> Don’t blame books for being too expensive. Everything else is more expensive, and that’s why you can’t afford books.
College textbook pricing is a function of the aforementioned rate of increase of everything else becoming more expensive, not a function of the cost of books increasing generally. They are, the author argues, decreasing, unless you introduce external distorting factors.
The article is correct that recreational books are below for cumulative CPI. College textbooks on the other hand are at ~ 3 times the rate of general inflation.
Source:
BLS CPI-U (FRED: CPIAUCSL)
BLS "Educational Books and Supplies" (FRED: CUSR0000SEEA, ~767 in Mar 2026, base 1982-84=100)
BLS "Recreational Books" (FRED: CUUR0000SERG02, base Dec 1997=100, recently ~96-100
I also heard tell the illustrated manuscripts market is soaring.
> the author is wrong about textbooks.
The author didn't write an article about college textbooks, he wrote a response to an article about mass market books and affordability.
The forces which have made college textbooks (and college educations in general) unprecedentedly expensive, real though they are, have little to do with this article.
Edit: I re-read my original comment and I probably wasn't clear enough. The external distorting factor is the higher education system absolutely exploding costs of everything to do with higher education, from predatory professors and textbook companies to the rent-seeking and regulatory capture of higher education institutions. College textbooks got incredibly expensive for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with the actual costs associated with making books, which are arguably cheaper than they've ever been.
Only for commodity goods does the cost of production impact the price. As substitutionality lessens, the price more and more approaches the value delivered.
It's beyond guilt-by-platform-use. I just started looking into this today, but the primary dox thread thanks Rossman for information he provided, so I'm not entirely sure about your claim. When Rossman does weigh in on that site he seems fairly unbothered by the fact that people on there are posting every private detail they can unearth of Micay's and calling for Micay's violent murder, at least from what I've seen in my cursory glance.
He's also made highly-viewed videos theatrically (and ridiculously) expressing technically unfounded concerns about the project, laid the blame at Micay's feet, and went on to make verifiably false claims about the project, about himself, about his own relation to it (from everything I can find about it), and appears to have no problem stoking any of it.
I had long appreciated Rossman's work on right-to-repair, but when that video came out I found it pretty beneath his potential. He scored cheap points from his considerably bully pulpit for his own benefit.
It's beyond guilt-by-platform-use. I just started looking into this today, but the primary dox thread thanks Rossman for information he provided, so I'm not entirely sure about your claim. When Rossman does weigh in on that site he seems fairly unbothered by the fact that people on there are posting every private detail they can unearth of Micay's and calling for Micay's violent murder, at least from what I've seen in my cursory glance.
He's also made highly-viewed videos theatrically (and ridiculously) expressing technically unfounded concerns about the project, laid the blame at Micay's feet, and went on to make verifiably false claims about the project, about himself, about his own relation to it (from everything I can find about it), and appears to have no problem stoking any of it.
I had long appreciated Rossman's work on right-to-repair, but when that video came out I found it pretty beneath his potential. He scored cheap points from his considerably bully pulpit for his own benefit.
Reducing that to mere guilt by association hardly captures it.
My observations from when I daily drove iOS (no more) mirror yours: the incredible amount of cruft that would accumulate was astonishing. At one point I had a device that was majority full of system storage and other data. The same was true across family devices, too.
Some years ago I stopped depending on Apple's purchased downloaded movies for long flights, after an instance of having the files downloaded to the device beforehand, but Apple deciding I didn't have the DRM keys to play said files during a long transoceanic flight. I then moved to storing DRM-free movies in VLC, but iOS prioritized keeping system storage and other data cruft around, and wiped VLC's stored files. Talk about paying for an expensive device and media you don't really own.
I'd imagine the metadata picture that could be synthesized from that data could be extensive in some cases. This stuff is hard and I'm sure there are good reasons for caching things, especially on a device positioned to primarily act as a readily available front end for online stores, but I have a hard time believing that Apple's executing it well.
I trust you didn't mean it that way, but it's totally improper to go to speculations about mental health in response to discussions about communication styles and maturity.
While I appreciate the second line and think it's generally the right answer with FOSS projects, your speculation poisons the well.
> > Daniel Micay has a history of absolutely unhinged behavior online
That quotation is from another comment in this discussion. Sadly, it is the sort of personal attack on his mental state that has been commonplace here at HN and elsewhere for a long time. I caution all to avoid such commentary. My long experience in tech r&d has firmly convinced me that mental health and wellness challenges are widespread, and should not be weaponized. I hope that clarifies my comment for you.
Even here, the same people come out of the woodwork every single time to hit the same bad-faith talking points. I've got a lot of respect for the whole team for doing what they do despite all of it.
I spent several minutes [1] looking into it earlier today because I'd mostly ignored it in the past, but his claims appear completely valid, and if anything, stop short of painting a sufficient picture of how badly he's harassed. I won't link to any of it here, but it took me one query and reading one page worth of it to think Micay is the most reasonable actor in the story. (Yes, I read more thereafter.)
When you have years-long public forum dox threads dedicated to doxing you with people openly calling for your physical harm, all with some non-zero degree of complicity and/or support by a YouTuber with millions of subscribers, let us know if it still seems like paranoia to you.
You should note that improperly using Qubes OS, creating a New Identity inside of Tor Browser, even in a disposable Whonix workstation VM, would leave one vulnerable to this.
A user would have to manually start a new disposable VM for each identity.
> Don’t blame books for being too expensive. Everything else is more expensive, and that’s why you can’t afford books.
College textbook pricing is a function of the aforementioned rate of increase of everything else becoming more expensive, not a function of the cost of books increasing generally. They are, the author argues, decreasing, unless you introduce external distorting factors.
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