Why are the companies legally required to shred the books? That's the most surprising part about this to me. Surely if they bought them second hand they could donate or resell after scanning. I'm wondering if the scanning machines are damaging the books.
You're not allowed to make copies of copyrighted work. Of course this law was made long before the reality of digital books.
The argument for the digital era is that you can make a digital scan and it's not a 'copy' so long as you shred the original and don't attempt to distribute it.
The legal idea behind it is that if you "copy" the book it's bad because now there are two copies and you "stole" from the author, but if you "move" the book to a digital form (and don't copy that outside of your organization), it's fine.
Given that they have to destroy them anyway, they're obviously also going to use the much cheaper destructive scanning (cutting off the spine and using a feed scanner rather than carefully turning page by page).
Carmen Ortiz should have been disbarred over this, it was a shameful episode. Instead she retained her position for years and now is presumably quite wealthy as partner in a prominent Boston law firm.
I had a Customer who bought tons of Gateway PCs. They had a "pasture" cubicle full of foam cows. It was quite a sight.
A friend of mine had a Gateway PC at home (the first Pentium Pro I ever saw-- his stepfather splurged on it). The dog got ahold of the foam cow and tore a leg off, so my friend used markers to draw on "gore". I'll never forget the maimed Gateway cow.
At some point UPS / FedEx became much faster. I recall ordering things in the mid 90s and it taking weeks or months to arrive. That definitely tilted shopping toward retail brick & mortar.
The bombing of the school was horrible, but it was a mistake. I could see essentially the opposite argument: Anthropic should be more involved as to prevent mistakes in the future with better technology. Imagine Claude asking the decision makers at CENTCOM "this looks like a school, are you sure you want this added as a target?"
> The bombing of the school was horrible, but it was a mistake
Please don't say this. It wasn't a mistake.
The very FIRST strike packages of the war are very clearly vetted. If you are involved in military planning, you know this.
They doubled tapped it after seeing people flee inside the save the children.
The goal here was to teach IRGC a lesson and demoralize Iranians, which clearly backfired.
Furthermore, US has been contentiously bombing civilian buildings, bridges, hospitals throughout the war. They have also bombed water desalination plants and other key infrastructure.
You have the US president threatening to use nuclear weapons and end the Persian civilization.
Ignoring the obvious joke about "random incidents" in schools regularly in America, is it not the case that the country with the most capacity to retaliate anywhere in the world would not be "demoralized"? I see the possibility that the effect of such terrorism might be different from place to place.
I find it totally implausible that the president or any subordinates intentionally targeted a school. As I recall it was located next to a military base. A mistake seems more likely.
You don't get to start a completely unprovoked and illegal war of aggression, bomb tons of targets with little care, kill 100 schoolchildren, and then say, "But it was a mistake."
The DoW head sees half of his own country’s population as enemies, Islam as an evil religion of hate, and the work he does as striking down the enemies of God. I heavily doubt that this man gives a single thought to children of muslims.
It's a mistake in the sense that if you go and rob a bank while shooting wildly, you only hit the customers "by mistake." That's not an excuse.
The US is bombing both military and civilian targets, by the way. Trump has been very open about this with his talk about "power-plant day." He considers attacking civilian targets to be a legitimate way of pressuring Iran to surrender.
Hegseth deliberately closed the unit that used to ensure it wont happen. The efforts to avoid civilian causaulities were deemed woke, weak and literally unmanly.
And administration repeatedly threatened to destroy civilian targets.
For US SWE labor, off-shoring was and still is a big contributor. I do think AI is a factor too though. You almost get laughed at asking for headcount now. For junior positions in particular, there are close to zero openings.
AI has grown dramatically in capability since last year as well so I'm not sure 2025 data holds today.
It was difficult getting junior headcount in 2023 as well.
That said, I agree with you that AI capabilities have grown massively, but the only way you aren't burning tokens with marginal RoI is having someone with credible domain experience using Claude Code or Codex hand-in-hand.
Basically, no one wants to spend $200K TC on training a junior who will most likely be using an AI tool already. The math works out more positively at a significantly lower TC.
For me it's mostly dealing with humans and bureaucracy now that takes the most time. Actually kicking off an LLM will often (though not always) get me in the ballpark of the right solution, and then iterating with the LLM from there gets me the rest of the way.
To me it's more about how real the financial strength of the company is versus being propped up on some shady accounting. Not sure if that was the case with Carvana or any of these new IPOs, but personally I have my nest egg in the S&P and don't want sharks abusing the index for their pump and dump exit strategy.
Probably many legally protected professions such as medicine and law will continue to be okay. There's a cap imposed on the number of residency positions that will keep those jobs scarce.
One way it seems different today is that wealth inequality is already quite high in the US. Even if AI delivers massive productivity gains the windfall is only likely to be more concentrated. When manufacturing was outsourced at least median housing wasn't 7x median income.
I'm curious what you mean by prepare, to have savings?
