The ObamaPhone was started by Bush.

You have completely ignored the importance of  Western churches in forwarding education/literacy. For Protestants , believer  bible-reading is a matter of heaven or hell. For Catholics it's a matter of sustaining a literate hierarchy to rule belief. For Deists literacy connects current believers to its Enlightenment mother-ship. So even without a statist/collectivist education system ...  and without a mercantile urge to numeracy ... lots of education  always has and will take place.

Well, school has been sucking the life out of reading for over a century nowadays.

It doesn't help that right-wingers have been forcing schools to ban books such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Frankenstein's Monster, anything dealing with slavery or how Native Americans were treated by Europeans, and yes, 1984.

CNN had an article about parents in Tennessee complaining their kids shouldn't have to read about slavery and how slaves were treated because it makes them feel uncomfortable.

In other words, the people who cry the loudest about participation trophies are crying about little Johnny having to read about how horrible white people can be to others. None of this helps the ongoing issue of Johnny not able to read.

From the blurb:

"cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text."

I wonder if this task is the main point of reading,  rather than a tiny casually addressed subset.  Seems to me reading text is more like inputting a "prompt" to a TRUE AGI meat-machine ... that's we humans. As output  to this  reading "prompt" we generate  self-aware non-algorithmically novel events ... whether text or geometric or  emotional. So yes, I do (sometimes) follow recipes I read from Julia Childs cookbook, but as often I read Euclids parallel-line postulate and immediately think about 4-dim spheres ... which madness prompts me to manufacture a dry-very-dry martini ...

You give excuses, not an explanation for the  ( USA vs Japan ) student performance difference. But .... you know the real reason as do I, and most everyone. But, that reason is political/social/economic poison to progressives/collectivists of all stripes.

You sound envious of a person and company you supposedly hold in disdain. Women usually behave like that ... not men. Better get about your own productive efforts, and leave Zuck to his own failing-but-profitable set of choices.

At this early stage of *.ai mass use, any application of the technology serves a good purpose. Same argument would hold true for writing, steam-engines and fibre-glass.  In a decade or so users of *.ai can/will evolve to more value-oriented tasks. For now ... practice ... practice ... practice ...

As I see it::  Since bitcoyn has no use-value it then must be money. Now the purpose of money is to make  government  tax collection easy; [ better $10 bills than a truck-load of sheep ] .  Can a USA citizen pay his Federal taxes with bitcoyn, or must his  bitcoyns first be exchanged for government-supported currency ?

You say ... projects worth so-many-billion$ . Question is, worth those billions to whom? Not to me or to most citizens. Worth that $130-billion to tax-assessing government? Perhaps. Worth that  bubble to investors? Only if casual computer users are forced to use LLMs ... which seems to be the ongoing ploy. You can smell the septic  forced-usage-meme in posts from *.ai fans right here on SLASHDOT. 

Then again, he didn't issue 'pre-emptive' pardons for his family, friends, crackhead son, etc yet,

The only reason Biden issued those pardons was because Trump was bragging about how he was going to weaponize the DOJ to go after people.

As for the clemencies, that does not absolve the person of the crime they committed. All it does is show mercy on them.

Compare that to all the January 6th terrorists who have been pardoned. And now there's talk of paying them for their troubles. No, not the $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund*. There is still talk of paying these people for their crimes.

* Anti-weaponization is straight out of Orwell. Or the Soviet Union. Take your pick. Apparently imprisoning people who attack police aren't criminals in his eyes.

Yes, Lenovo had this feature. They were called the Yoga.

if expense is the concern, don't buy a mac book

Fixed it for you.

Reminds me of that post (quoting from memory) where a guy says the reason he needs to own a gun is because if his child needs an operation, no one's going to stop him from going to Italy where it's cheaper.

When someone builds a company and new product, they are creating wealth. The companies he owns are the net worth.

The only reason he has these companies is because of socialism. He has received billions in taxpayer money to keep his companies alive.

Side note, the same federal agency doling out taxpayer money to him is the same one he targeted under DOGE.

Double side note, Musk whined about another stimulus package after covid, while taking an unknown amount of money from the U.S. taxapyer during covid despite his company being worth $270 billion at that time.

For a slightly longer version of the amount of money the socialist has taken from the U.S. taxpayer, read on.

Indeed --- ICE is trained-to-purpose. Invading border-jumpers SHOULD feel terror, from the minute they approach USA border, to the second our anti-migrant drone explodes in their face. And surely one can design an anti-personal drone to detect "enablers" & pimps   with EMPATHY toward such narco-Mex mules, and also zero-in on those rabid quislings.