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[Willfor]

I know that a few months after I saw a few of Truean's posts I was talking with a cousin of mine about something or other, she said I should become a lawyer. I just nodded my head. But inside, inside I was thinking, "No. Fuck no. Not in a million years, no."

They're already weaponizing cyberlawyers to replace paralegals (Washington Post).

ROSS has joined the ranks of law firm BakerHostetler, which employs about 50 human lawyers just in its bankruptcy practice. The AI machine, powered by IBM’s Watson technology, will serve as a legal researcher for the firm. It will be responsible for sifting through thousands of legal documents to bolster the firm’s cases. These legal researcher jobs are typically filled by fresh-out-of-school lawyers early on in their careers.

It's also cloud-based, so in theory it gets a lot cheaper the more law firms sign onto this. Obviously in the short to mid term this means a lot let jobs for young graduate lawyers - a lot of the graduate work is button-pushing and sifting through legal data on computer nerwork. ROSS acts as a much smarter front-end for all that data, and cuts through a lot of the grunt work. However it could actually reduce the cost and raise the quality of legal services down the track, so it's not so clear how that would affect the legal profession in the longer term.

Man, I wonder how all of the law students coming fresh out of their $80k programs are going to pay back their students loans. There's no question mark on that one because it's a rhetorical device used to indicate that they are not going to be able to, they're fucked, thanks capitalism.

[Shadowlord]

Someone's gonna have to pass a minimum wage for robots, so that a cyberlawyer who does the work of 50 law students has to be paid 50 times minimum wage. VOTE ME FOR PRESIDENT, I WON'T DO IT BECAUSE CONGRESS WILL SAY "YOU WANT TO RAISE COSTS FOR JOB-CREATORS!? FUCK YOU!"

[Sheb]

Lying is politics, Clinton and Sanders are both doing their share of lying.

Not nearly to the same degree as Trump. He's just spouting whatever sounds good, truth be damned.

Ted Cruz, who is still getting significant voting blocs despite being out of the race for weeks now, was characterized for a bit as "Lyin' Ted"

By Donald Trump.

Honestly, this election it seems like nobody cares about honesty anymore. The most honest candidates out of the Republican side never gained traction. Not that there was much of a fight over it this year on the Dem side other than Sanders, but Sanders, who is characterized even by many Republicans as the most honest candidate in the race, is losing.

Sanders might be slightly more honest than Clinton*, but both are basically still saying stuff that relate to reality, unlike Donald 'I got the Best Facts' Trump.

As measured by those various fact-checking website. By some other measure (like how the numbers of his economic plan adds up), he is slightly less honest that Clinton.But both their plans still make sense. Meanwhile, Donald Trump promised to cut taxes by ten trillions over ten years, repay the entire federal debt in 8 years while not cutting social security. He isn't even pretending to promise things that he could achieve, he is just lying out of his ass.

[mainiac]

Some people I know contend that he actually sucks at managing things, and hasn't made significantly more money than a money market account.  He just started rich.  I don't know if that's true, but a tax return would show it.

It's actually very likely that he has done worse then a decently run retirement account.  Trump received a lot from his dad but a very conservative estimate is that he got $40 million in 1974.  This is a deliberate under estimate.  There were other inheritances, he got stuff like interest free loans, his dad gave him a lot of connections.  So he got considerably more then $40 million, we just know that by 1974 he had already gotten at least $40 million.

42 years is a lot of time for money to grow.  Depending on what time in 1974 you enter the market you would expect between a 7000% and 10,000% return on investment.  So an investor who was completely hands off and only followed the market would have around 2.8 billion to 4 billion dollars.  That is without a single hot tip or interest free loan like Trump was getting from dad.  That is without needing to swindle a single person out of their retirement money or engage in a single bad faith bankruptcy.  And it's the low end inheritance estimate.  If we suppose instead that he had inherited about 100 million by 1976 then with 40 years of gains he should be worth 6 billion.

It's very possible that a full disclosure of the Donald's assets would reveal a true less worth significantly less then 3 billion.  That means that he hasn't outperformed the market, he is actually doing a lot worse then the chumps and the losers.

[Sheb]

Was reading Piketty recently, and it's even worse when you consider that rich people usually do much better than the market before they have access to good fund managers and better investment product.

Speaking of which, I'm wondering why we're not seeing more attacks on Trump's business records. "Don't let America become the next Trump Airlines" got a nice ring to it.

[mainiac]

Was reading Piketty recently, and it's even worse when you consider that rich people usually do much better than the market before they have access to good fund managers and better investment product.

There are extreme methodological problems with those chapters of Piketty.  Not to mention his entire thesis is enormously fallacious.  Read that book with a GENEROUS serving of salt.

[nenjin]

Setting aside investment, what about licensing his name out? I'd read somewhere that was his likely biggest source of income at this point. When you're getting micropayments from several hundred businesses who use your name and likeness, over several years, that'd add up to a lot when combined with his investments.

But it also might just as well be subsumed in the bad business deals he went after, like Trump Airlines.

[Sheb]

Was reading Piketty recently, and it's even worse when you consider that rich people usually do much better than the market before they have access to good fund managers and better investment product.

There are extreme methodological problems with those chapters of Piketty.  Not to mention his entire thesis is enormously fallacious.  Read that book with a GENEROUS serving of salt.

Well, he do admit having very limited data sets for those parts. Do you know of a good rebuttal of those chapters?

[mainiac]

Well, he do admit having very limited data sets for those parts. Do you know of a good rebuttal of those chapters?

Well for starters there is selection bias.  This has two parts:
1) An endowment that is well run today will probably be well run 10 years from today.  As a result the well run endowments will be the largest.  So if you look at the largest endowments you are biasing yourself just like if you evaluated the investment strategies of the rich by looking at Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.
2) There are a lot of different ways that you can evaluate the relative investment strengths of the rich vs. the middle class.  Most of these will give inconclusive results.  By settling on such an esoteric metric you are putting yourself at risk of cherry picking the data.  If you ignore the 20 metrics that show a null result and only look at the 1 that shows a result you better have a DAMN good reason to pick that one.  There should be a compelling case why it is more representative.  But endowments are a very indirect metric.

Moving past that:
3) The praise for exotic investment strategies could very well be entirely unfounded.  They could be better investments or they could be risky investments that got lucky.  These are investments in extremely uncertain areas.  A lot of "smart" money was proven to actually be risky money very recently.
4) Endowments have an advantage compared to private investors because they dont need to worry about life cycles.  Harvard can afford to take a 200 year timeframe.  Donald Trump can not.

But the much bigger issue is that his "r>g" theory throws away the conventional wisdom without so much as acknowledging it.  This pervades the entire book.  For hundreds of years it was widely understood that if the returns on investment were too low, less money would be attracted to investment.  We have had mountains of proof of this over the past century because central bank policies have been able to create changes in real investment.  Picketty says that a century of evidence is a mirage and that in fact r is some exogenous factor.  Bullshit.

As long as I'm at it though, my favorite bit of Picketty stupid:
He says that inflation hurts the poor worse then the rich because the poor have assets in cash while the rich have assets protected against inflation.  He also says the assets of the poor are very small, less then $1000 I believe.

Let's consider a huge jump in inflation.  Push inflation from 2% to 10%.  That's the difference between great moderation and oh-shit-oil-shock-iran-nuked-iraq.  What is the effect for a poor person on this world shaking bout of inflation?  $80.  It aint nothing.  But it's not the biggest thing ever.  If a poor person is able to secure two additional days of part time employment over the course of the year that is a bigger deal to them then 10% inflation.  Yes in percentage terms it is big but the poor are so much more dependent on income then revenues that it's barely noticeable.

[SalmonGod]

Spoiler: Oh god.  Please help.  Mind broken. (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Reminds me of mainiac and RK, because if this thread were a romantic comedy, they would be having a big fight the night before the election and just when you think they're about to start battling to the death for real, all of a sudden they're making out.

[RedKing]

I can't decide whether that comparison makes me laugh, or want to hunt you down and leave no body to find.

[Shadowlord]

"It's not like I like you or anything! Baka!" -RedKing, probably

[RedKing]

I don't like anyone, at least when it comes to politics these days.

Watashi wa kuudere ga desu.

[Cruxador]

As an aside, what do the Americans here think of the Constitution? Do you think it should be adjusted as time goes on, or should it be treated as immutable?

That's not an "or". The Constitution contains provisions for amendment. The constitution needs to be followed, because it's the contract by which our federal government exists, and any government which tried to rule the US without the constitution (or, theoretically, some replacement ratified by all the states) would be unlawful.

[Strife26]

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.