Content gets more engagement as it gets closer to the "policy line" of getting banned, and in a competitive information environment (an engagement maximizing algorithm) you end up with a lot of content close to the border of what's allowed.

Since then, Google and Apple products have become just as bad as Microsoft's. I think this is because the industry has moved towards an oligopoly where no one is really challenging the big players anymore, just like Microsoft in the late 1990s. The big companies compete with each other, but in oblique ways that go after revenue not users.

Probably worth Googling something like [men who don't have social media] to think what women think about this, it's more positive than you might think :)

There's a joke inside Google that Google infra makes easy things hard and impossible things possible.

But upgrading technology requires government administrative capacity. That's generally cheaper than outsourcing technology development to third parties, but does require a commitment to try to understand the thing you're managing.

Politicians don't hire competent administrators because they believe that building a solution yourself and buying a solution from a contractor are basically equivalent, which anyone on this website can tell you is not true. This is an easier problem to solve than most think, but it's not trivial. And it's really hard when you have clowns like Elon Musk purposefully destroying institutional knowledge for no good reason.

I'm not saying that's a good thing. We're a very rich country and we should do better.

But the US also has a lot of systematic problems that peer countries don't, like child poverty, that are likely a bigger cause of subpar test scores than bad schools.

We spend lots of money on schools in the US and generally get pretty good outcomes. Our math scores leave something to be desired, but average reading scores are better than peer countries. There are plenty of exceptions, especially in poor neighborhoods, and chronic absenteeism is a real problem, but it's worth keeping sight of the fact that the vast majority of American schools are quite good.

Some examples:

* PISA scores: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/OECD_2022_PISA_Results_Comparing%2...

* PIRLS/TIMMS scores: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=1

BigQuery has two completely separate pricing models: on-demand, and slot-based. The two models bill on completely separate things:

* On-demand pricing bills per GB of data processed by your query.

* Slot-based (or editions) pricing allocates your project a number of CPU/memory slots, and you pay per CPU-second.

You can find the costs each query would have by looking at the total_bytes_billed and total_slot_ms columns in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.JOBS_BY_ORGANIZATION table, and multiplying those values by the slot-ms cost (total_slot_ms * 0.01111) and the bytes-billed cost (total_bytes_billed * 0.0000059). Then you can go through your queries and allocate them to either on-demand or slot-based pricing, depending on which is cheaper.

Usually slot-based is cheaper, but queries that do a lot of internal joins can have really huge CPU costs but cost very little in on-demand if they're not reading a lot of bytes.

Somewhat annoyingly, these billing models are configured at a per-project level; you can't switch between the two of them in a single project. Fortunately, you can query tables from other projects easily.