>And despite all of this, I am still stuck playing IT boy with my parents’ computers because they refuse to use an operating system that isn’t complete dogshit.
But if the EU cements their citizens' dependency on Google/Apple even further by effectively mandating the use of these devices, it gives Google/Apple more leverage. Imagine if them pulling out of the EU meant nobody could use their digital wallet? What if the use of digital wallets has become more mandatory by then?
Really? Google to this day refuses to do business in China, and Apple at this very moment excludes the EU from multiple new iOS 27 features that launch in the rest of the world. And with the current direction the EU is taking (e. g. even more regulation, more economic recession, even fewer competitive tech businesses), I wouldn’t bet on US companies getting "more favorable" towards the EU.
Looking forward to the Apple quarterly earnings call where Tim Cook (or soon the new guy) explains why they decided to let go of the EU, leading to a 30% fall in revenue and net profit. I'm sure investors will be delighted.
...and the iOS 27 features are not anything actually important, while China never was an established market for Google since 2009. Things have changed.
The lawsuits, sadly, won't matter. "Security" (or, rather, totalitarian control!) is more important than the 1% of nerds who care enough to tinker with their phone.
People keep framing these sorts of debates in terms of tinkering.
It's about ownership, not tinkering. It's about preventing megacorporations from having the last word about how government services can function and how people can interact with them.
But it's how the people outside of our circles see it. We tinker with our devices, which is not understandable to them - their phone just works, why would they change anything about it?
People keep talking about it that way inside our circles, and if we do that here, we will surely fail to do better with a broader audience.
Last year's example of ICEBlock makes the freedom/tinkering distinction clear to most people. ICEBlock was an iOS-only app for tracking immigration raids in the USA and alerting users when they're nearby. Apple caved to government pressure and banned it. Because iOS users don't have the freedom to install apps from other sources, that's the last word; the app is effectively dead.
I've found most people understand pretty well why that sort of thing is a problem even if it did not affect them.
It's not 1% here though... Graphene has 300k users worldwide. There's 8 million absolutely illiterate and 150 million functionally illiterate people in Europe for comparison on scale here.
> Guidance tells us the average reading age in the North East is lower than the national average at between 9 to 11 years. To put that into context The Guardian Newspaper has a reading age of 14 and the Sun Newspaper has a reading age of 8.
Health literacy specifically is a major problem in healthcare
> 1 in 4 (26.7% / 931,000 people) adults in Scotland experience challenges due to their lack of literacy skills.
I find that page somewhat ironic as they claim 18% is one in six, but 17.4% is one in five. Seems numeracy is as big a challenge.
The US is no better according to wikipedia
> In 2023, 28% of adults scored at or below Level 1, 29% at Level 2, and 44% at Level 3 or above
> Adults scoring below Level 1 can comprehend simple sentences and short paragraphs with minimal structure but will struggle with multi-step instructions or complex sentences
> Adults scoring at Level 3 or above are considered "proficient at working with information and ideas in texts
"functionally illiterate" means that while you can read your native language, you will not correctly understand what you have just read.
Rates seem to vary state by state, from as low as 8% (denmark) to 43% (romania).
It's also not a clearly defined target, since it would be better to have rates based on the reading comprehension of the average school at year X or something similar.
I'm curious about this definition, just because it's not something I've ever considered before and googling seems to muddy the water even more.
Is it "functionally illiterate" if you can read the language aloud and not understand it, if you also wouldn't have understood the same thing spoken to you? That seems like it's about comprehension ability, not literacy.
Although one thing that just occurred to me is that if your reading level is low, you might be using all your cognition on reading so that you don't have spare capacity to understand as well - that's frequently the case for me with e.g. Chinese where I can read an entire passage out and then the teacher asks what the passage was about and I'm just thinking "I dunno, I wasn't thinking about that but I think I understood everything".
And that's definitely a different problem to being able to sound out the words, but just having no idea what those words mean, whether you read them or heard them.
And does it have to be your native language, or in any language? Not trying to nitpick, it just feels like the phrase can be usefully applied to a foreign language too.
posters upthread are talking about comprehension and value systems, not literacy.
"functionally illiterate" is the brush that one paints with when describing people of opposing political viewpoint or lower socioeconomic status, for example.
Why are you surprised? Europe has 700 million people. Think of the average construction worker you know, do you think they could read and correctly summarize any moderately complex article? Think an article about inflation or evolution or heat pumps or investment funds, etc.
Fairly sure that in most countries the average person reads less than 1 book per year, so half of the population reads less than that. I know people who haven't read a book since highschool, when they were forced to.
The Average Briton allegedly reads 15 books per year. I assume its self reported and poorly sampled. Otherwise its very hard to believe (and variance between countries seems way too high) but stats like this (especially more subjective ones like functional literacy) are usually not very useful on their own.
First, GrapheneOS supports remote attestation. So if they want their security, they can have it. Second, the current focus of the EU on sovereignty is a window of opportunity and there are better opportunities to fight this than two years ago.
...attendance? I landed a spot in likely the best economics uni in Poland while having 52% attendance in my final HS year, out of which perhaps 10% of the absence was due to illness.
It all depends on the country and the local rules, which can also change from year to year. Attendence didn't matter much, if at all, in my day, but right now it matters. Extremely so. Student's couldn't, until this year (when this was finally revised) even visit the school nurse without getting a "no attendance", which would count negatively with respect to the mandatory attendance requirement for advancing further. And even for receiving the common stipend.
There is no such operating system.