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

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.

You might wake up to the smell of bacon only to find a cop installing a key logger dongle on your DragonflyBSD machine.

Weird! How could this happen. All we did was freeze or remove federal spending for education in every decade since 1980. And suddenly we're behind after 45 years. I wonder why feeding colleges and universities thousands of unprepared students should have such a negative impact on our higher education and research programs. Well, we better tighten up our borders and stop accepting immigrants into our universities just to be sure...

The trouble with black and white is sometimes you miss the magnitude of difference.

Little outfit called Piepeople Consulting.

Normally the agency that is most appropriate for carrying out regulation of AI commerce, the FTC, would not be under any obligation to follow an executive order. But Andrew Ferguson will almost certainly go along with whatever Trump wants.

The federal government is nearing the point of being a failed state.

I was offered FTE from Cisco and when I refused they terminated my contract. The full-time offer was a paycut with worse healthcare than I got through the contracting agency.

Put it up on Steam, just break it up into 72 500GB DLCs.

If Duke's is "the official mayo of the tailgate", then really anyone can make any sort of nonsense statements in marketing. The FTC's truth-in-advertising laws aren't really meaningful anymore, and I don't think they are applied equally to every industry (or at all).

So while the government could limit commercial speech, it also can't impose arbitrary restrictions without cause. There has to be a rationale that walks down the narrow definition that previous courts have defined. e.g. is it illegal, misleading (this is where we assume the case is), or does the government has good cause (public good, etc).

Being forced to disclose information is considered a more extreme restriction than being prohibited from stating something false. Lies aren't as easily protected as free speech as the truth, but in practice it's allowed as an opinion or if the receiver wouldn't take it literally (best in the world, top quality, etc). But compulsory speech has to have good cause and I think we'll see challenges when companies get annoyed by these new restrictions. And we do have mandatory disclosures for things like pharmaceutical ads (which shouldn't even exist). But I doubt that our courts will see AI as a threat to public good on the same scale as drugs, tobacco, and alcohol are (big mistake, IMO). And perhaps I'm cynical, but under the current regime I would bet that we'd see the courts blocking birth control ads before letting NY keep their AI disclosure laws.

The civil lawsuits will be flying though. Every time someone's shitty LLM uses the likeness of an actor's appearance or voice for some stupid ad, we can expect some lawyers to get involved. And that's regardless of whatever state laws might be around. If I were Robert De Niro or Taylor Swift, I wouldn't care if an ad says "this is AI" on it, I'd freaking sue if an ad looked like me or sounded like me.

I agree discussing solutions would be preferable. But there can be catharsis in complaining.

My mentor worked as a contractor and Microsoft didn't have a lot of cash on hand to pay him and offered to pay him half in cash and half in stock, this was back in the mid-1980's. He took the cash of course.

There is too much money at stake, and it seems like a lazy free speech argument would go over well if it made its way to SCOTUS.