, as cratering demand combined with an employment glut would reduce jobs and depress the salaries of the jobs that remained? Do they not realize that many of the enterprise clients they depend on to pay full-freight for this product will be out of business? Do they not realize that everyone whom they owe money to will also be in a tight spot and will expect to be paid the full amount of the money owed? Do they not realize that the AI companies themselves are likely to go bankrupt in such a scenario? It has to be a messianic vision, because it can't be anything else.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
That might be the official definition, but I don't know that it's broken out in practice. I included the prison population because when I was looking at the DoL's county by county maps, I noticed that Forest County, PA had a male labor force participation rate of only 8.2%. Being familiar with the area, I knew that the state prison at Marienville skews all of the demographic statistics, as it contains 2300 people in a county that only has about 6900 total. By contrast, Cameron County is similarly small and mostly forested, with no large population centers and no industry, and it has a male workforce participation rate of 81%, and no prison. I don't know if the prison population affects the numbers on a national scale, but given the local breakdown it seemed like I should take that into consideration.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Is inference really profitable? Maybe in and of itself, but these companies use so many accounting tricks that it's hard to tell. Every new model requires huge R&D and capital expenditures, which have to be amortized over the lifespan of the product, which isn't infinite since these companies rely on constant expansion to stay in the hype cycle. Could Open AI turn a profit if it stuck to selling it's current models and cut its R&D and capital spending to something similar to a normal company? Or does it require the constant promise of a super product to keep the hype cycle going?
Rov_Scam
2d ago
@self_made_human is one of my favorite posters. Whenever I find myself nodding along with a comment thinking "oh yeah that's about what I would write" more often than not its one of his.
Only increases the chance that you are the same person. Rov_scam is one of my favorite posters. Everything he says is brilliant and I agree with it 100%!
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Charts I'm seeing show the prime age male labor force participation rate to be at 89.5% as of last September, and the lowest it ever was was in April 2020, at 86.3%. This decline has been more or less steady since the early 1960s, though local drops seem to happen concurrent with economic downturns. If you look at prime age female labor participation rate, it's a much different story. When this started being tracked in the mid 1950s it was around 40%. It hit 50% in 1970, 60% in 1978, and 70% in 1985. From there, though, growth slowed; it took until 1997 to hit 77%, and from there it's more or less plateaued in the mid-70s. At most recent count it stands at 77.7%, which is close to an all-time high, but it's not much above where it was 30 years ago. If female labor force participation rate had much to do with male labor force participation rate you'd expect to see the largest drops in the male rate correspond to the largest gains in the female rate. The female rate jumped 20 points between 1970 and 1985, while the male rate dropped 1 point. The male rate dropped 1.5 points between 1997 and the present, while the female rate didn't change at all.
If you want to drill down to the real reason working-age men aren't working, you have to look at more detailed data about exactly who these people are. There are about 64 million prime-age men in the US, and about 7.36 million aren't looking for work. Before we can go any further, there are two things we need to get out of the way. The first is that approximately 900,000 prime-age men are currently incarcerated, accounting for about 1/8 of the total. This is probably an undercount, as the numbers I used don't include people in local jails who, whether awaiting trial or serving sentences of less than two years are largely out of the labor force. I don't know what your opinion on work-release programs is, but I doubt it would be wise to allow all of them to have regular jobs, and since it's an undercount anyway I'll assume we both agree that these people shouldn't be working and omit them, which lowers the current rate to around 90.9%.
Second, according to the New York Fed, about 7% of prime-age people have a disability of some kind. The numbers aren't broken down by sex, so I'll assume they're similar for men and women. That gives us 4.48 million prime age men who have disabilities. I should add that the numbers come from the US Census, so this means that they consider themselves disabled, not that they're getting Social Security disability payments. Among disabled people, 45% are employed. I don't have workforce participation numbers, but given the current unemployment rate of 4.4%, and that disabled people have more trouble finding work than healthy people, we'll say that the disabled unemployment rate is 5%, which gives us a nice 50% labor participation rate. Of course, a lot of these people could probably work if push came to shove, since self-identification is the only criterion. I hate to hazard a guess, but for the sake of argument I'll assume that half of those who identify as disabled could work if they absolutely had to. This means that there are roughly 1.1 million truly disabled people in the 25-54 age bracket. Adding it to our incarcerated population gives us 2 million people who aren't working because they actually can't. That brings the rate up to 92.6%
That's an improvement but it's still far below 1960s rates and doesn't account for the entire phenomenon. Labor participation rates tend to be highest in big, trendy cities like Denver and San Francisco, and in places like oil boom towns in West Texas. The rates tend to be lowest in Rust Belt cities, Appalachia, and depopulated rural areas. These men are also disproportionately poorly educated, with either a high school diploma or less, and don't have much in the way of skills. Not coincidentally, this is the same demographic that's likely to have a drug problem, which probably also contributes to a lack of desire for work. In other words, these are the people who, if they had to get jobs, wouldn't get very pleasant jobs, or very high paying jobs. It makes sense that the labor force participation rate would go down over time as employers require more skilled workers and as the geography of employment changes.
All that being said, what it means is that the solutions aren't that sexy, and don't play into any culture war narratives. Saying we need to increase economic opportunities for unskilled workers in Youngstown or West Virginia is about the coldest take in American politics.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
It's called different things in different states. In Pennsylvania it's called ARD, or accelerated rehabilitative disposition. It's mostly used for DUIs, but other categories of offenses are eligible as well.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
He wasn't charged because he agreed to pay restitution. Most jurisdictions have diversion programs for first time offenders where they're given what amounts to probation except rather than complete the probation after conviction they agree to do it immediately, and the charges are dropped once the conditions are complied with. The ice sculpture guy may be offered a similar deal, though it should be noted that that just happened the other day, so one wouldn't expect the case to be resolved for a while.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
It depends on the state but there usually is an exception depending on the circumstances. In PA owners of sole proprietorships and privately-held LLCs can represent themselves in small claims court, where the jurisdictional limit is $12,000 and procedure is more relaxed. Once you get to big boy court things are dramatically different. Judges aren't going to let you slide on deadlines and procedural errors. (It's one thing to be unable to meet a deadline or file something wrong, but you have to get permission from the court or opposing counsel and rectify any errors as soon as they're discovered. Opposing counsel is often willing to cut you some slack since lawyers in a city deal with one another all the time and want to be extended the same courtesy. A pro-se litigant isn't going to have that expectation.) It's really easy to fuck things up, and that's before you even get into the legal arguments. You might as well make a rule that they can save themselves the trouble and go straight to remedies.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
How is Gabbard still employed at this point? The administration seems to have frozen her out of everything, her pacifist wing has lost the battle of influence within the administration, and she doesn't placate any voter base except Rogan listeners. And now there's this, which is probably nothing but is still something. I'm not sure what Trump gains by keeping her.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
My guess is that it has something to do with that contract. All the other criticisms have been around for some time, and Trump doesn't seem to have been fazed by them. Incidentally, this reminds me of an interaction I had with a Chapter 7 client when I started doing them on the side around 2016. This woman had like 13 credit cards and had absolutely no financial literacy. That isn't exactly uncommon, and in those cases I ended up giving them a crash course on the topic. She told me she wanted to reaffirm a debt, and the following conversation ensued:
Me: You can't just decide to reaffirm a debt. That's up to the trustee. Which debt were you thinking of reaffirming? (I wouldn't agree to help them reaffirm debts except under special rare conditions; the couple I did were on loans for cars that weren't worth a lot of money and had low balances. Otherwise it's almost always a bad idea. Most reaffirmations are for car loans generally.)
Her: I was thinking I should keep the Toys R Us card (reaffirming a credit card debt is almost unheard of)
Me: Why?
Her: Just to have it around in case of an emergency.
Me: There's no such thing as an emergency toy purchase.
To be fair to the woman, I understood her logic: This card only had a balance of like $350 and was the only one that wasn't in arrears. It would haveen trivial for her to keep it and pay it off, and she wanted to have it around in case something unexpected happened and she needed money. It also had a limit of $500 or $1000 or something similarly small, so it couldn't get her into that much trouble. I explained to her that, regardless of the wisdom of the decision or the trustee's willingness to allow it, reaffirming didn't create an obligation to allow her to keep the card, and they would probably cancel it anyway. In fact, they would probably cancel it even if she didn't have a balance on it. In any event, this case was a confidence-builder for me because she ended up doing pretty well. She made a decent income but spent a good chunk of it on credit card bills that were killing her. Once those were wiped out she was able to start saving. She also had what I called The Exacta: She surrendered a newer Nissan Altima and went back to using a 15-year-old Grand Am that had been sitting in her driveway.
Anyway, I bring this up because I busted out laughing and thought of this when I read that Noem said that they didn't put the contract out for bid because of the declared emergency. Sorry Kristi, there's no such thing as an emergency ad campaign.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
I think you and @pusher_robot are misunderstanding my argument. I'm not trying to take anything away from the guy or say he shouldn't be lauded. What I'm saying is that when you have a billion-dollar idea that takes millions to implement, it's a lot easier to do so when you already have those millions. There are plenty of smart, hardworking people with good ideas that may have the potential to make them billionaires, but most aren't in a position to just walk away from well-paying jobs when they have mortgages, families, and leaking dishwashers. For most people, risking a good life to pursue what is effectively a lottery ticket is irresponsible to the point of reckless. It's not reckless, however, when failure means your net worth will be whittled down from $175 million to $75 million. I'm not trying to take away from anyone's accomplishments here, just making the point that you can't state categorically that billionaires are better than the rest of us.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
In this context, I can't give him credit for Tesla or SpaceX because he was already incredibly wealthy when he got involved with those ventures, and that wealth didn't come from any particular display of talent, at least not enough to say that he's simply better than the rest of us. I'm not trying to diminish his accomplishments, just saying that it's a lot easier to take huge business risks when you have 100 million dollars already.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
They may be better than me personally, but I doubt they're any better than the millions of other people trying to do what they do. I don't think it's rent seeking so much as sales prowess and (mostly) luck. It's easy to look at someone like Bezos or Gates or Carnegie and point to value created, because everyone knows what they did. But take a guy like Mark Cuban. He's a celebrity billionaire if there ever was one. He owns a pro sports franchise, which is about the most stereotypically billionaire thing you can do, and he hosts a show that presents him as a Svengali of entrepreneurship. Everyone has long forgotten that the value he created was broadcast.com, which no one remembers and which became defunct within a couple years of his selling it to Yahoo. He had a business with minimal value and happened to unload it at just the right time; a year later and he'd be living out of a cardboard box right now.
Of course, the smart set knows that Cuban was lucky. But we don't even have to leave the NBA to find another one: Steve Ballmer. He was Bill Gates's right hand man, so one can argue that he built part of the value of Microsoft. But when Gates handed the reins over to him, his tenure at the top wasn't exactly stellar. He had a few hits, but the Ballmer era will be known more for the long string of misses, and the end of Microsoft being the undisputed industry leader. If we move to another league but stay with Microsoft we have Paul Allen, who was instrumental in the very early days but quickly took to feuding with Gates and was forced out of the company. He didn't do much after that besides philanthropy and other stereotypical billionaire stuff, and most of his net worth came from stock he was able to hold onto.
Elon himself is really the worst of the bunch when you think about it, a combination of Cuban and Allen. He had a good idea and was able to get investors but was bad at running the company and got forced out. The brought new management in, changed the name, and sold X.com, since renamed PayPal, to eBay for enough to net Elon a cool hundred million. Everything else in his career is the result of having fuck you money to begin with. I'm not saying that intelligence or vision doesn't play into this at all, but luck and salesmanship are a huge part of it. I wouldn't even put risk taking in this category because lots of people are willing to take huge risks doing things like taking out home equity loans to buy sports bars and pizza shops.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
The car I actually had in mind was a Civic Type-R, though there are a lot of cars you could sub in here, the idea being that these are normal cars designed for normal driving that have just been modified a bit for performance. The problem with the S550 is that for the price you quoted you're only getting a V6, which is a mid-life crisis car for a woman. You can get an S197 for that price but it's probably been in at least one wreck. I don't know how much a C6 goes for these days but if OP went that route he should spend the rest of the money on veneers and hair dye and head down to the local suburban townie bar where he can hit on hairdressers who bitch about how their ex-boyfriends are always late with child support.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
I understand what you're saying, but there's a difference between a clean car and a beater. Women don't know anything about cars, and car design hasn't changed enough in the past 20 years to make anything look seriously dated. She's not going to peek at the odometer. I recently bought a new car and rather than be exciting it was brutal, due to parting difficulties with the old one I had put 150,000 miles on in 6 years. I made a decision with my mind and not my heart (which would have had me shoveling money into the old one), and regretted it for the first week. I tried explaining this to several women, and they all thought I was insane. Men, on the other hand, could relate to what I was going through. To men, a car is like a friend. To women, it's just another appliance.
The one aspect of cars that women will appreciate is the interior. There's a certain irony to this, as almost every woman I know drives a car with a basic interior. My theory behind this is that since they treat cars as appliances they buy models they hear are "good" and when they're shopping they gravitate towards the more affordable ones because they don't care enough about cars to see the difference. Men are more likely to spring for the higher trim packages, so the interiors are generally nicer. After driving beaters for years, my first car out of law school was mid-trim and every car I've had since has been top or next to top trim. These are not luxury cars; the first car that I got compliments about the interior from was a Sonata Limited. In my experience, Hyundai and Mazda tend to have the nicest interiors among the Asian brands. I had a Subaru with the top trim and, having gone back to a Sonata, I once again have buttons that are a pleasure to push. While it may seem odd for anyone over the age of one to experience pleasure from pushing buttons, well, you just haven't pushed any good ones. At this point, I feel mildly depressed when I ride in a car with a crappy interior, especially newer cars with crappy, basic interiors.
The above may suggest that a luxury car is the way to go, and it can be, but OP would be advised to proceed with caution here. The first issue is that European luxury cars are overengineered monstrosities which is fine if you're leasing one, like most people do, but for which ownership of an older, high-mileage models means frequent, expensive repair bills. The second, more immediate problem is that these cars will attract women, just the kind of women you probably don't want to attract. As I said earlier, women don't care about cars. To the extent they can be used as a signal, they're less about trying to send the right signal and more about avoiding sending the wrong one. A sensibly-priced newer vehicle from a mass market brand doesn't send any signal, which is fine. It's basic transportation. A ten year old beater sends the signal that one is poor or cheap, which is bad. A luxury car sends the signal that one is wealthy, which is also bad, because you're now attracting women who you wouldn't be attracting but for displays of wealth. There are obviously degrees of this; driving a Lexus or BMW sends a very different signal than driving a Lambroghini.
The upshot here is that if OP wants to maximize his car's effect on his love life he should buy a mass-market brand with the top trim level. It should be noted, however, that the effect on the trim level will be marginal and he should only go this route if he wants it for himself. The age and mileage of the car doesn't matter as long as it's clean and not seriously old. That being said the car I had that got the mst attention from women was a 1974 Dodge Dart, but that car was so gloriously awful that I can't recommend it in good conscience, assuming one can even be found.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
The problem with the Miata is that there's no cargo room. If he's successful and wants to take his lady friend away for the weekend, getting two suitcases into one of those things is going to be a challenge. A friend of mine had one he took camping and he had to pack similarly to how he would if he had taken his motorcycle, which wasn't some Harley cruiser but a Triumph sport bike. But beyond that, even getting groceries into one of those things is a challenge, unless you're going every few days. I like Miatas, but if you're only going to have one car and want something sporty, there are better options out there.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Iran was one of these countries until 2020 or so. Except Trump backed out of the JCPOA for spurious reasons and while Iran continued to abide by its terms after the withdrawal, it led to a growing distrust of the West among Iranians. So in 2021 they end up with a more conservative government since all electing moderates does is get you burned. The idea that a deal would be useful now only works under the idea that Trump is extremely petty and backed out of a perfectly good deal because he didn't like the fact that Obama negotiated it. You can bitch about specifics all you want, but Iran was getting inspected during this time. If you're going to make the argument that Iran was trying to covertly violate the deal then fine, that gives an excuse to pull out, but if that's the case it makes no sense to try for another one.
I have no idea. The odd thing is that one of the tasks they specifically advertise their AI for is contract evaluation. I'm not a contract lawyer so I'm in no position to comment, though I wouldn't be surprised if the service they're offering does something that lawyers don't have to do. One of the things that I chuckle about is that they say AI can draft documents. I'm sure it can, but that's kind of irrelevant. I draft a lot of motions, but I'm not reinventing the wheel every time. Usually I have my secretary find a similar motion, change the case caption, and spend 1/2 hour to an hour editing it to fit with the facts of the current case. I don't see how it would save any time by entering those facts into the AI prompt instead, and I can easily see how it could take more time since I'd now have to review the entire document in greater detail so I understood what I was filing, rather than, say, assume that my secretary hadn't touched the part where I explain the summary judgment standard.
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