instead of "nearly 56"? K.I.S.S.

is what they really want.

Adjusted for inflation, the federal government simply spend less on education than we used to (ref1). And that doesn't even account for the fact that the population has grown.

Not that per student spending is the only or best metric to measure education. You could look at college graduation rates, in 1980 it's 16.2% and by 2020 it's 37.5%, so by that metric we're doing very well. (sorry, Statisa won't provide me the source unless I pay the money. I had a hard time finding the 1980 graduation rates)

Looking at the statistic of "Attained Tertiary Education" on wikipedia, which convenient has linked reference.
    USA 43.1% (ref2)
    China 16.1% (ref3)

From that point of view, the USA is winning. Right?
Not really, it's also a bad metric (I chose it intentionally). Take into account China's long-term strategy, which is no open secret. We saw a dramatic increase in the influx of Chinese students into American Universities, becoming the dominate source of international students for US schools. And now we see their numbers going back down, after Chinese Universities were built and expanded over the years. We would of course expect a shift, with cheaper and improved schools in China reducing the number of foreign students applying to US schools.

Long-term what does this even mean?
It means China has a plan and they have been executing on that plan for decades.

What's the US's plan?

*ref1: Education Spending Declined During 80’s, Report Says
*ref2: S1501 - Educational Attainment
*ref3: 4-4 Population aged 25 and over by region, sex, and educational attainment

Congrats on provoking so much vacuous ire?

Not disagreeing with you on the substance, but seems increasingly pointless to me to worry about it. Not just out of my pay grade, but these days all of the crucial decisions are being made by selfish a-holes for stupid and shortsighted reasons. Can't even imagine why they are so concerned about dying with the most toys, but...

Mod parent up? Deserves more visibility than -1, even though I disagree about Liu Cixin. Good, but I wouldn't rate him that highly. Really hard to pick a favorite... Possibly Iain M Banks? The Culture is such an optimistic view of the future, notwithstanding all the gruesome deaths?

But mostly I've been disappointed by most of the current SF authors. Too much rehashing of old themes... Currently reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Pretty goo, but again I wouldn't rate it at the top.

These years I'm losing faith in the value of catharsis. So what even if it makes someone feel better? Too many crucial decisions are being made by selfish a-holes for stupid shortsighted reasons.

Addressed in my other reply on the branch that started out more politely. But the short summary is that most of the honest businesses are basically using tested business models and in those cases the google is usually in a privileged position to confirm the general conformance to the claim.

I've actually written about this topic in the past, but my pie-in-the-sky vision is a two part tab that wannabe downloaders could look at. The top part would be the claims of the developer. Perhaps going beyond the money to motivations. The lower part would be under the google's control and would most often say "Yes, we have evidence to support the above claims" or "This business model is out of our scope and we know nothing". Maybe the google response will go farther in some cases, something like "This business model seems questionable and we caution you about using this app and want to remind you that we are not liable if you do it anyway."

New and improved! Now with 21st century anarcho-capitalism in every bite.

Then why should anyone put the effort in to watching it?
That's the problem with AI slop. You cut humans out of one end of the equation but don't realize that also is going to remove humans for the other end.

The media executives of the world must think we're all pretty stupid if they think that your average consumer is OK with ever decreasing quality of content. It gets to a point where watching grass grow is more entertaining than confusing moronic slop, and nobody is getting paid then.

Patreon should have just immediately pulled their app from Apple's store. They're a website. There's no obvious benefit to doing things in an app versus a website.

That said, nothing inherently prevents Apple from maliciously making it harder for Patreon's website to work on iOS. Apple controls the only web browser engine that is allowed to run on the platform.

Actually, it is. Cars don't generally allow third-party apps at all. They're an embedded system. Therefore, those are entirely moot.

Gaming systems are largely limited to games, and to a limited extent, media consumption (e.g. Netflix), which makes them a much more specialized system than an iPhone.

And gaming systems don't need to be a single tool that serves all of a user's needs in the way that a cell phone does. Cell phones are something you carry with you all day, and generally require a monthly cell service contract. So there are significant ongoing costs and hassles associated with having more than one. But most people play games primarily at home, which means it is relatively painless (apart from the initial purchase cost) to have multiple consoles; if a game isn't available on one, they can play it on another. Thus, game console app sales compete across platforms in a way that cellular phone app sales largely do not.

So while not entirely moot, gaming platforms are still a very different animal from a consumer perspective.

Apple is the only high-volume general-purpose computing platform I can think of that does not freely allow side-loading and third-party app stores. So in many critical ways, Apple stands alone on this one. And that's doubly true if you limit it to mobile platforms.

That said, I do agree that game platforms should not be allowed to be locked down, either. It is just far less important from an antitrust perspective because of fundamental differences in how the devices are used.

U.S. courts could not give two s**ts about worldwide market share. Apple has more than 58% of U.S. market share for cellular phones.

Apple's servers aren't involved at all for in-app purchase payments through third party payment processors. And no sane person would consider such sandboxing to be reasonable for a server that just provides downloads of app binaries, because the server is not doing anything more than loading bytes from disk and sending them out over HTTPS. So that would get smacked down by the courts in a quarter of a second.

Competent lawyers do not play games like that, because they know that doing so is the surest way to incur treble damages for willful violation of court orders.

They, in fact, have 58% of the U.S. cellular phone market, which is more than enough control over the market to regulate them under antitrust law.