TFNA

I wasn't talking about textbooks, which were only a sideshow of the pre-AA academic pirate circles I was active in, but rather published research.

Prices for scholarly books are not set by the author but by the publisher. The author will often send you a PDF for free if you email and ask nicely.

I don't think this a youth thing that "people outgrow", lol. For over a decade now adult (and now middle-aged) peers who are heavy readers were asking me to put books on their ebook readers, since they knew I had the hookup, but now since Anna's Archive is so convenient, they are just getting the books themselves. A surprisingly large number of normie bibliophiles knows AA now.

For the majority of literature, buying the book won't contribute to the author because the author is deceased. For that minority where the author is alive, many people won't see a need to make an exception to their policy of not paying. Indeed, your second paragraph gets to the heart of it.

That doesn't accord with my experience. I've been involved in academic book piracy since the early millennium, and there definitely was no "buy it if you like it" ideal. Virtually no one will spend the 100-400€ that a typical scholarly book costs except libraries. And since this was a community that reads heavily outside their research as well, once works of fiction started to be more heavily hosted on these servers, it came to seem a waste to ever actually spend money on media if you could just read it all for free -- nevermind that a lot of users were in the former USSR or the Third World where media was not available for sale locally even if you wanted to spend the money.

Before the smartphone era, non-tech-savvy young people were still pretty tech-savvy compared to modern computer (= phone) users, who rarely step outside a few corporate phone apps and have even lost the concept of the file and the directory. You can't expect the same curiosity and willingness to make an effort from normies today as back in the XMPP era.

I spend about half of every year traveling the mountains and deserts of the world, often ones with poor infrastructure. I use Signal more than any other messenger app, and I have never had the deliverability issues you complain about; messages do all get through eventually.

I have run Signal on LineageOS or GrapheneOS for nearly a decade, no Google services, and I have always had satisfactory battery life, i.e. ~2 days of normal use.

I bought a PinePhone, so I definitely know what truly unoptimized battery life looks like, lol.

As an OP here, I'd like to mention that I don't agree with this characterization at all. When I said academics are divorced from the real world, I was speaking of them largely conforming to particular demographics that make them a bit blind to broader trends in electoral politics and culture.

Academics do just fine picking up "adult life skills". Only a small minority of academics find academic employment from their mid-thirties or so on, so everyone moves to other sectors for the rest of their lives. It is not as if they are just hapless misfits or on the dole for the rest of their lives.

Until I gave up on Reddit this year, I was solely on small hobby subs. I hadn't even seen the big general subs since sometime before Covid. And yet all of those small subs I was on had degenerated into insubstantial comments and image posts. Posting substantial comments, the kind that used to be normal, started making one look like an autistic-infobombing weirdo.

Substantial discussion of some hobbies has moved from Reddit to invite-only WhatsApp groups, precisely because Reddit went downhill. (This is true for long-haul bicycle travel, for example.) Unfortunately, on WA, too, everyone is on their phone, so messages are on average too short for comfort, and also there is no FAQ culture so people just ask the same questions again and again.

When people use the term, it is obviously not a reference to just "knowing things" but rather 1) the distinct socialization one gets in academia that leaves one rather divorced from the real world (and I say that as an academic), and 2) hyperspecialization to the point one loses the big picture, a problem in education today.

Very insightful. However, weren't the Ferengi in that episode the first, abandoned version of that race, before they were changed to a hyper-capitalist people for DS9?

Even if the platform weren't originally a microblogging one, longform text is basically over at a societal level because the majority of internet users now are on phones, and that medium discourages longform text. You can see this from Reddit, where comments a decade ago where often much longer, a couple of solid paragraphs, and now they tend to be microblogging-length inane quips.

The Xavier character in Logan was literally written as decrepit, senescent and dying. It was the job of makeup among the crew to make Stewart look that way. I wouldn't draw any conclusions about Stewart's actual health at the time from that film.