I'm skeptical of the claim that these changes to the SAT represent "dumbing down" of the test. The SAT is a standardized test intended to produce a distributional bell curve of results. If you suddenly dumbed down the SAT, you'd have far too many perfect scores and big score cliffs due to the high number of high scores.

It's true that the SAT has been recentered over the years such that a given absolute score isn't necessarily comparable. But a 99th percentile score from 20 years ago should be pretty equivalent to a 99th percentile score today. The only change could be WHO gets a 99th percentile score if the test has shifted to favor some kinds of students over another.

It may be true that these shorter reading passages no longer reward the sustained efforts of reading long-form passages. That could be a problem if we are worried society is losing this ability, but it doesn't mean the test is actually easier unless you had particular skill in long-form reading passages.

I'm a bit skeptical of this story. The Pentagon is in Northern Virginia, which has plenty of highly competitive schools where taking 10+ AP exams is quite normal. What could have happened is that this Pentagon staffer's kid just took the easiest classes in school to cruise to a 4.0. I really doubt there are many high schools (if any) in NoVa that top out at pre-calc.

What if you only want to eat burritos once?

I'm not arguing that eating out is generally cheaper. Obviously, it's substantially cheaper to cook once you amortize bulk costs over time. But I've had situations where that's not possible. For example, if we are staying in an AirBnb and can't take perishables with us.

I believe you if you are making 5+ burritos. But just one?

You need: meat, tortillas, cheese, beans, rice, lettuce, salsa, onions, tomatoes, cilantro/seasonings. At my local grocery store, you are looking at $7 for a package of chicken, $3 for a package of tortillas, $3 for cheese, $1 for beans, $2 for a small bag of rice, $2 for the smallest package of lettuce, $1 for an onion, $4 for a jar of salsa, $1 for a tomato, and $3-4 for cilantro and other seasonings purchased in the smallest available quantity. That's over $25 for everything you need to make a burrito.

At Chipotle, burritos run $9 each.

There's a massive difference between a formal sit-down restaurant with wine and eating takeout.

If you compare a couple Chipotle burritos to buying tortillas, lettuce, beans, meat, cheese, salsa, etc. separately the Chipotle burrito probably comes out ahead unless you can use the ingredients to make quite a few burritos. If you are just making 2-3, Chipotle is probably cheaper.

I'm not sure that's totally true. A lot of grocery profits are going to be driven by higher-margin luxury items. I bet they make a lot more profit on a lobster than a sack of potatoes. Plus, groceries are going to be hit by tariffs that will squeeze their margins.

Probably not directly causal, but the closest grocery store to me (part of major chain) just announced it will close at the end of the month.

You have it backwards. Traveling to the U.S. is now cheaper for Europeans due to the exchange rate. In January, your Euro bought $1.03. Today, your Euro buys $1.16.

Japan is 10-20 years ahead of the U.S. in terms of the population pyramid. It hasn't created social unrest. It's more social stagnation. Fewer ambitious young people pushing new ideas and starting new companies in favor of stodgy old companies that have trouble keeping up. Many of the elderly continue to work way past traditional retirement age.

They increased the price and decreased the benefits of membership (have to pay for ad-free streaming). Plus, they've more or less hit the saturation point. No wonder growth has stalled.

Oh, I know full well. I'm an in-house lawyer for a large company, which means part of my job is to squeeze law firms. We are generally happy to pay for deep expertise, but most of the law firms make their money by churning and burning the hours of junior lawyers who don't know much. The problem with AI is how do you create those experts if you can't train junior folks?

Not sure what types of matters you are referring to with your pro se advocacy. Very rare for an individual to have 10 different discrete controversies of the same nature. I imagine you have some very specialized legal issues at play there. If they are "caving" instead of losing at trial, then they likely had clients who directed them to cave and/or advised their clients to do so. They might talk a big game to you because you are acting as opposing counsel, not because they necessarily think they can win the case if it were to go to trial.

By the way - the famous "kill all the lawyers" quote from Henry VI is typically misunderstood when taken out of context. They are not killing the lawyers because lawyers are bad, the speaker (named Dick the Butcher) is killing the lawyers because they want to get away with stuff!

The tax-specific LLM implementations I've used will annotate and hotlink to actual statutes/cases from an associated research database. I believe they prevent from hallucinating by all limiting cites to what it can find in the database.

I agree that LLMs will increase productivity quite a bit and will render lower-quality practitioners redundant and will make the remaining ones far more efficient. I can't tell you how many hours of my life I have wasted looking for standard contract language that I know is found in some precedent document. A well-implemented AI tool could simply provide a menu of options in response to a query like "Please provide language for a deficit restoration obligation clause for a partnership agreement." Even a general-purpose LLM like Chat GPT can already do that- I just need it to work from databases of established precedent I can actually link to and verify the providence of.

As to "kicking the hell out of members of the bar." Keep in mind that 1) like all professions, some lawyers are terrible, 2) even the best lawyer will lose (and should lose) a case if the law/facts are against them. That said, I've come across a lot of very smart but non-legal educated folks who believe themselves to be much better at understanding law than they actually are. It tends to be a particular problem with engineers precisely because they do tend to be smart and able to figure things out on their own.

I am a tax attorney and I have worked with KPMG quite a bit. I've never heard of a two-week timeline as a "traditional" timeline for providing tax guidance. The limiting factor in tax tends to be the development of the facts (usually of an in-progress business deal).

I've also worked with some tax-specific AI tools (not KPMGs). The one I use now uses Chat GPT as a backend. It is useful, but the problem is that it can still get questions completely wrong, so you have to check closely and still read all of the source material it cites. Regular Chat GPT will not consistently cite the law it relies on, so is close to useless.

The main barrier to AI in tax is that most businesses will not and cannot give the AI access to its ERP system to train with. Most systems are still too vulnerable to data leakage. The nightmare scenario is that a third party could get the LLM to spit out proprietary non-public financial information. That barrier isn't insurmountable, but current solutions do not provide sufficient comfort.

There may come a day when most tax compliance is done by AI, but I think we are still some years off before it becomes mainstream. Tax planning will be human- driven for the foreseeable future because pulling the trigger on a particular plan is fundamentally a human judgment call. However, AI would allow the human to dispense with a lot of work and compare different planning options quickly.

Seatguru can be outdated and doesn't account for aircraft swaps. Sometimes airlines can change the airplane you are flying on a day or two out, which will mean a change in the seat layout. You might have a window seat with a window on a A321, and then they swap with a Boeing and you are SOL.

Turo is the same as any other rental company in regard to damages and insurance. You either rely on your existing insurance or you spend more for the extra insurance from Turo.

One thing they do that's helpful is have you take photos all over the car with the app at check-in, unlike a traditional rental company where you can take photos and maybe tell the person at the gate about it but no guarantee the documentation will be accepted and properly noted.

Some renters are just renting their personal cars, but like Airbnb, some people make it their business.

There's something to previous posters who talk about the aim towards international audiences reducing the number of comedies. But there's another issue at play, and that is streaming.

Big superhero-type movies that have a lot of room for big explosions and other special FX bring action that makes people want to come to actual movie theaters to watch. But most comedies don't have that. As a result, people have little reason to go to the actual theater when they want to see a comedy. They watch at home.

Streaming services like Netflix that don't need box office receipts have taken advantage of this. There's a reason why they have focused a lot of their efforts on comedies. For stand-up comics, having a "Netflix special" has become the mark of success. They have a huge deal with Adam Sandler, who has made quite a few movies for the platform. It works great for them because you can make a lot of popular content fairly cheaply when you do comedies.

But for the big studios, the massive amount of comedy content on Netflix means anything they come out with is a comparatively hard sell.