Even in the US the only homogeneity is if your education background uses Websters as its standard reference, which I suspect is above 99% of US schools.
The dictionary situation in Canada has historically been less one-sided. Depending on province is the most common dictionary, with Gage being the only truly Canadian dictionary I ever saw growing up. But I suspect OUP Canada is the dominate one now (I haven't been over there in decades).

Years ago, at least in the northern US, metre and meter were both common to see in print. And metre was preferred if ambiguity was possible, which is rarely the case. But hey, I'm from a part of the US that teaches children to sing in French. So perhaps not an ordinary sample of USian lifestyle.

A combination of arrogance and denial will lead to this century being known as the Chinese Century. Western style democracies are unlikely to retain the geopolitical dominance they once enjoyed, and neither the US or EU are prepared culturally or materially for this eventuality.

Memorising a bunch of spelling in order to read some 18th and 19th century documents that are otherwise modern English seems inconvenient, but not as inconvenient as teaching millions of children and English as a second language students a bunch of spelling variations that should otherwise be obsolete.

None of us can read Old English without significant training. And even Middle English (~400-500 years) is troublesome for a layperson without an annotated student book for the text you want to tackle.

I don't agree that the job of dictionary compilers would be any different. Each one attempts to establish their own vision of the English language for their region. And they will continue to do so, perhaps selling a lot more material if we have to transition between new spell (and possibly new alphabet) and old spelling. Most of us that already know the old system would end up buying reference material for the new version.

Mechanical analysis would be easier, not harder. And with LLMs most of the expert systems for this are obsolete precisely because they are inflexible.

The number one reason not to do this is: Interia.
Nobody likes having to learn new things or change the way they've been doing things. If grouping numbers together in multiplication for "common core math" causes a row with parents, imagine if we added some letters for the various forms of TH ? People would lose their minds that they can't sing the Alphabet Song anymore!

Both are inconsistent and irritating, and by preserving spellings through linguistic shifts, they make it essentially impossible to generalize a phonetic system. Add to that the Latin alphabet, even with various digraphs, is insufficient to cover English's phonemes.

And at once instance we'll spell something with a letter we no longer pronounce, out of tradition. And another we'll swap HW in the beginning of all Old English words and start pronouncing them like "white" or "whey". Absolutely ridiculous language.

Underground? You'll have to pump air in there or your staff will die.

And you'll need to send the waste heat somewhere, maybe into the walls but the square-cube law indicates that this is not scalable. A really big data center will need to pump waste heat out through a medium, liquid or gas. Water is the obvious choice. So your underground data center ought to have a hyperboloid cooling tower sitting above it. Seems kind of pointless to have dug that big hole after all that.

Originally I wasn't making a serious argument and more of just a funny quip. But I'll bite:

Per machine licensing, service contracts, certification programs, a large suite of costly add-on applications, different licensing for VMs, licensing limits on number of CPU sockets, etc.

I'm going to guess that a Microsoft-based deployment is going to be quite a bit more costly than OpenBSD. Especially in data center and SOHO server where a relatively barebones OS is going to be able to meet the mission requirements. Like why put your authoritative DNS server on Windows, that's just asking for trouble with added expense.

A very long time ago, I setup a Windows network for a company; it used NFS and RADIUS and a little bit of Samba for the initial login scripts. Doubtful it's the way someone would approach the problem of providing a non-Microsoft way to bring Windows clients into their network, but the tools we had were different back then. (and NFS support was a bit more wide spread)

So why pay more to get less with Microsoft?

I could do with fewer parallels to 1930's Germany

Feudalism seems cool, let's do that but with technology.

I'll rent my apartment from my boss and he can evict me if I work for a competitor. Seems fair, just people making contracts. No government needed, not even when security escorts me off the premises.

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.