More to the point, what *is* merit? Even if you knew what it was, why should it matter in the context of elite higher education, where those institutions reject enough students of *every* demographic that would succeed at those schools to fill their freshman classes with nothing but that demographic?

That GAO post seems to be an exercise in irrelevance to me. I don't think I understand why we should care "how long" in time a bill or coin might last, but rather how many transactions they are used in before they are effectively retired from circulation.

For instance, if the Mint issues a $1T coin- or 40 of them I guess- I'm willing to bet they all "last" effectively forever, even though they'll also only be used in exactly one transaction in the next half millennium.

I don't think that's the only thing. When your human capital has become more responsible for your organization's enterprise value, productivity, and opportunities for growth over time, why shouldn't it take more human resources to manage it?

I think this kind of misses the actual problem. "AI slop" is no worse than "human lawyer slop." The underlying issue is that the vast majority of lawyers take a position or come up with an argument and *then* look for cases to support it, quite willingly citing cases that may even be realistically neutral on the question. That, in turn, has perpetuated the idea that there is no value in mere argument without direct precedential support. While I'm well aware of the intended benefits of predictability and consistency, I can't see the point in the typical brief- surely the public doesn't need citation X to consider whether one side of an adversarial argument is more just or fair. If the AI's or human lawyer's actual reasoned argument is good, I feel like that should be enough far more often than it actually is.

Sure, if you wanna go down the road of whether, say, it's constitutionally necessary that St. Cyr apply to actual pre-IIRIRA and -AEDPA convictions rather than just guilty pleas as a form of 212(c) relief from deportation, that is a deep, complicated rabbit hole, and I would be willing to entertain the contention that it should be comprehensively briefed based on dozens of obliquely-related cases. But I don't think it gets us any closer to fairness and justice than asking "If you thought that some guy that pled guilty shouldn't be subject to changes in immigration law, why should the guy that contested his charges instead be out of luck?"

The discussion is about the differences, if any, between the two countries. The incentives would be the same in either case

I don't think that's enough to make up for allocution, least of all when the argument is that the US judges could exercise the same oversight in terms of sentencing but don't. In the US, a defendant affirmatively states, in their own words, in public open court, that they've committed each and every required element of the crime. Even if you assume there's some problem with sentencing in the US, surely those are less relevant than potential problems with guilt. The worst that can happen is a defendant is sentenced to a the maximum sentence for a crime they've committed, whereas in the UK it seems very possible to be fairly sentenced for a crime that you weren't technically guilty of. An American judge, in contrast to the English one, very definitively hears the defendant say "I did it" in enough detail to know there's not some technical innocence.

Besides, in England, you can appeal a sentence based on its undue leniency, something that simply does not exist in the US criminal system.

But what makes the UK plea bargain review more robust that that in the US?

At Harvard? You sure? Not my school, but my first semester physics class was literally otherwise filled with graduates of European national-level physics magnet high schools.

I think the issue is that those drugs cost money, now, for a particular insurance company. Future costs for long-term problems are future shareholders' problem, or potentially someone else's problem entirely. Imagine a child with Type I diabetes- it's laughable to think that anybody paid for the full risks of 80 years of treatment costs when that child was born. You can't even guess who's paying for that care next year or the year after, let alone 64 years down the road.

I'll pass, thanks, except to note that your wall of text is a far cry from what you started with. You don't think there has even been a PhD awarded for confirming Ohm's Law in specific scenarios? But I thought it wasn't open to interpretation...

Not to mention, any reference to a need to agree with your instructor dropped out entirely.

There are what you call opinion degrees at Harvard? Seems like you'd have no way of knowing that unless you held one yourself. Though I guess you're free to call the sky the ceiling if you like.

My own experience suggests no such situation, though there may have been some downgrading of headstrong teenagers who thought their political opinions were just as academically valid as career-long expertise in a given field

Why is that unlikely? Are you alleging that Harvard has not become significantly more selective in the last 20 years?

Brilliant retort there, especially how you quickly dispense with the well-established principle that you can't delegate your essential function with "nuh-uh." To which I respond "yo-huh" I guess.

Buddy, it was you that started calling someone else names because they didn't like your doubled-down insistence on how right you are off the cuff every time. All I said was it wasn't crazy to think that an EO doesn't get anything done. You've since familiarized yourself with some of the actual text and law (remember when you said there was no legislation on this?) and continued to dig deeper into details to bail your ass out because you can't allow yourself to modify or abandon any position, and it just gets more absurd all the time. Like above, where you refer to the "executive+congress policy" in complete blindness to its extremely obvious problem of being a mere statement of the hierarchy of laws PLUS a grant of power to the President with no basis in the foundational legislation. (As an aside, if the APA "doesn't apply," how would that "policy" have any bearing on this anyway?)

After all your spilled electrons and profanity, because you can't stand not to be immediately right on everything, your position boils down to: an informal rulemaking procedure is sufficiently "decid(ing)" to be consistent with statute. Mine is: decide means one must decide. And that you're rude, insecure, jump to conclusions you can't yet and may never be able to support, and fundamentally way less smart than you perceive yourself to be.

I'm definitely winning the day on one of those two things. The other, well, nobody will ever know for sure.

Great, so they set up that committee. I'll ask again: did Congress empower that committee? No. The Board can set up a bake sale, but it doesn't mean the ladies' auxiliary chair gets to run the Congressional canteen. Irrespective of that, the committee took no action, nor did the Board.

It's not that I don't understand your argument, it's that you don't understand enough law to make a coherent and compelling one. Congress did not say "go set up some rules so shit happens automatically," it said "The Board... shall decide." It's as if you've never even heard of the antidelegation principle. Guess that doesn't surprise me given your view of Youngstown is that it's about property seizure. You must have gone to a very interesting law school if they taught it that way or that the case was mentioned in Property rather than Con Law. Where was that again?

Jesus Christ. Did Congress empower that committee? And, more particularly, did that committee actually do anything anyway? No on both counts. At best, they merely discussed it- the chairman "noting" something isn't the same. What's super entertaining here is the notion that you, a known expert on federal administrative law, have been patiently waiting to advise us all on these particulars for days now, just to heighten the suspense I guess. Do you have yet something more to pull out of your ass that continues to fail to show any semblance of the regular exercise of Congressionally-granted power?