Rov_Scam
1hr ago
Semi-related: There was a girl I went to high school with who, though I didn't think she was particularly hot, certainly acted like she was. I guess she was reasonably popular and hung out with the popular crowd, to the extent that my school had one, but I can only recall being in one class with her and her just coming off as self-absorbed. Fast-forward ten years later and a couple friends of mine were joking about her Facebook account and what a riot it was. They knew her better than I did, and I didn't have a Facebook account until well after people were sending requests to literally everyone they knew, so I hadn't seen it or thought of this girl in years.
It seems that she had taken the idea of becoming a celebrity seriously. Not that she wanted to be anything in particular, or that she had any particular talent, just that she wanted to be rich and famous. Unlike most people with such aspirations, she actively pursued this pipe dream to hilarious ends. The thing that makes it even better is that she didn't fall flat on her face but had just barely enough success to keep the dream alive. I would also add that she grew up in a dumpy, run down part of the Mon Valley and due to school feeder patterns I didn't know her at all until high school. I will say now that the highlight of her life to that point (and probably to this day) was that she was a backup dancer for Beyonce for some period. I don't know how long this lasted, and as far as I know it was only for one performance. She also released an instructional DVD on hip-hop dancing, which at least means that some production company was willing to foot the bill.
Anyway, after professing my ignorance my friend emailed me some pictures with his own captions added. I'd love to just post them but that seems inappropriate, but I think descriptions with his captions will suffice:
Rov_scam,
See Attachments, I feel by being ghetto, from [school], and constantly posting photos like this (aka starving for attention) that you're good enough to achieve [our other friend's] constant yet private attention via facebook.
- A picture of her in a swimsuit on what appears to be a beach but looks a little suspicious (Photo shop)
- A picture from the same shoot as above (I'd still hit it even though [a friend of ours] already has and normally I wouldn't)
- A picture of her in a bikini tanning in a yard, not styled or made up (not photoshopped and clearly a Mon Valley native)
- A picture of her from behind in a short skirt staring back at the camera. Her hair is done up and she looks really trashy (Ohio Valley maybe?)
- A picture of her on a bed on all fours in a negligee (Tramp)
- A picture of her onstage with Beyonce, complete with a Getty Images watermark (no caption needed)
- A picture of her with short, shaggy hair (not her natural color; possibly a wig), black lipstick, and a black leather jacket, obviously a professionally-designed costume of some sort (Tour de France fan)
She had apparently also recorded some tracks in an attempt to enter the music industry. I had previously been unaware that she had any musical talent whatsoever (she still doesn't). She did not sing in high school. She did not act in high school either, but this did not stop her from attempting an acting career. Her real last name is, shall we say, of the ethnic variety. Specifically, of the Eastern European ethnic variety that, while not unpronounceable, is not the kind of thing you want to see on a marquee. So she obviously uses a stage name. A stage name that, I might add, was obviously not selected with SEO in mind, because it shares enough similarity with an extremely popular website that Googling it will not yield other results. She is evidently unknown to AI either, as Claude didn't know who she was when asked directly. She said she planned on having a million dollars in her bank account by the end of the year, which obviously didn't happen because even if it did one doesn't keep that kind of money in a bank account.
My more recent forays into her current history show that she has had 20 addresses in as many years, all of them in New York, Los Angeles, and now Florida, though I don't know how one's [drawing a blank] career progresses at age 40 i Daytona Beach. And by New York I, of course, actually mean New Jersey, because there's no way she could afford to live in the real New York. She was evidently under management by a modeling agency at some point, though I'm not sure that means anything. Her music career has progressed to "creating" AI songs. She billed herself as a YouTube creator at some point, though I haven't watched any videos and I'm not going to. Somehow it's gotten even more pathetic.
I can see her Facebook posts pretty easily despite not being friends with her, because she thinks she's important enough to have followers. She still posts multiple times per day, mostly pictures of herself. She has a son, and I'd bet dollars to donuts that the father isn't in the picture. She has multiple LinkedIn profiles. All the jobs are suspicious because none of them have ever ended. These include professional dancer, founder and CEO of her own record label, YouTube content creator, and owner/dance instructor of some kind of.. studio? I guess? And she's a Trump supporter to boot, which doesn't make sense for someone whose primary appeal seems to be to the African American community. Though it makes total sense for a ghetto white girl.
I suggested to my friend years ago that we could easily make a little bit of money off of her by starting a dubious consulting agency and offering to triple her exposure for $500. This didn't seem like that tall an order since her exposure was probably so little that tripling it wouldn't be hard. It appears that that ship hasn't yet sailed.
Rov_Scam
2hr ago
Iran is a problem because of:
- Their sponsorship of terrorist groups in other countries
- Their nuclear program
Neither of these have to do with their conventional capabilities, which nobody was talking about until recently. They were already conventionally weak and destroying these capabilities further doesn't accomplish anything, except to possibly exacerbate the existing problems. If you want those problems to go away, you have to either negotiate or control the country. Trump didn't want to negotiate, and due to his recent actions the Iranians aren't going to be willing to negotiate either, so that option is off the table. We already hit their nuclear sites last summer, and Trump said that anyone claiming that it didn't solve the nuclear issue was reporting fake news. 8 months later and they're back to being two weeks away from a bomb. They aren't going to install a new government without some kind of occupation, and they aren't going to be able to get to the nuclear sites without boots on the ground occupying and destroying them. There's no precedent for a country capitulating due to bombing alone, except maybe Japan in 1945 if you only count the mainland. And even then we had total air and naval superiority and still had to both use nukes and send an occupying force of more than 400,000 for a country that's smaller than Iran. I have no idea what Trump thinks is magically going to happen.
The risk to us seems to be primarily from the economic effects of shutting down shipping lanes, which I think is most likely worth the cost.
How can you say that when you don't know what the cost is yet? Should Americans pay $7/gallon for gas for a year for this? Will Iranian insurgent groups periodically drone oil tankers in the Gulf for the foreseeable future? How long will it take global shipping to recover? How much money are you personally willing to lose because of this war?
Rov_Scam
4hr ago
I chose the invasion force numbers based on Gen. Eric Shineski's testimony before congress in 2003, when he estimated that it would take between 200,000 and 300,000 troops to control Iraq. Rumsfeld and Wolfoqitz eviscerated him for this, as they knew that such numbers likely wouldn't fly with the public, whom they were trying to convince that a more nimble operation would be successful. They ended up sending about 150,000 troops for the initial invasion, but those numbers were augmented by 50,000 troops from other countries. I don't know how many troops Israel would be willing to send, but I think it's safe to say that we can't expect much help from elsewhere.
In the end, I don't know why you're bringing up actual troop numbers in Iraq at all, since that's obviously not a war we want to emulate. If we assume that Shineski's estimates were correct, and account for the fact that Iran has double the population and several times the land area, 500,000 seems like a reasonable estimate for what it would take to control the country. I brought up the casualty numbers not because I think any of those numbers are likely, but because we don't know what kind of numbers would be likely. We lost 5,000 in Iraq, but 50,000 in Vietnam and 30,000 in Korea.
I brought all this up because on the one hand you talk about how we weren't willing to fully commit in Vietnam but on the other talk about how this is a fight we can "easily win", and your reply makes it clear that you don't want to commit any ground troops. Well, which is it? Do you want to win, or are you willing to walk away if the air campaign doesn't achieve the objectives (which, it should be said, aren't clear right now). To my knowledge, and correct me if I'm wrong, there has never been an instance where a government has been toppled due to air power alone. Libya fell due to a counterinsurgency, and again, I'm not sure that's an example we want to follow here. What do we do after we've bombed every legitimate target and the regime is still in power? Walk away? If so, that's fine, but it's also evidence that "we really didn't want to win". We may not have 500,000 troops at the ready, but we're certainly able to commit that many if necessary. We've committed more when the population was a lot lower.
Rov_Scam
5hr ago
I assume you're referring to the upcoming spring turkey season. I can't comment about nutjobs because I only ever hunted in the woods behind my parents' house, though a redneck out of central casting stole our flagging pins for a proposed new trail during spring turkey a few years ago, so they're evidently territorial about what other people should be allowed to do in a state park. I haven't done it in a while because it got too frustrating. I'd be over at my parents' visiting and see up to 40 turkeys moving across the back yard, though they all disappeared as soon as the season started. In about five years of semi-regular hunting I got one turkey. The breast meat is fine but I didn't bother with the legs. A friend told me that they're a lot leaner than farm-raised turkeys and tougher as well, so they'd have to be braised for a really long time just to keep them from being inedible. The thing about deer is that you only need to get one to have a freezer full of meat, and my unscientific observations have shown that I'm about as likely to get one deer as I am to get one turkey. I should add the caveat that I gave up hunting over a decade ago when I realized that being in the woods was more enjoyable when I didn't have to carry a gun or worry about being quiet.
Rov_Scam
5hr ago
It's more of a trope than an actual thing, the prototypical example being Al Bundy from the sitcom Married... With Children. The high point of Al's life was the night he scored four touchdowns in one game for Polk High School. In the series he's working in a shoe store where he spends all day cramming fat women into shoes that are too small for them. The bigger part of the joke, though, is that Al and his family are all lazy and misanthropic, and the fact that he feels the need to mention his past football prowess while in his 40s only serves to underscore what a loser he is generally.
The trope isn't so much a reflection of a real-life phenomenon as it is a warning to kids about not getting too hung up on things that don't matter. There's a lot of pressure in high school to be athletic, or smart, or popular, but the minute you take off the mortarboard it all ceases to matter. Take grades, for instance. In high school, grades and SAT scores and the like are certainly something you need to worry about, far more important than popularity. But as soon as that acceptance letter comes in the mail, that's it. They've done their job, and nobody will care about them again. You're first year in college, you're in the same position as the guy in the seat next to you with the B- average. And if you flunk out and spend the next 20 years working as a convenience store clerk, nobody is going to be convinced that you're smart because you had a 4.0 GPA in high school and won the Bausch and Lomb Science Award. When you apply the same logic to things like sports and popularity it seems even more ridiculous. But for kids who don't know any better, it seems important.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
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.
Rov_Scam
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
2d 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
2d 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
3d 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
3d 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
4d 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.
In this case very little, since it's worth about five minutes every decade, or about 30 second per year. And that's only because I knew her IRL. It's kind of pathetic, but she hasn't done anything to me personally, and she hasn't done anything to warrant anyone trying to destroy her life. I'm not going to condone anything Kiwifarms does, which is why I'm not posting any real details, even though she's still after attention.
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