Then I’m even more confused what the problem is. Do you have so much laundry that you keep both machines perpetually running in parallel? I can only imagine that happening if you have a household of 8+ people.
On the other hand, if you want unbiased, quasi-scientific tests, who is gonna pay for it?
It is actually in your best interest if YOU are paying for it, since then you are the customer and not the product.
That said, it isn’t even that expensive. When I buy a washing machine, I just buy the Warentest article on washing machines first which makes the overall purchase, like, 0.5% more expensive.
I think the problem for people who are not in Germany is that manufacturers often release different versions for each market. So, for example, you might find that >50% of the models being tested by Stiftung Warentest exist only in Germany or other parts of Western Europe.
What always confuses me about the „search has gotten so bad“ mentality is that it is often based on anecdotal evidence at best, and anecdotal recollection at worst.
Like, sure, I have the impression that search got worse over the last years, but .. has it really? How could you tell?
And, honestly, this should be a verifiable claim; you can just try the top N search terms from Google trends or whatever and see how they perform. It should be easy to make a benchmark, and yet no one (who complains about this issue) ever bothers to make one.
Dan at least started to provide actual evidence and criteria by which he would score results, but even he only looked at 5 examples. Which really is a small sample size to make any general claims.
So I am left to wonder why there are so many posts about the sentiment that search got worse without anyone ever verifying that claim.
I think the point he's trying to make that the search results page from the mainstream search engines are a minefield of scams that a regular person would have difficulty navigating safely.
If he was looking at relevance, yours would be a solid point, but since most of the emphasis is on harm, a smaller sample works. Like "we found used needles in 3 out of 5 playgrounds" doesn't typically garner requests for p-values and error bars.
I think this is a good illustration of my frustration with this discussion: I don't think search has gotten bad, I think the web has gotten bad. It's weird to even conceptualize it as a big graph of useful hypertext documents. That's just wikipedia. The broader web is this much noisier and dubious thing now.
That's bad for google though! Their model is very much predicated on the web having a lot of signal that they can find within the noise. But if it just ... doesn't actually have much signal, then what?
The web has gotten bad because of what big search engines have encouraged. If they stopped incentivizing publishing complete garbage (by ruthlessly delisting low quality sites regardless of their ad quantity, etc) then maybe we'd see a resurgence of good content.
I don't think so. I think it's the inevitable outcome of giving all of humanity the ability to broadcast without curation.
Or maybe we're saying essentially the same thing, but you think search engines should be doing that curation. But that was never my conception of what search engines are for.
I think we are indeed saying the same thing. However, I would like search engines to do some curation -- specifically, to remove results that deliver malware, are clones of other sites, and are just entirely content free (eg Microsoft's forums).
I'll give Google credit: I haven't seen gitmemory or SO clones in a while. It took a few years but they seem to have dealt with them.
I disagree, the bad sites people are talking about are spam, not bad personal takes. They are written by people being paid to churn out content. This is now being done with AI. This is a result of search engines listing them.
The web is bad because it is both popular and commercial. Every now and then I fantasize that just finding a sufficiently user-hostile corner would suffice to recreate the early internet experience of an online world nearly exclusively populated by anticommercial geeks.
But there's still plenty of signal. It isn't as if there are no working YouTube downloaders, or factually correct explanations of how transistors work. It's just that search engines don't know how to (or don't care enough about) disambiguating these good results from the mountains of spam or malware.
I think that both of you are correct. The internet has much more "noise" than in the past (partially due to websites gaming SEO to show up higher in Google's search results). As a result, Google's algorithm returns more "noise" per query now than it used to. It is a less effective filter through the noise.
Imagine Google were like a water filter you install on your kitchen faucet to filter out unwanted chemicals from your drinking water. If as the years progress your municipal tap water starts to contain a higher baseline of unwanted chemicals, and as a result the filter begins to let through more chemicals than it did before, you'd consider your filter pretty cruddy for its use case. At the bare minimum you'd call it outdated. That is what is happening to Google search
On the one hand, I'm not sure the data corroborates that. If this is a web problem and not a search engine problem, then I'd expect every search engine to have the same pattern of scam results.
I'd also argue that finding relevant results among a sea of irrelevant results is the primary function of a search engine. This was as true in 1998 as it is today. In fact, it was Google's "killer feature", unlike Altavista and the likes it showed you far more relevant results.
Relevant is a difficult concept to agree on. In 1998 it was more about X != Y, that is being shown legit pages that just were not the correct topic.
These days the results are apt to be the correct topic, but instead optimized for some other metric than what the user wants. For example downloading malware or showing as many crypto ads as possible.
I don't expect every search engine to have the same scam results. Scammers target individual search engines with particular methodologies. Google does a lot of work to prevent crap on their engines, the issue is the scammers in total do far more.
If the web is being polluted by a nefarious search engine provider that is excluding the polluted pages from their algorithm, you wouldn't see the same pattern across search engines
Not saying or even suggesting that's happening, but the logic isn't airtight
> I think the point he's trying to make that the search results page from the mainstream search engines are a minefield of scams that a regular person would have difficulty navigating safely.
Yes, and he makes the point well. It also means if you are part of the 0.49% of people who use Firefox on Android, he isn't talking about your experience. I find Firefox mobile remaining at 0.49% utterly inexplicable, which I guess just goes to show how out of touch with the mainstream I (and I assume most other people here) are.
It's not just ad blockers. My first attempt at a tyre width query got relevant results, mostly because "tyre grip" looked so bad as a search term so I used "traction" instead. In the mean time, friends of my age (60's) can't get an internet search for public toilets to return results they can understand. When I try to help them, their eyes glaze over in a short while and they wave me away in frustration. These mind games with google hold no interest for them.
I am regularly bitten with one thing he mentions: finding old results is hard, and getting harder. It makes it really hard to find historical trends ("am I wrong about what it was like back then?") really difficult.
I agree we can say "this is a minefield of scams" without doing a comparison.
There still is a question about when it got bad--I think Dan mentions 2016 as a point of comparison, and there were plenty of scams back then, so you might wonder whether the days when a query wouldn't return many scams.
If you go back far enough, then there wasn't the same kind of SEO, and Internet scams were much smaller/less organized, but that's a long time ago.
I think the automation tools for scams are what the major change is. In the distant past it was humans doing this, now I'm guessing there are a few larger businesses and likely nation states that have a point and click interface that removes 99% of the past work.
1) The step where you evaluate "how they perform" is necessarily subjective.
2) you could design a study and recruit participants but that isn't something a blogger is going to do.
3) He does link to polls where people agree with the idea the result have gotten worse. Yeah, there are sampling problems with a poll, but its better than nothing.
In this case especially, the writer is answering the question: "Whose results are best according to my tastes?"
What always confuses me about the „search has gotten so bad“ mentality is that it is often based on anecdotal evidence at best, and anecdotal recollection at worst.
I can't speak for anybody else, just trying to find stuff online, not writing a treatise about it or writing my own engine to outcompete Google. It's been asked many times here over the years and the answer was always explanations, never solutions.
Shittification does not happen overnight, but along many years. It started with Google deciding that some search terms weren't so popular: "did you mean...?" (forcing a second click to do what you intended to do in the first place) and went downhill when qualifiers to override that crap got ignored.
For me enough was enough when I realized that a simple query with three words, chosen carefully to point to the desired page, gave thousands of results, none of them relevant. YMMV.
Dan approached the problem from a qualitative perspective. Perhaps if more people took this approach over quantitative maximalism we would actually have products that don’t drive us fucking insane.
All that matters is the overwhelming sentiment that search has gotten worse, not the same fucking spreadsheet that got us here in the first place!
To do this you would need to have a comprehensive definition of "quality", and that's anything but easy, and it will be at least partly subjective. It's also hard to include omissions in your definition of "quality" (and again, what should or should not be omitted is subjective as well).
For example, let's say I search for "Gaza"; on one extreme end some engines might only focus on recent events, whereas others may ignore recent events and includes only general information. Is one higher "quality" than the other? Not really – it depends what you're looking for innit?
All you can really do is make a subjective list of things you find important and rate things according to that, and this is basically just the same thing as an anecdotal account but with extra steps.
Some things are easily quantifiable, but very few. Such as the number of ads per search. Back in the day google had at most 1 and it was visibly distinct from the rest of the links.
Otherwise, yeah, maybe search didn't degrade but the internet got more spammy. Or maybe users just got wiser and can see through the smoke screen better. Who knows...
Doesn't change the fact that today one has to know how to filter through pages of generic results made by low effort content farms. Results that are of dubious validity, which at best simply waste your time. Or through clones of other websites (i.e. Stackoverflow clones).
Search engines can choose to help with that (kagi certainly puts in the effort and I love it for that), or they can ignore the problem and milk you for ad clicks.
> Dan at least started to provide actual evidence and criteria by which he would score results, but even he only looked at 5 examples. Which really is a small sample size to make any general claims.
US NIST, in their annual TREC evaluation of search systems
in the scientific/academic world, use sets of 25 or 50 queries
(confusingly called "topics" in the jargon).
For each, a mandated data collection is searched by retired
intelligence analysts to find (almost) all relevant result,
which are represented by document ID in general search and by a regular expression that matches the relevant answer for question answering (when that was evaluated, 1998-2006).
Such an approach is expensive but has the advantage of being reusable.
So you're confused why other people aren't doing research for you and when they do provide some evidence, you dismiss it because it's not a large-scale scientific inquiry into search quality? Get frickin a grip.
Every time I encounter an egregious poor result in DDG I document it with images. I have a directory of them over the last few years. However I encounter so many now, while when I first began using DDG just a couple years prior to that it was less of an issue (and I fully switched at the time). So yeah, I don't have before/after comparisons but it's a little more solid than just 'I feel the results are worse' being characterized here.
There are particular search parameters that DDG changed the behavior of, including exclusion and double quoting, which are now, according to even their own docs, more a hint of the direction results should go rather than any explicit/literal command (ime these virtually never work, which was a motivation for documenting failures, and they actually removed them from their docs temporarily at one point earlier this year).
> So I am left to wonder why there are so many posts about the sentiment that search got worse without anyone ever verifying that claim.
I suspect it has gotten worse, so posts complaining about it resonate. But, it is not really a huge problem, and anyway it isn’t as if there’s much I can do about it, so I’m not going to bother collecting statistically valid data.
I think this is generally true about a lot of things. We should be OK with admitting that we aren’t all that data-driven and lots of our beliefs are based on anecdotes bouncing around in conversations. Lots of things are not really very important. And IMO we should better signal that our preferences and opinions aren’t facts; far too many people mix up the two from what I’ve seen.
When it comes to human psychology what we believe tends to be more important than what is when it comes to future predictions of our actions. If people think search sucks then it's likely they'll use less of it in the future and it opens up companies like Google for disruption.
Even without looking at the subjective quality of search results, the sheer user hostility of the design of the Google search results page is an obvious, objective instance of how search has enshittified.
That is, in the early days, Google used to highlight that "search position couldn't be gamed/bought" as one of their primary differentiators, ads were clearly displayed with a distinct yellow background, and there weren't that many ads. Nowadays, when I do any remotely commercial search the entire first page and a half at least on mobile is ads, and the only thing that differentiates ads from organic results is a tiny piece of "Sponsored" text.
Yes it has and for a certain class of queries it's not even open for debate, because Google themselves have stated they deliberately made it worse. And they really did, it's very noticeable.
This class of queries is for anything related to any perspective deemed "non authoritative". Try to find information that contradicts the US Government on medical questions, for example, and even when you know what page you're looking for you won't be able to find it except via the most specific forcing e.g. exact quoted substrings.
Likewise, try finding stories that are mostly covered by Breitbart on Google and you won't be able to. They suppress conservative news sites to stop them ranking.
15 years ago Google wasn't doing that. It would usually return what you were looking for regardless of topic. There are now many topics - which specifically is a secret - on which the result quality is deliberately trashed because they'd prefer to show you the wrong results in an attempt to change your mind about something, than the results you actually asked for.
Probably for the same reason that there are so many more posts about anything that make claims than that explore evidence systematically, especially when the people making the posts stand to gain nothing by spending their time that way.
I encounter claims that "protobuf is faster than json" pretty regularly but it seems like nobody has actually benchmarked this. Typical protobuf decoder benchmarks say that protobuf decodes ~5x slower than json, and I don't think it's ~5x smaller for the same document, but I'm also not dedicating my weekend to convincing other people about this.
The problem with benchmarking that claim is there's no one true "json decoder" that everyone uses. You choose one based on your language -- JSON.stringify if you're using JS, serde_json if you're using Rust, etc.
So what people are actually saying is, a typical protobuf implementation decodes faster than a typical JSON implementation for a typical serialized object -- and that's true in my experience.
Tying this back into the thread topic of search engine results, I googled "protobuf json benchmark" and the first result is this Golang benchmark which seems relevant. https://shijuvar.medium.com/benchmarking-protocol-buffers-js... Results for specific languages like "rust protobuf json benchmark" also look nice and relevant, but I'm not gonna click on all these links to verify.
In my experience programming searches tend to get much better results than other types of searches, so I think the article's claim still holds.
I agree. You wouldn't use encoding/json or serde-json if you had to deserialize a lot of json and you cared about latency, throughput, or power costs. A typical protobuf decoder would be better.
A proper extractor fan mitigates the problem entirely.
For a lot of cooking, gas is simply superior in almost every way to induction or electric. Induction has a few advantages in certain situations, but not many - gas is more flexible.
Now there is something to be said about people using insufficient extraction or not maintaining their ventilation/extraction systems for sure, or grossly underspeccing them so that they aren’t worth a shit.
A simple Airthings or Awair air quality monitor shows you the VOC rate in the home and it is easy to see how a fan keeps the levels at zero or even just opening a window drops the pollutant rate to almost zero very very quickly after cooking.
It’s a requirement in rentals in Ireland - though the code hasn’t historically been properly enforced.
Our landlady recently had our extractor serviced and checked by a contractor (among other much neglected tasks) as the city council was finally beginning to conduct inspections.
I repair rental homes and most of the homes I work on have a proper fan vented to the outside. These homes I work on are all single family detached homes.
Roasting/charring peppers is one I find much easier to do with a gas stove. A lot of the food I like to cook involves this step - fire roast some peppers, let them steam, remove the charred skin, and so on. Adds a real depth of flavour.
I could break out a blowtorch, or kinda badly do it in an oven (the taste is not the same/as deep as with fire), but the ability to just pop it on the flame for a minute is the best.
I’ve also found that I have much easier time controlling temperature with flame than even the really nice induction stoves, even with a LOT of practice.
Where induction is amazing IMO is delivering a lot of heat fast, so boiling water or getting a pan up to a high temp for searing.
Honestly, my preferred setup if I was building a kitchen would be a hybrid setup - one side gas, the other side induction.
There will never be an end of work, no matter our technological advancements. At least not while we have capitalism, it just goes straight against its core philosophy.
I disagree. You don’t necessarily have to win big cases. You just have to show that you are willing to take them to court, and that alone projects power. The result is that companies are less likely to file dubious mergers, and this is exactly what we want and what is happening:
> You just have to show that you are willing to take them to court
This only deters small firms. If you can afford to fight, it’s currently worth it. The FTC will show up unprepared [1], and you will win. Wall Street loves Lina.
*If* you are taken to court, it’s probably always worth the fight, losing such a trial has massive consequences.
However, in the past, that was an empty threat, the FTC would only take cases to court that they would win 100% - which vastly errs on the side of caution. It also meant that you could basically expect never to be challenged on a merger.
That has changed now. Now, there is a real chance that your mergers and anticompetitive behavior will get examined and THAT is the deterrent. The new FTCs behavior causes ripples long before an actual court case.
There is a difference between „I will never get taken to court“ and „I will probably get taken to court, and then I will probably win but honestly, all bets are off“.
Am I the only one thinking that home schooling is the wrong solution to the underlying problem?
The problem is that the public education sector has been - for years - continuously squeezed dry of any funding. Teachers are quitting left and right, and schools are in a terrible state. Instead of fixing THAT problem, now people homeschool.
Ok; I guess. At least homeschooling is something that the individual can control, public funding not so much.
But it boggles my mind how people can assume, with a straight face, that they are equipped to educate their child alone - something which is normally a profession for which you have to study O(years) (and even then most people aren’t really good at). What gives parents this confidence? And what gives parents the right to squander the future of their children on a whim?
I have two kids, would consider myself very well educated (have a PhD, etc), and I habe absolutely 0 confidence in myself schooling my kids.
Finally, public schooling is obviously an attempt at leveling the playing field between children from different backgrounds. By removing your kid from that, I think it further contributes to the segregation of our society.
The evidence is weak, but currently leans towards "parents can and actually do a better job than the professionals." This includes parents with low incomes, and includes parents with low educational achievement.
You categorize this as contributing to segregation, but I say that it contributes to diversity. Public school is a hugely homogenizing force and the homogeneity it targets is not necessarily good. I think it is good for society to have a set of people who were raised in an environment with fundamentally different experiences and priorities.
Thank you for providing the links, but
I don't buy that. The first link cites three papers:
Almasoud, S., & Fowler, S. R. (2016). The difference in the academic achievements of homeschooled and non-homeschooled students. Home School Researcher, 32(1), 1-4.
Cogan, M. F. (2010). Exploring academic outcomes of homeschooled students. Journal of College Admission, 208, 18-25.
Coleman, R. E. (2014). The homeschool math gap: The data. Coalition for Responsible Home Education.
Two of these are journals are devoted to home education (so personally I'm not assigning much weight to that). The Cogan reference seem legit, but is based on 70 home-schooled students admitted to one specific "medium-sized private university".
Where the hell is all this money going? It's certainly not to teachers, whose salaries have barely changed[1] when adjusted for inflation. Is it going to real estate costs? Technology costs? Administration? What?
Buying and supporting expensive laptops for every kid, with expensive education package subscriptions, all so kids can read a textbook on a screen instead of in a book.
Giving a bad teacher more money won't make them a better teacher. Maybe you can argue that offering more money to teachers will draw in qualified people from other professions, but this kind of solution can't be implemented in a vacuum. The bad teachers are already in the schools and cannot easily be fired because they're protected by politically powerful unions and furthermore, protected by a substantial portion of the public who hold school teachers on a pedestal and will resist any political move to make it easier to fire bad teachers.
Where's all that money going? Surely not to teachers who are chronically underpaid and have 30+ students per class. It's not buying school supplies, which our teachers often have to pay for out of pocket or hold bake sales to fund.
Is it all going to football fields, useless technology spending, and 5 levels of non-teaching administration staff?
For our kids' school, the main thing that jumps out to me compared to when I was a kid is that each class has a paid aide. So there's 1 teacher per 30 or so students, but there's also an aide in there, so 1 adult per 15 students.
I don't know if every school does this. But ours is public and I wouldn't have known this was a thing if my wife didn't volunteer.
Every school that can afford it basically has to, by law. They are there for all the kids on “Individual Education Plans”, or IEPs. The bar to expel a kid from regular classes in school was raised super high, so the schools now have to spend a lot of resources on developing and administering IEPs for kids that are unable to function well in a regular classroom.
I agree that funding isn't necessarily the problem. We live in a wealthy county and have more to spend per pupil. Unfortunately that doesn't translate to higher test scores. The extra dollars go to administrative positions in the central office which may or may not translate to better academic performance.
> But it boggles my mind how people can assume, with a straight face, that they are equipped to educate their child alone - something which is normally a profession for which you have to study O(years) (and even then most people aren’t really good at).
The key assumption here is that the expertise and years of studying translates to desirable outcomes. The large expansion of homeschooling suggesting by the article suggests a great rise in people who no longer believe that the expertise promoted by teaching schools is actually relevant to teach their children.
After all, mass public schooling is only about a century old and default human experience in many ways has always been closer to what we call homeschooling.
>The large expansion of homeschooling suggesting by the article suggests a great rise in people who no longer believe that the expertise promoted by teaching schools is actually relevant to teach their children.
"Believe" is the important word there. Are these people removing children from school because they actually can do a better job, or because the TV told them a school somewhere had a litterbox for a furry student?
> "Believe" is the important word there. Are these people removing children from school because they actually can do a better job, or because the TV told them a school somewhere had a litterbox for a furry student?
Does it matter why they pulled their kid out to homeschool if the outcome is better?
Funding is not the issue. Private schools pay their teachers less and have higher success rates.
Public schools are still teaching in a style suited for the Industrial Revolution. They also are a jobs program, so they can’t change to accommodate students if it hurts the employees.
Private schools have higher success rates because the kids are of a higher socioeconomic class. The teachers don't have to do the job of a social worker/parent. In other words private schools don't need to hire the best teachers, therefore they don't have to pay the best salaries.
So I think you hit the nail on the head for why public schools are generally awful. It’s precisely because they’re public. The public is full of dysfunctional families and homes with severe issues and people with terrible values. The kids bring these problems to school and the school has to spend considerable resources on them. And we’re supposed to want to surround our kids with this?
Unfortunately I know first hand having had to go to these schools until my parents finally realized their worldview was damaging their children.
Saying that, public schools in communities of stable homes with caring parents with good values tend to be just fine. They still have to deal with issues a private school won’t tolerate but they’re mainly functional.
Not really. I'd argue raising a successful child "takes a village" with parents/teachers/community being legs of a stool. If any one of these legs is weak outcomes will be poor and they really aren't interchangeable.
Parents aren't teachers and teachers aren't parents. I'd argue that one of main problems with education right now is the dereliction of duty on the parents part, expecting the schools to pick up the slack - which they really cant' do.
We let our 3 kids choose between homeschool and private school. As a result they tended to bounce back and forth between the systems depending on their priorities. By the time they reached 4th grade I was mostly a coach when they chose homeschooling. I would let them know the things they needed to learn and help them find curriculum. And when they got stuck on something they would come to me for help, but in general they were responsible for themselves. Mostly they would only do schoolwork for 3 hours a day or so.
They had no problems reintegrating into regular school when they chose to do so. Our youngest stayed on the homeschool track the longest (from 7th grade because they got involved in competitive Call of Duty. So they ended up doing the homeschool->community college->GaTech track.
> But it boggles my mind how people can assume, with a straight face, that they are equipped to educate their child alone - something which is normally a profession for which you have to study O(years) (and even then most people aren’t really good at). What gives parents this confidence? And what gives parents the right to squander the future of their children on a whim?
There are awesome resources to educate you kid on just about anything. The real distinguishing attribute on whether a parent can be a good educator is whether their children can spin them up emotionally. If a parent can't stay calm when their child is pushing their buttons homeschooling probably won't work. And then secondarily, a parent should know when they are over their head and need to bring in assistance. Not every parent is equipped to help their children learn calculus and other advanced courses.
How good were you at your profession when you got your bachelor's?
How good were your "average" classmates?
I can teach my (hypothetical) child better than the "average" teaching-degree graduate. You're selling yourself short if you don't think you can, too, with a focused effort.
My friend group is like 20ish elementary school teachers (US). They are all great people, but they are quite variable in competence. Some are very good, and some can't move beyond the basics in Kindergarten.
What I'm saying is, you're placing way too much faith in the teachers.
Last I heard, in Florida, they were accepting "spouses of active duty military" for teaching positions without further qualification because they're so hard up.
Doesn't it? You seem to be suggesting that because a new grad isn't that great at a job, a complete lay person would be able to do it just as well. And anyways, Florida may be a steaming pile of shit, but most teachers in the US have Master's degrees.
Homeschool done right (TM) isn’t you teaching by yourself though. Teach your kids to read well at an early age, get a good math curriculum, and feed them high quality books written by people who know way more about each subject than you do.
Self-learning and reflecting on what you read are two of the most important parts of learning. Too often, schools pay lip service to these ideas, then spoon feed information to students.
At least in my country the homeschooling is ballooning as parents don't want the LGBT stuff and DQST forced on their kids but also don't want to be accussed of being a bigot when they raise issue with it.
I don't have kids so I don't know but I know lots of people with kids and it is concerning enough to them that they homeschooling or pod learn. Even a lesbian couple with adopted and biological children are freaking out about it.
> The problem is that the public education sector has been - for years - continuously squeezed dry of any funding.
Lack of funding isn't always the problem. As jawns mentioned, there's a lot of reasons to remove your kids from public school.
> I have two kids, would consider myself very well educated (have a PhD, etc), and I habe absolutely 0 confidence in myself schooling my kids.
Interesting. I'm surprised you feel this way while acknowledging that most educated teachers "aren't really good at it". Perhaps you aren't qualified to teach your kids, and that's okay. At least you have the self-awareness to know they need help from someone else.
> public schooling is obviously an attempt at leveling the playing field between children from different backgrounds.
Yep. But it can also stifle the growth of overachievers.
> something which is normally a profession for which you have to study O(years) (and even then most people aren’t really good at). What gives parents this confidence? And what gives parents the right to squander the future of their children on a whim?
You have to consider capacity. It is a parent educating 1-2 children vs a teacher educating 30+. So while the teacher has a lot more training on how, a lot of the how is how to do it in bulk.
Would an individual focused on solving any particular problem outperform a PhD trying to solve 30 at once? I don't think that is unreasonable. Someone who hasn't picked up a book on software development yet has a reasonable chance of beating me (professional software developer) if I work on 30 projects at once.
If you have the means, you can also buy a lot of teaching a la carte.
When faced with similar resource and time constraints, teacher is going to win. But the gap in those is huge.
>The problem is that the public education sector has been - for years - continuously squeezed dry of any funding
I'm late and this probably won't be read, but I disagree. There is no strong correlation between funding and public education "success".
The only thing that correlates is parents involvement in education. This isn't something you can realistically spend your way out of. (It's been tried).
If funding is truly the underlying problem, why does Utah have some of the best K-12 outcomes in the country while being dead last in per pupil spending?
Nearly all appliances have a „quick“ mode though if you really need something fast.