Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/nearly-5-million-americans-in-default-on-student-loans-1513192375 <comment><USER2> I'm a high school math teacher. As part of their high school math education, I encourage all of my students to do one of their projects on analyzing loans.

I ask them to pick an item they might take a loan out for, such as a car, a boat (we live in a small fishing town in Alaska), a house, or a student loan. They pick a realistic loan amount, APR, and term length. Then they run the numbers on the loan.

I demonstrate making a loan analysis spreadsheet, starting with an empty spreadsheet. Students then get the choice of making their own spreadsheet, modifying one that I've made with them, or using a loan calculator. By the end of a session, most of my students have become comfortable using a spreadsheet to analyze a loan. This lets them understand how all the various factors interact, and they can play with any loan they become interested in.

Students start out with no idea how banks and lending institutions determine monthly payments. They end up understanding loans better than many adults. They move away from "all loans are bad and predatory" and "loans are free money" to "some loans are fair, some are predatory, and I need to ask myself if a specific loan sets me up for a better life.

I wish someone had done this for me. When I took out student loans many years ago, I had no idea what my monthly payments would end up being. I was just told it would be worth while, and I trusted the people advising me. Students these days can't afford to blindly trust that student loans are going to make their lives better.

<comment><USER3> I think it's hard to absolutely assess the value of a student loan —however predatory— without considering the prospects of having a higher education. Some degrees are worth a dodgy loan. Some really aren't.

You could also say that many students wouldn't be in higher education without the loan. That is especially true here in the UK. That might not be a bad thing except that we've gone through an arms race so that every junior post needs five bachelor degrees and a decade of experience. Experience alone used to be enough.

It'd be nice to get back there. Our focus on getting _everybody_ into higher education —and underwriting indefinite liens on lifetime income— has also meant that universities care more about the number of students than the quality of teaching. That alone probably isn't news, what has been recently in the UK is the remuneration of higher management staff.

They can apparently justify the 10-20× bump over _senior_ lecturers (plus benefits like housing, cars, lunches) to their boards by saying they're the only people who can attract all the money from the students. It's disgusting and vicious cycle.

<comment><USER4> It's similar in the U.S. people going six figures in debt for degrees that qualify them for $30k jobs is a problem, but that is a dirt-simple ROI analysis.

Forcing nearly everyone into the college-bound track is a _huge_ problem. Politically, vocational training is deemed classist or racist, and such utopianism creates a sad disservice to lots of young people who could be learning skilled trades and setting themselves up for comfortable living.

Just like everyone at the university level is not med-school material, not every high schooler is college material.

<comment><USER5> It sounds like a partial solution to this is an infographic that must be provided by each college before allowing loans to be taken out showing:

* The degrees you're interested in

* The total cost of ownership of each of those degrees, based on the dollar cost + interest

* The years you'll have to work to pay off the degree based on the median salary of whatever career requires that degree

* Placement rate _in the career you 're obtaining you're degree for_ after obtaining your education (colleges usually fudge the numbers here by considering a student getting any job as "placement" after going through their pipeline)

Very similar to truth in lending requirements for credit cards and mortgages.

[https://www.occ.treas.gov/topics/consumer- protection/truth-i...](https://www.occ.treas.gov/topics/consumer- protection/truth-in-lending/index-truth-in-lending.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_in_Lending_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_in_Lending_Act)

<comment><USER6> You can't expect the college to give you a realistic prospect when they are the ones who stand to (non-) profit from your matriculation.

At the very least, they will give you a best-case scenario instead of a worst- case or median-case.

<comment><USER5> That's why you use the law to do it, _like we do with credit card and mortgage products_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This did not happen by chance. The answer isn't hard to arrive at--simply ask why college is so expensive compared to the 1990s, and why states cannot afford to offset these costs anymore. America is selling out its future by convincing young people that they should go into debt to pay for "the college experience".

But why does "the college experience" need to include superfluous staff and wasteful resources? Follow the money.

<comment><USER8> > Follow the money

Paint, for those of us with no familiarity with the US system, a picture.

<comment><USER9> Insane administrative salaries, ridiculous sports budgets, new buildings and amenities that no student needs ( [https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/one- schools-f...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/one-schools- formula-for-athletic-success-build-a-lazy-river-and-hope-the-recruits-will- come/2017/03/31/e1b7f5c8-1568-11e7-833c-503e1f6394c9_story.html) )

<comment><USER10> Those things are easy scapegoats but they aren't the biggest cause of tuition increases. States simply aren't spending the money on colleges like they did in the past. [1] This is likely because of all the guaranteed loan money available so the states don't feel the same pressure to fund universities.

For the specific case you linked above, $25m for athletic upgrades is really not that expensive for a school the size of UCF with over 64,000 students and an annual budget of $1.5b. [2] If you abandoned building the facilities and distributed the money evenly among all students you could cut costs for a single year by 2% for in state students and 1% for out of state students. [3] That isn't nothing and you can certainly debate whether athletic facilities are a smart use of $25m, but it is a drop in the bucket compared with the actual rise in costs.

[1] - [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent- the-m...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-main- reason-tuition-is-skyrocketing/)

[2]- [https://www.ucf.edu/about-ucf/facts/](https://www.ucf.edu/about- ucf/facts/)

[3]- [https://admissions.ucf.edu/cost/](https://admissions.ucf.edu/cost/)

<comment><USER11> > Those things are easy scapegoats but they aren't the biggest cause of > tuition increases. States simply aren't spending the money on colleges like > they did in the past. [1] This is likely because of all the guaranteed loan > money available so the states don't feel the same pressure to fund > universities.

I have seen the model stated that there are two Official Views on why college prices are up:

1, the Democratic View: prices are up because states have cut spending on colleges.

2, the Republican View: prices are up because given the easy availability of student loans, colleges can charge higher prices.

It's surprising to me that these are considered acceptable rival opinions, because, if you assume that one is right and the other is wrong, it's very easy to determine which is which.

#1 says that prices have risen due to a fall in supply. #2 says prices have risen due to a rise in demand. Both of those things do in fact increase prices, but a fall in supply causes a rise in prices and a fall in quantity traded, while a rise in demand causes a rise in prices and a rise in quantity traded. If you think that one of these things is responsible for high prices, you can determine which simply by asking "compared to the good times when prices were low, have college enrollments increased or decreased?"

<comment><USER12> That's an incredibly simplistic view and betrays own biases. For example, point 1 could better be described as "per capita state spending" and that completely annihilates your point.

In the same way, for point 2, you would have to calculate the percentage of funding change per student, not the macro view alone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Tuition, especially at private colleges, is totally out of control. But class sizes are up, not down. And the number of full professors is not growing. So where is the money going?

To an explosive growth of administrative staff. My alma mater has almost one employee _per student_. There are many dozens of administrative departments, each with multiple deans and assistant deans and staff, and sometimes subdivisions each with their own layer of bureaucracy. OPAL, for example, has a subdivision for each kind of minority on campus, each with its own assistant dean and staff. You can look at the list of departments: [http://home.dartmouth.edu/administrative- offices](http://home.dartmouth.edu/administrative-offices) . Keep in mind that this is a very small college, with about 4000 undergrads and 2000 grad students.

This monstrous growth is entirely a product of the last 30 to 40 years and is almost entirely responsible for the astronomic increases in tuition, currently $60,000. Even worse, the college claims that its actual cost per student is double that, with the shortfall made up from the endowment. There is NO legitimate reason that a college education should cost over $100,000 per year.

The government needs to stop writing a blank check to these colleges in the form of unlimited loans for their students. The government needs to set a much lower cap on the number of loans it will give to each student per year. The colleges will accuse the party in power of trying to deny students the right to an education, but they will eventually surrender and start cutting the bloat.

<comment><USER14> What's the reason for that. I know administrative staff like that that are getting paid, but what would the current one decide to hire more staff? Unless there was some benefit the staff would prefer to keep the money for themselves rather than hire more people.

<comment><USER15> Americans colleges expect you to fully insert yourself into college life, and for you to fully insert them into your life.

It's like having a parent, except you have to pay them.

They expect everyone to live on campus - so they have to play landlord, mayor, community organizer and mediator, mom and dad, chef and waiter, stadium and opera house, convenience store and urgent care clinic...

Now, which of these do you think are among a college's core competencies? Which of these services are provided in a cost-efficient manner?

<comment><USER13> They also have a monopoly on providing those services to students, so no incentive to keep costs down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Although by inclination what I want to do is rant about the iniquity of this kind of robo-debt in education, instead what I am thinking right now, is this: _how does this compare overall to the rate of default in debt for other purposes? how does it compare to car loan debt? mortgage debt?_ I ask, because debt is the same, except in as much as student debt is in principle seeking a path to be able to repay it. The asset based debt invites a repo man:

you can't suck knowledge back out of a graduates head (ancient egyptian practices to the contrary)

<comment><USER17> "The modern theory of the perpetuation of debt has drenched the earth with blood, and crushed its inhabitants under burdens ever accumulating." -Thomas Jefferson

I know I mention this book a lot on here, but _Debt: The First 5,000 Years_ is the most amazing book I've ever read on the history of debt, money and slavery.

Debt relief has to come. Every great civilization throughout history has had to forgive debts. Current student debt is not even remotely payable. Millennials are the most in debt out of any generation, the lowest paid and most likely to take unpaid internships[1]. They put up with so much more that no previous generation would have even stood for.

"A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence. If freedom (real freedom) is the ability to make friends, then it is also, necessarily, the ability to make real promises. What sorts of promises might genuinely free men and women make to one another? At this point we can't even say. It's more a question of how we can get to a place that will allow us to find out. And the first step in that journey, in turn, is to accept that in the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe." Graber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ)

<comment><USER18> > They put up with so much more that no previous generation would have even > stood for.

This is a rather ungenerous view of the great burdens faced by previous generations. When I grew up there was a draft. When you got out of high school, you faced the real live possibility of being forcibly inducted into the military and sent to an active combat zone--where many US soldiers died, including high-school friends of mine who were killed before they turned 20.

They would _happily_ have swapped going to war for four years of college and the long-term debt attached to it if they had had that option.

You might not like the terms today, but please don't ever say you have it worse than any generation before you.

<comment><USER19> I agree with this. A lot of what I see along these lines is simple ignorance - life is certainly no harder than it's ever been and probably easier for most young people in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Before the internet, centralized places of knowledge were needed, and you'd need to attend that place to find said knowledge. Think about how access to music caused the price of albums to drop. Education had not seen a similar dip in cost even though the supply is 100 percent saturated.

There's a dying class of professors who got in while tenure was still a thing that paid probably 1/10 of the cost for education kids are paying now. They have the rosiest glasses possible because they're making around 100k for zero competition in their workspace.

The vast majority of the time now a TA teaches the course or certainly grades the paperwork. Well over half of college degrees obtained will never pay for themselves.

A philosophy, social science or psychology degree are not important enough to pay 50k to get. Free college would be a complete disaster, and a massive waste of money.

The education cartel places liberal , financial shackles on kids who are less than 1000 sunrises away from going to prom. The liberal arts is a complete disaster for young people's financial means. So, you get somebody 100k in debt for something they could learn on the internet and guess what? They'll ALWAYS vote to raise taxes on the rich.

I worked at a state university for five years, doing research. The waste of extravagant, totally unsustainable. I was going to grad school free since I was an employee, dropped out to teach myself software and in four years I make nearly as much as the Phds. in a physical therapy department. All it cost me was time.

<comment><USER21> I thought college was an outstanding and irreplaceable experience. I still have student debt (pushing 40) and if that debt were tripled today I'd still think it was the deal of a lifetime.

Other than some international trips, going to a university was probably the best money I've ever spent.

<comment><USER22> Easy solution: have two forms of college and let students pick when one they want to go to.

Have one system where it is primarily online and low cost.

Then have the traditional system where it is physical classes and high costs.

Let students decide where to go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The relief of bankruptcy: only for entrepreneurs, not for students.

Another instance of utterly corrupt selective application of theoretically sound conservative principles. Just like "deregulation" and Net Neutrality.

<comment><USER24> There is a reason for that. If your business goes bankrupt it can be liquidated to settle debts. Once that is done you are left with nothing. The same cannot be done with an education. You can't "give back" knowledge to your school, or sell it to someone else.

<comment><USER23> Liquidation of course is often insufficient to pay back all creditors. The risks which have to be assessed before making student loans vs. business loans differ by degree, not kind.

The systems of laws in our society are constructed. A choice has been made to privilege entrepreneurs over students.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ex-wife was an english prof at a state university. They had students who came in with a 16 on their ACT, which really means they should still be in high school. They'd take remedial classes for a couple years, then most eventually filed academic bankruptcy.

Finance officer was telling me how for in-state students, the student is only paying around 20% of the actual tab, and that the state picks up the rest. Then there was the story from a few days ago where some poor lady ended up owing over $100k for a < $10k debt due to fees and penalty rates.

Even my own degree, in the "allegedly" hard subject computer engineering, first day of class would fill an auditorium. After midterms, class size would drop to just a handful of people.

So taxpayers on the hook for subsidies, former students paying obscene finance charges on a kind of debt that is almost unshakable, and little of that culminating in valuable skills and credentials...

Excluding the more selective institutions, higher ed is a racket, and the financing of it is an even bigger one.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is ruining America's future. That's 5M people who can't even qualify for a car loan now. The penalties for default are punishing. Even bankruptcy isn't a realistic option.

This is ruinous for these people. They'll be in their mid-30s or early 40s before they can pay off. Starting that late to build a nest egg, they'll never recover. There's going to be an entire generation that has no secure retirement plans. It will also be a baby bust. By the time they are stable enough to think about starting families, they'll be biologically incapable to produce. Nobody will be around to fight off invaders. We're seriously toast in 50 years at this rate.

<comment><USER27> Welcome to having America's latest STD! Its bigger than Hepatitis (at 3 million), and costs about the same to cure ($80k to $90k a person).

Relationships are delayed, careers are set back and our economy is slowly bled. Much like healthcare!

<comment><USER17> Don't even get started on health care. I worked in health insurance for three years and lived outside the US for about the same time. I saw a lot of waste in our health insurance industry and a foreign market that was superior in almost every way, even for very serious conditions. I wrote a post about it a while back:

[http://fightthefuture.org/article/returning-to-america- and-t...](http://fightthefuture.org/article/returning-to-america-and-the- unaffordable-care-act/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Let's add another layer of abstraction and diversion, the trusty tax payer! /s

This of course, totally ignoring that government backed (everybody gets one no matter what) loans got us here in the first place...

</comment><comment><USER29> There is a simple and equitable solution, which is to transfer the debt to the universities where they studied.

<comment><USER30> I genuinely don't know why I haven't considered this perspective before seeing as how many colleges treat students as just bodies to stuff their money bags with. Oh, come to our college, take out $60000 in loans for a degree that will never pay that off, but we get to pocket it anyways because we have no decency? Sure thing! And don't forget to donate as an alumnus! I'm not exactly in this situation, but have seen it enough with people who had no business being at certain schools for certain degrees that I can't help but think universities should be held responsible for all this to some extent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> In the US people can't clear student loans in bankruptcy. It's a shame, I think, given the constant upward tick in tuition and lack of resulting careers. They can even go after the students parents.

<comment><USER32> > In the US people can't clear student loans in bankruptcy. It's a shame...

Maybe you could explain this to me, because I really don't understand. Why do you think that it's a shame that people can't just discharge substantial, otherwise unsecured government loans?

To me, the real shame is high school employees pushing college on marginal students. One of the few things worse than spending too much money on a not- particularly lucrative degree is spending the money, but not graduating.

I believe the graduation rate at Bellevue College, the biggest and best community college* in WA state is around 25%. I'm sure they're not unusual in that regard.

* It's technically not a community college, but for all intents and purposes, it is.

<comment><USER27> Bellevue College might be the biggest, but its far from the best. They tend to hire current UW professors to teach one class a quarter, stuff the rest of the dept with teachers that were able to get canned at the Seattle Colleges and UW satellites, and hope for the best.

Many of my friends who went there have horror stories about their teachers which I'd be hard pressed to encounter at Seattle Central College or North Seattle College.

Nearly every community college in the Puget Sound decided about a decade ago to shed the community branding and add a handful of 4 year degrees. Problem is the material you learn in upper level CS classes at UW and its satellites is quite different than what North Seattle College and Seattle Central College require (eg: a whole class on SQL Server, C# as the Intro CS class at Seattle Central rathr than the state mandated Python, etc).

<comment><USER33> US is pretty dismal at graduation rates overall - Department of Education is not even tracking the percent of graduates completing a 4-year degree in 4 years anymore, instead preferring a generous 6-year completion metric for a 4-year degree, which stands at 59% [https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40](https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40)

41% of all US undergraduate students have nothing material to show 6 years down the road except for the mounts of student debt. The quoted figure of 22% of those debts being in some kind of default starts looking optimistic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It is confusing for me how bankruptcies work.

What happens if a corporate declares bankruptcy? Do they only pay less while keeping everything they invested/bought using the loan money, for example - buildings, equipment, stores etc? How does this compare to student loans?

<comment><USER35> Assuming the bankruptcy isn't called off:

The bankruptcy is handled by a liquidator or trustee in bankruptcy. That person / entity will attempt to liquidate the assets and will then pay a portion or all of the debts in order of preference. _If_ there is a remainder (unlikely, but it could be) it will be returned to the shareholders. Depending on the country some creditors will receive automatic preference (such as the taxman). In some cases, for instance if it is believed the company is viable but has been managed badly it is possible that such a trustee will even attempt to keep the company running while they search for a buyer.

If debts are re-negotiated or forgiven it is possible for a company to emerge relatively unscathed from bankruptcy proceedings, this all depends on what deals can be made with the creditors.

It compares poorly to student loans because those are individual debts and unfortunately individual debts are far harder to discharge than corporate debts.

<comment><USER36> It doesn't really matter for corporations, as a company can be burnt and any debts left will never be paid, and a new company can be created with no debts.

This is what structuring related entities is all about.

The one that owes all the money (particularly the one paying and owing to employees) had nothing of real value in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I recently rejected a job offer at a major university, as a software developer for their IT department.

The position did not pay, what their brochure was promising their computer science majors could expect to be paid, while at the same time, asking these computer science majors to accumulate 5 salary-years' worth of debt, for the honor and distinction of earning this degree. But they don't even pay their own staff that much.

</comment><comment><USER38> Like so many things here, I think this is another case of monopoly. Accredited institutions can do whatever they want because there isn't enough competition and students are being taken advantage of (no one is giving them the right financial knowledge about interest rates and years of labor required to pay off the loan).

Let's open up the playing field and allow more cheaper colleges like community colleges. And educate students about choosing those cheaper schools. Employers need to do their part too and stop being so elitist. Not every job requires a Stanford grad.

And let's design the programs so millennials can still work and earn money durring the day and do some kind of part time bachelors program in the evening (that doens't take too much extra time). That way instead of going into debt, they can spend the time breaking even or even building up some savings.

</comment><comment><USER39> Student loans are the stupidest form of loans. Do people need a college education? Absolutely. What's the best way to provide it? I have no idea.

Here's why student loans are dumb.

1\. They are practically guaranteed to anyone who signs regardless of their future ability to pay it back.

2\. The majority of people getting them are children and have are terrible at perceiving future outcomes. Ask any 18-year-old starting college if they will make more money than average after graduating, most will say yes.

3.College drop out rates are high. This site says 56% [https://www.collegeatlas.org/college- dropout.html](https://www.collegeatlas.org/college-dropout.html) . Taking out a loan to help you make more money and then not making more money puts you at higher risk not to pay back.

4\. Relatively speaking all majors are valued at the same cost within an institution. If I get a bachelors degree in computer science I pay the same tuition and costs as someone who gets a bachelors degree in ancient history, even though our potential earnings are vastly different.

The entire student loan and college education market is a mess. I suspect this is a sign that college should be a public good or has been messed with by folks that think it should be.

</comment><comment><USER40> Are there any studies that look at the costs of tuition compared to the rise in freely available equivalent information?

I wonder if this is common in other markets where the companies recognize that a lot of their business is commoditized so they keep raising prices to help offset potential losses.

I don't think student loans can collapse like mortgages because there isn't property involved. However, if there is a collapse in higher education in general - a sort of wave where people realize it is not worth it financially and enrollments drop dramatically, that would cause ripple effects in the economy.

<comment><USER41> The problem isn't what you learn, it's whether you can show the piece of paper proving you learned it.

I learned most of my undergrad education on my own at home from the books suggested. My education cost me time + the price of the books. However to get the exams, grades and piece of paper in the end, it costs a lot of money.

If we could decouple certification/exams from private institutions, autodidactic people could get their Bachelor's degree almost for free. For Master and PhD degrees I guess the point is more to do research.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> A big problem is that the gov't is double-dipping on the benefits of higher education. They both benefit from higher taxes on earnings as well as interest of education loans.

</comment><comment><USER43> Someone is making good money there. What if People invested on learning coding instead of spending a fortune just to feed the uni market?

</comment><comment><USER44> Agreed

</comment><comment><USER45> Time to get into crypto and pay them off. I know I'm going to get a ton of downvotes for saying that...

<comment><USER46> probably still the fastest way to double your money...

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Let's simply tax the new BTC zillionaires, and pay down the student loan debts.

<comment><USER48> We could just forgive the debts. We don't need a compensating tax when inflation is this low.

<comment><USER49> This would be a slap in the face of some people who went to school and worked odd jobs to pay for tuition.

<comment><USER50> Not doing it would be devastating for the economy in the long run.

It's a hard choice but macro is more important than micro in these decisions.

<comment><USER51> Its a mistake in the long run to socialize risk. These former students are defaulting because the courses they took have no value in the marketplace.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The last male northern white rhino - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/12/last-male-northern-white-rhino <comment><USER2> On the extinction of species, I am reminded of John Donne's note on how connected we are (ought to be?) as mankind - perhaps a sentiment that needs to be extended more into nature:

 _" No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."_

</comment><comment><USER3> Markets often result in the Tragedy of the commons[1]. Here again is the extinction of an in demand spices rather than husbandry to perpetuate the supply. Likewise fishing stocks that frequently collapse and climate change resulting from oil production.

Ironically there is a way to prevent these disasters when there is sufficient public will and control over the market.

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons)

</comment><comment><USER4> Another last male living thing: a cycad in London. Yes, supposed to be gone in the last great extinction.

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/10/136029423/the-l...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/10/136029423/the- loneliest-plant-in-the-world)

<comment><USER5> Ok but it can and does make hybrids. So they could hybridize it with a closely related species. Then backcross the pistillate offspring from those crosses with this original male. And keep doing that until there's >95% cycad genetics. You'd have low genetic diversity, and there might be issues with low vigor and runts because of that, but you'd have a population of cycads. I'm sure hybridization happened in the wild anyways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> They will have their genomes sequenced, as will the frozen remains of 12 more rhinos. Hopefully we could be able to revive the species later.

[http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-rhino- money-2015...](http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-rhino- money-20150226-story.html)

<comment><USER7> What's the relationship between "genome sequencing" and IVF?

This quote from that article was interesting to me, I had always assumed that mammal reproductive systems were relatively similar: "The reproductive system of rhinos is very complex and there is still so much we do not know,"

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am curious if environmental/wildlife groups and/or the government in the countries where their horns are in demand done anything to educate the public re: their unfounded beliefs/superstitions?

If individuals don't realize the impact of their actions on the world at large, shouldn't the government or public groups (e.g., in Vietnam or China) step in and take a stand on it, no matter how unpopular that stand is?

You'll never win the fight against the poachers. The only way is to cut the demand at source. Too late for that unfortunately. This really made me sad.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there a story leading up to this one? I guess I was looking for answers to questions like:

\- At what point did Sudan become the last male northern white rhino?

\- Were similar conservation and breeding efforts done on the previous male northern white rhinos?

\- If so, why did those fail (for both conservation and breeding)?

\- How far back were conservation and breeding efforts executed and failed, leading up to the last one?

\- Is this a case of hunting efforts out-pacing diligent conservation and breeding efforts, or was there not enough education and funding for truly diligent conservation and breeding efforts?

Unfortunately, the goal of this article seems to be to strike at the readers' emotions vs. present a factual story of the past and present. Not saying the former is bad, just that I was hoping for more of the latter.

<comment><USER10> There's eight links of "related content" underneath this article. Not all about this particular species, but pretty easy to filter through to see what's directly related:

In 2007, there were 14 of these rhinos left, 4 wild and 10 in captivity: [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/mar/04/conservat...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/mar/04/conservation.internationalnews) \- this article also cited a number of 30 back in 2000.

In October 2014, the second-to-last male died at the relatively young age of 34, leaving just 6 and removing the last realistic hope for breeding: [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/18/northern-...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/18/northern- white-rhino-dies-six-alive-world)

In December 2014, the next-to-last male died, of old age, leaving just 5: [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/dec/15/northern-...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/dec/15/northern- white-rhinos-death-leaves-just-five-left-in-the-world)

It's painting a pretty dismal picture altogether. I guess conservation efforts were too little, too late, with the remaining population already too small and too aged to ever offer much hope for success. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That article is so painfully sad. I have done nothing to cause their extinction, yet can't help but feeling guilty. It might be because I have done nothing.

"Human beings – we always kill the things we love."

</comment><comment><USER12> If you want to get involved to prevent things like this in the future, contact your representative a lot of states are currently considering banning the sales of rhino horn and ivory. You can read more about it here [https://www.reddit.com/r/babyelephantgifs/comments/338f7t/co...](https://www.reddit.com/r/babyelephantgifs/comments/338f7t/contact_your_state_representatives_about_current/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Can someone explain the fascination of the so called 'asian medicine market' with rhino horns, tiger bones and penis and other such endangered animal parts ? I had earnestly hoped that viagra and other erectile dysfunction medication would rid the blackmarket for tiger bones but that hasn't happened in the least bit.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow, there are also 2 females. Is there any technical reason why they don't just use artificial insemination to make some more babies? It would be pretty irresponsible to let the species go extinct because they didn't really try to save it.

</comment><comment><USER15> There needs to be some international treaty which declares poachers to be subhuman, such that they can be hunted for sport, without prosecution for murder: immunity in the country where the hunting takes place, as well as immunity back home, or in any state which is a signatory to the treaty.

After that, to be a poacher will mean taking a tremendous risk: simultaneously becoming not only hunter, but hunted. Hunted by a group of psychopaths who appear wherever poachers appear, anywhere in the world, to take advantage of the treaty.

And, of course, many of those psychopaths will be none other than ... competing poachers. All traces of cooperation among poachers will be gone, replaced by paranoid mistrust of the purest kind.

A poacher won't even be able to sell an elephant tusk to anyone without fear. If you're approached by someone offering a tusk, he can be defined by the treaty as a poacher, which means you can legally kill him and take the tusk (and the same risk upon yourself as you try to do with that tusk what he just did).

<comment><USER16> Sounds good in theory but in practice this would turn out to be terrible.

How do you even define a poacher ? Maybe they start using intermediaries.

They use anonymous locations as a way to sell the horns ?

Maybe once their buyer appears on site to take the horn, they take a picture and shot the buyer calling him the "poacher" to collect the poacher money and resale the horn ?

Allowing legal murder of humans should only be instituted by the state and not be individuals, even the state screws up the process and individuals are much less trustworthy.

The poaching problem requires both attack from supply side and demand side using various soft techniques. The only reason the horns are important is due to its social value.

We do not have poaching problems with ants,spiders,monkeys,etc. because killing and the keeping their body parts has little social value to humans and there exists a strong penalty if you have a dead monkey in your house !

This is frankly china's problem.

<comment><USER15> > How do you even define a poacher?

Quite trivially. First, precisely identify certain geographic areas (habitats of endangered animals subject to poaching). Then, anyone in those areas with any sort of equipment for poaching (guns, traps, whatever) is by definition a poacher. To make it simple, a poacher killer, if armed, is also defined as a poacher while inside one of these areas. "Inside" also includes air space, which extends 30,000 feet above ground, and three miles beyond the border of the area. Anyone who would be a considered a poacher if standing in the area is also a poacher if in the air space. All passengers and crew of the craft are considered poachers if any one of them satisfies the definition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Biology startup idea:

Since Rhino horn is just like keratin and dirt or something, design a process to create spot-on fake rhino horns and flood the market with them.

You would make lots of money at first and eventually drop the price of rhino horn to the point where it wouldn't be economically feasible to harvest real Rhino horn.

<comment><USER18> There are at least two startups working on this idea. eg [http://synbiobeta.com/pembient-bioengineered-wildlife- produc...](http://synbiobeta.com/pembient-bioengineered-wildlife-products/)

Personally I think it's a bad idea, as it's demand which drives this not supply. fixing supply may only increase demand for the 'real thing' even more.

<comment><USER19> Exactly what will happen, more supply will create more demand, which in turn will create a demand for a premium product - the real thing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What is the best way to personally contribute to rhino conservation? A quick search yields many rhino charities. Would be great to know which, if any, are actually making an impact.

</comment><comment><USER21> Very poignant

</comment><comment><USER22> It's so fuckin sad, I literary cried reading it. I simply don't get how we (as humankind) cannot prevent such disasters happening while wasting billions on much less important things.

<comment><USER23> The two main reasons are:

1\. Lots of humanity doesn't agree that those are less important things, and

2\. Among those that have a value system that does agree with you on that point, there's still a tragedy of the commons problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's the saddest thing.

</comment><comment><USER25> What really pisses me off about this is the mentality of human beings toward other living creatures. Specifically, how every god damn living thing on the planet is seen as ours to control, like the whole of nature is our own little fishbowl entirely full of our own pets. And once our pets are limping along, gasping for breath, we pretend to care.

There are five northern white rhinos left. All of them were in zoos until four were moved from a zoo in Czech Republic to a conservancy in Africa.

Can you imagine being the last human being and living out the rest of your short, lonely, depressing life in a tiny artificial habitat, poked and peered at by weird creatures for god knows why?

Most of these animals were born in captivity. That means they don't even reflect the mentality of the original animal in its natural habitat. This is effectively no longer a wild animal; it is our pet. The hope, one imagines, is that somehow scientists can figure out how to breed enough of them that they could reintroduce them to the wild, but this is a risky, expensive, difficult, long-term process. But the track record of this system over the past 50 years proves this will not work.

In order to try to convince poachers not to kill them, there was a systematic attempt to dehorn rhinos in captive populations in the 90s that continues today. In order to keep these animals alive, we mutilate them, ignoring the long process of evolution which adapted these animals with very pronounced and specific biological features. This still doesn't stop poachers from killing them for a multitude of reasons, but it reduces the likelihood of human and rhino caused mortality.

Extinction is a natural process, which occurs due to geological transformation, climactic oscillation, and species interaction. About 99.9% of all species that have existed on the planet are extinct.

Human growth, however, has drastically accelerated the extinction of species. Some of the ways humans cause extinction include water pollution, overfishing, overgrazing, thermal pollution, excess turbidity, deforestation, agricultural development, urban conversion, introduction of alien species, and of course, hunting. In rainforests, which include up to 80% of the species diversity of the planet, deforestation causes the loss of up to 50,000 species a year.

Considering all of that, think about this: we are guarding one fucking rhino. We know it's not going to breed; they've been trying for 50 years and made one or two cows. So naturally this begs the question: why the fuck are we pretending so hard to care about this one giant mammal when it's already too late?

We don't actually care for, or need, this species. It is effectively already completely removed from nature, so it has no effect on its environment or other species. The only reason we're dicking around like this is guilt. Guilt that we abused our pets, and so we make a lame attempt to put a band-aid on it and say we're sorry, so that our parent or God or whatever moral authority you choose will forgive our sins.

But feeling guilty doesn't save lives, and it doesn't keep an environment healthy. So this process of burning the world, then giving it CPR when it can no longer crawl, does nothing to help the fauna of the planet. We're not actually helping. We're trying to make ourselves feel better. And this false compassion is fucking infuriating.

Sorry for the rant.

</comment><comment><USER26> Crime

</comment><comment><USER7> Here are some approximate rhino population levels as of 2013: [http://www.rhinos.org/rhinos/state-of-the- rhino-2013](http://www.rhinos.org/rhinos/state-of-the-rhino-2013)

The Southern White Rhino has a population of about 20,000 (Endangered).

TIL about the Woolly Rhino: [http://www.rhinos.org/rhinos/extinct-woolly- rhino](http://www.rhinos.org/rhinos/extinct-woolly-rhino)

Would it even be responsible to save the Northern White Rhino right now? Maybe wait a few years, let the current ones die off, then breed several of them using Southern White Rhino surrogates could be one plan.

<comment><USER27> If they could use southern Rhinos as surrogates, doesn't that imply the southern and northern white rhinos are the same species? So we are not talking about the extinction of a species here, only one less habitat for a species? (Not that this somehow makes it acceptable of course.)

<comment><USER28> Surrogacy is simply using the womb. It is not interbreeding, so it does not necessarily imply they are the same species.

There are many definitions of species. If they are able to interbreed and create viable (i.e. non-sterile) offspring, they might be considered to be the same species. However, there are cases where offspring are viable, but less fit for a variety of reasons. In this case, many biologists would still consider them separate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This short article about a rhino made me curiously sad. I'm not a die-hard animal lover, but it just somehow seems allegorical to many of humanity's problems...

</comment><comment><USER30> [http://i.imgur.com/gzCATUl.png](http://i.imgur.com/gzCATUl.png)

I was incredibly confused for a good 5 seconds.

<comment><USER31> Lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Does anyone know if they have tried artificial insemination and if so why it hasn't worked?

<comment><USER7> They can but it's risky and there are new challenges with different animals. The process isn't perfect, the animals might die: [https://www.google.com/search?q=white+rhino+IVF](https://www.google.com/search?q=white+rhino+IVF)

It's also not been considered too urgent since they have the sperm and eggs already, they can always put the baby in a Southern White Rhino.

You must also consider the fate of that animal and the security it would require. It might be better to let them go extinct, make a big deal about it, then bring them back. Plus if they did it this way they would get much more recognition verses if they saved the species with a few still living.

<comment><USER33> > It's also not been considered too urgent since they have the sperm and eggs > already, they can always put the baby in a Southern White Rhino.

Source? Why is the Guardian article framing Sudan as the species' last chance if this is the case?

<comment><USER7> The 1st link on the Google search I linked to was my source. [http://www.bbc.com/news/science- environment-31001941](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31001941)

The Guardian article is written by someone who is most likely a freelance writer. Their goal is to pump out articles that make attention grabbing claims while staying truthful. The author was not a rhino expert and likely didn't do much journalism research to find the facts people need to know, but some sob story about the last of it's kind is better news (more shares, more likes, more viewers, more ad revenue).

<comment> chestnut-tree _" The Guardian article is written by someone who is most likely a freelance writer"_

The Guardian writer, Jonathan Jones, is the art critic for the newspaper. Hence, the links to art history and a very descriptive interpretation of the rhino in the picture ( _" His head is a marvellous thing. It is a majestic rectangle of strong bone and leathery flesh, a head that expresses pure strength"_).

The article is part of a series called 'Framing the debate' which the site describes as follows:

 _" A great photograph doesn't only say more than a thousand words, it can also create a hundred different reactions. In this series we take a close look at contemporary and historical photographs and videos that divide opinion"_

[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/series/framing- the-...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/series/framing-the-debate)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If I were living in abject poverty and someone told me that if I killed an animal and sawed off it's horn they'd get me $300,000 I would probably murder that animal.

I view poaching as a poverty issue. Poachers are largely in poverty and buyers of animal goods are largely in cultures with major poverty issues. Yes some rich people in those cultures spend outrageous sums of money on items, but I contest that if you eliminate poverty the majority of these issues are also eliminated.

<comment><USER35> Poachers are not largely in poverty. Poachers are primarily large, well-funded criminal syndicates, although they do (sometimes) use impoverished locals for their hunting ability and knowledge of local conditions.

The boom in trade in rhino horn, elephant ivory, etc. has been largely fueled by increasing incomes in China and elsewhere. It is not the result of poverty.

<comment><USER36> Think of a fast food place. The people making the most money are the well funded groups running it (the corporations and to a lesser extent the franchise owners). But the day to day operations are only possible by the hoards of workers who would often rather be at a different job but are there because of economic necessity.

Those who benefit the most from poaching are the well funded criminals. But the locals do benefit, the well funded criminals just ensure the locals only benefits as much as needed to ensure they still get their own big payday.

If the locals weren't benefitting at all, it wouldn't end all poaching, but it would have a significant effect. If instead the locals benefitted from stopping poaching, it would have an even greater effect.

Consider the case of control animal hunts where big game hunters pay to hunt the infertile old elephants who are still consuming resources that could otherwise go to the herd. The money spent helps the local economy, including to help pay for protection of the younger fertile elephants, and it helps the herd by culling the older elephants (my understanding is that the older ones interfere with the fertile elephants mating, there could be some benefit to having older herd leaders who are infertile, so it isn't a simple calculation).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The article frames man-made extinction as unethical toward animals. The real problem is the diminishing _biodiversity_. Every time a species goes extinct, we – as well as ALL future scientists – lose _invaluable_ sources of data.

As one door closes an opportunity is forever lost. The effects of man-made extinctions reverberate through time and fill the pool of _unreachable truths_ (Hofstadter).

It's unethical toward the whole human race as well.

<comment> guard-of-terra We shoud devise ourselves to collecting as much cell cultures as possible. Then we do not lose information and might as well recreate this diversity in the future.

For example, Siberia will really like to get rhinos, mammoths and other large animals back, and it is possible to breed them from existing warm-climate ones. And there's a lot of space for them to thrive.

<comment><USER37> > Then we do not lose information and might as well recreate this diversity in > the future.

This is an understandable position, but difficult in practice. We're losing "information" in a lot of other ways as well. Habitat destruction is probably the most obvious part of that for many species. It's not enough to have a genome without knowledge of what I'll call that genome's "context of relevance". Which amounts to a vast web of climate, local environmental history, other organisms in that context, and so on. All of that will likewise affect any given organism's epigenetic expression, something else that a naive recording of genetic data will miss.

Likewise, we're destroying what amounts to animal "culture". Go read Elizabeth Marshall's _The Tribe of Tiger_ [1], esp. the part that describes the extremely interesting relationship between the Bushmen tribes of the Kalahari desert and the resident prides of lions.

As far as we can manage, it's still best to preserve as much as possible of our "archives of life" in living form vs. recorded on media somewhere.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Tribe-Tiger-Elizabeth-Marshall- Thomas/...](http://www.amazon.com/Tribe-Tiger-Elizabeth-Marshall- Thomas/dp/0743426894)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forge_of_God](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forge_of_God)

<comment> guard-of-terra We already know that Siberia was home to wooly rhinos and mammoths. We can as well reintroduce them there. Of course it will take time for them to adjust.

<comment><USER38> But what else might have been in Siberia when there were wooly rhinos and mammoths? It's very probable that simply introducing them wouldn't do much (i.e., they'd just die again) without reconstructing the ecosystem around them.

<comment> guard-of-terra Of course ecosystem should also be recreated: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The impending extinction of the Northern White Rhinos is discussed in chapter three "Leopard-skin Pillbox Hat" of the book Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams. Yes, that Douglas Adams. It's his only non-fiction.

According to the book, the primary use for the horns is to make jewelery. There were thousands of Northern White Rhinos in the early 1900s, 1,000 in 1980, 13 in 1985, and the population got up to 22 by the time the book was published in 1990. He thought we could save them.

<comment><USER40> This [1] article explains another big reason:

> The appetite for killing rhinos to saw off their horn is fuelled by demand > in the far east, which has risen as countries such as Vietnam, one of the > biggest consumers of rhino horn, and China have become more prosperous.

> Rhino horn is made of keratin, the same material as human toenails, but an > unfounded belief that it cures everything from hangovers to cancer and can > serve as an aphrodisiac, has fed demand and sent prices soaring to an > estimated $75,000 (£50,000) a kilo.

[1]: [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/27/ol- pejeta...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/27/ol-pejeta-kenya- sudan-worlds-last-male-northern-white-rhinoceros)

<comment><USER41> "Rhino horn is made of keratin, the same material as human toenails"

And hair and fingernails and ..

Which brings up the obvious point that the best way to "save the rhino" is to gather about 1000 pounds of nail clippings, grind them up, and put them on ebay as counterfeit rhino horn. That'll poison the marketplace (something we're pretty good at) which will help ruin the profitability of rhino poaching, and it'll also kill the price, changing rhino poaching from "a worthwhile risk with the possible reward of a zillion bucks" to "an idiotic risk with little return"

The governments and activists involved should be flooding the market with counterfeit rhino horn today, if they really cared about the rhino.

<comment><USER42> Did you know that bread contains a product made from keratin (cysteine)? Most of it is counterfeit: it's claimed to be from duck feathers, but it's actually made from human hair collected mainly from Chinese barbers.

<comment><USER42> Just out of curiosity: do people downvote this because they think it's false, or because of another reason?

<comment><USER41> Probably epic chemistry fail. Its like saying there's grass in my cheezeburger because some of the amino acids in grass proteins end up reassembled as muscle proteins in cow muscle. Not only that, but aside from the biochem obviously every single carbon atom in the cow came from grass. Real cows eat grass not corn which is a whole nother topic and there are some lipid (fatty oily) issues.

This can obviously be abstracted to my innards are grass, because the amino acids in the cow were consumed and re-arranged into programmer pot belly and my stylish hair do. (glances down at my hairy belly) yes you are grass aren't you...

The other epic fail is there's real food, then there's bread, and finally at the bottom of the barrel theres not-even-bread. And the worst of the chemically preserved artificial bread shaped stuff may include various peculiar preservative compounds. But when I eat junk food like bread, I eat the good stuff. So, no, "bread" is not a singular atom or compound or food, and only the cruddy stuff is full of preservatives of weird sources.

<comment><USER42> This "epic chemistry fail" is a strawman. I did not say there's hair in bread. I said there's cysteine in bread, cysteine which is made from keratin from human hair. Quite obviously it's not in all bread, but you'll find it in most if not all industrial bread and even in many local bakeries (you won't find it in a good bakery though). The actual chemical process for extracting cysteine is boiling the hair in hydrochloric acid, which separates it into other stuff and a white powder, which is the cysteine.

Whether you personally eat that bread is not very relevant for this discussion, but for what it's worth, I personally think that whether cysteine is made from duck feathers or from human hair is irrelevant, it's chemically the same molecule. I generally bake my own bread, but when I don't I have no qualms about eating bread with cysteine in it, and if my own bread would taste better with cysteine I would put it in. Scary chemicals are just a label people put on things, salt is a scary chemical too when you call it natrium chloride.

Duly noted that HN prefers not to learn such factoids though =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> There is a start-up that tries to eliminate "the $750 million illegal rhino horn poaching trade by growing rhino horns made from rhino DNA and 3D printed keratin".

(Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with _Pembient_ ).

<comment><USER44> People who are crazy enough to consume rhino horn for any purpose will discard this attempt as "fake rhino horn".

<comment><USER45> Maybe it's more a lack of access to modern scientific knowledge than 'craziness'.

<comment><USER46> Are the main customers for items like this the poor and uneducated, or the wealthier segments of Asian society with plenty of access to modern scientific knowledge?

Also, I wouldn't be surprised if it's analogous to the Dr. Oz / anti-vaccine set in the U.S. Those people have access to all the knowledge they could want, but you still couldn't shake their misguided beliefs out of them.

<comment><USER44> Rhino horns = illegal and dangerous = very expensive = rich buyers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How py.path ate my files - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/rstwKzZg <comment><AUTHOR> Update: there is an error in the write-up:

      print p

actually returns the path string. However since I was using IPython, showing `p` without printing it displays the object representation:

      In [20]: p
      Out[20]: local('/home/user')

This story is nothing I am proud of, but I wanted to share it anyway, I think there are a few interesting facets to this, e.g. how I got there:

\- not discovering the solution through the documentation,

\- hacking away instead of asking,

\- lack of attention to detail when hacking through it (do I really wanna do this on my homefolder???),

\- also: forgetting about the incident right away

I guess that makes me look bad, but I believe such errors happen everywhere and all the time. So there is the question, why did the solution not occur to me? Am I really just stupid and I am the only one? Or should the `__str__` method be included in API-documentation?

I don't know, but I'd like to hear your thoughts!

(edit: formatting)</comment>


College Textbook Prices: Out of Control - <AUTHOR> http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2014/03/textbooks-prices-out-of-control-and.html <comment><USER2> The absolute worst thing is "course packs" that some of my classes have. These are PDFs from something like Harvard Business Review that we have to pay for. It's about ~$60 for the digital set, and half the time once I get it I realized I could have found half of the PDFs online for free. Every student has to buy them. In some classes they won't distribute the digital copies so you have to pay even more to go to the insanely corrupt "Campus Copy Center" (private business) and get a printed copy of the same shit everyone else got loosely bound together for $100.

</rant>

<comment><USER3> I went to Penn and this sounds terribly familiar

<comment><USER2> I also go to Penn, I think most Penn students have this experience a few times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm currently taking some classes at my community college.

Besides the insane prices, one things I've noticed is that students don't get their student aid paid out until weeks into the semester, so you either have the choice to buy books at incredibly high prices at the college bookstore (higher even brand new compared to Amazon), or you have to wait 6 weeks before the aid is available for students to shop elsewhere.

Sneaky business.

<comment><USER5> I teach at a community college, and as it was explained to me by our financial aid office, student aid isn't paid out until a few weeks in as a mechanism to prevent financial aid fraud. Every year people sign up for classes, collecting their financial aid money, and then never show up. Community colleges are the primary target for this type of fraud, since we have open admissions.

The federal government is not okay with this, so they instituted a system of mandatory reporting where we have to keep track of whether or not a student shows up during the first few weeks. That way they know who not to send aid to when that time is up. If we fail to properly report this then the college is expected to send money to the federal government to make up the difference.

So it's not a trick on our part to get you to use the campus bookstore. I personally encourage my students not to use the bookstore, since I think marking up the prices on textbooks is inappropriate. I've also pushed hard for the adoption of open textbooks in my department, but it looks like that's going to be at least two years away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Other discussion of the same post that's also on the front page, with more comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7452231](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7452231)

(Looks like HN doesn't canonicalize all the blogspot.tld URLs.)

</comment><comment><USER7> Textbooks are insultingly expensive. Why is it a student's first lesson on copyright law is having to choose between a legitimate copy of a textbook at a sky-high price while eating ramen noodles, or getting a pirated copy and living large?

Then there's the paper publishing racket which is just as perverse.

This whole system needs to be disrupted so hard nobody even recognizes it.

<comment><USER8> We're recognizing, we're recognizing: [http://minireference.com/](http://minireference.com/) ;)

Part of the issue is that there are many moving parts in the value chain: students, profs, authors, publishers, distributors, and bookstores. The exploitation has persisted mainly because the decision maker in the sales process is not the client! Mainstream publishers are milking this fact as much as they possibly can. Insultingly so, you're right. The main problem is that schools and universities are incredibly slow to adapt so the racket continues, but with students taking textbook decisions into their own hands things will change.

I'm optimistic that within the next couple of years, the $130 price tags will be a thing of the past. The market says so.

<comment><USER9> As long as professors are allowed to write textbooks, others in their department will be pressured to require them. Every given textbook will have several coauthors at different schools, each contributing a chapter, making the book required for students spread across the country.

Ordinarily I'd put my bet on market forces, and I really hope you're right... This is so much closer to monopolistic extortion though, I don't see it changing without lawsuits, regulation, or large donations to University presidents contingent on new textbook policies.

<comment><USER10> The last option is intriguing. Just reorganizing things so that textbooks are covered by tuition and have to be paid for out of departmental budgets could dramatically change the situation overnight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In case you missed it, here's the blueprint for a DepartmentPress revenue model for universities:

> _I am trying to get my [[colleagues from the]] department to create an > introductory meteorology textbook. > A pretty decent online book could be > written ... we could charge $30 for it > and use the money for an > undergraduate scholarship._

$20 sale price - $10 printing = $10 profit x 300 students = $3000 / semester

We're not braking the bank with these profits, but at least first-year undergraduates will save $100/course/semester, which is money they will use for beer instead.

<comment><USER11> Realistically, it's money they'll use to buy the Stewart's Calculus ($200) [1] (which, let's be clear, is covering 350 year old subject matter). And then they'll use their financial aid to buy beer.

All of these intro texts (at $150-$200) are broken. They do not go into the subject matter deep enough to use as reference later in coursework or a career and their too expensive to disseminate knowledge widely. Realistically at $30 it's still too expensive to compete with free. But until annotation and referencing UX catches up for e-books dead-tree books still win for learning (I know people manage with PDFs and annotation, but I haven't had success with e-books for anything except for recreational reading). And I think there is a hurdle that is difficult to get over with getting other universities to adopt a university press book from a different university especially for an introductory text.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-James- Stewart/dp/0538497815/](http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-James- Stewart/dp/0538497815/)

<comment><USER12> Even worse is when the intro classes mandate the book, only for the professor to not use it because the book is so weak and useless. $150 paperweight that can't be resold to the used book store because they come out with a new edition every year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In India, at least at IITs, we get assignments and course material on email or as hardcopy kept at campus photocopy centre from where students can get copies at cheap rates. We hardly bought textbooks. The once we bought were very cheap. I think the most expensive one I bought was for $8 at current rates. Don't you guys have libraries ? Whenever I needed to consult a textbook I used to go to the library and read it there.

Moreover we get "Indian" edition of those books which are written by Americans and those used to be as cheap as Indian author text books.

On flipkart (Indian version of amazon) Introduction to algorithm is for INR621 which is roughly $10

[http://www.flipkart.com/introduction- algorithms-3rd/p/itmczy...](http://www.flipkart.com/introduction- algorithms-3rd/p/itmczynzhyhxv2gs?pid=9788120340077&otracker=from- search&srno=t_1&query=introduction+to+algorithm+by+cormen&ref=ba0109ca-7953-4a7a-a5fd-30cfe69e59c9)

On amazon same is at $60

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer- listing/0262033844/ref=sr_1_1...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer- listing/0262033844/ref=sr_1_1_olp?ie=UTF8&qid=1395603005&sr=8-1&keywords=introduction+to+algorithms&condition=new)

<comment><USER14> When more than a student or two has the idea of using the library's copy, it becomes a battle over who will be able to check out the limited number of copies. Sometimes this becomes serious enough that the library will freeze the availability of a book if it's been assigned that semester.

Obviously there is something to be learned about the price differences in the different versions, but there is also a non-trivial difference in quality. I've had International Versions that were missing whole 10-page sequences, pages out of order, and different problem sets whose answers had factual errors. Also the lower grade paper is an obstacle to book reuse.

By this I don't mean to be negative, I just believe the final answer involves more reasonable digital distribution; I'm sick of the myth of "getting the exact same book for cheaper" because I've been burned by it a number of times.

<comment><USER13> umm...never had any such issue with my books. May be I was lucky :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Crazy, all the reading list on my course are provided as pdf to the students and included as part of the course fees. Maybe that's one of the reasons it was voted UK University of the Year, 2013.

<comment><USER16> My UK experience on a science course was that any mentioned books were highly optional and all course material was available for free on the internal network: lecture notes, slides and question sheets. Any reading material was only a suggestion, and available in the libraries anyway. Courses where you had to get books, e.g. history, the texts were in libraries. There was even a slight kerfuffle when the only way to get notes for one of the lecture courses was to buy their book, rather than giving them away as PDF as was normal. The idea of being forced to spend hundreds of £s on textbooks is crazy.

<comment><USER17> Likewise. The professor/lecturer taught the material in the class, with spoken word and blackboard scrawlings, with some paper handouts for the occasional supplement and for question papers. Recommended books were for those who wanted to go deeper in a particular area and were available for loan in the library and were very much indicated as so; you could pass every exam with no more than notes taken in class.

The idea that a book would be necessary for a class that a teacher should be teaching seems crazy.

<comment><USER15> Not only that the book is necessary but the person not delivering the necessary material sells the book that contains it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It doesn't fix the "custom book" problem, but if you're an instructor you should encourage your institution/bookstore to mandate price comparison for textbooks.

We run white-labelled price comparison sites for about 350 campuses, and the stores at those campuses end up winning 80% of the sales. The need to look competitive against online retailers is a really powerful incentive for the local store to do everything possible to get lower-cost options on the shelves (and we do things like help them get more used/rental books, lower prices strategically, etc).

Here's our website, shoot me an email if you're curious: [http://www.verbasoftware.com](http://www.verbasoftware.com)

<comment><USER19> I love verbasoft! It's like a university-sponsored price comparison site. I believe the model is that instead of having a central university bookstore that sells the canon copy, students are directed to a site like [http://davis.verbacompare.com/](http://davis.verbacompare.com/) that shows textbook prices on Amazon, Albris, Half.com, and a few others.

For students at universities that haven't yet partnered with verbasoft, I made a textbook search engine in college that does essentially the same thing: [http://textbooksplease.com](http://textbooksplease.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> None of the books I bought in school can be sold. The class requires the latest edition, and the homeworks are just slightly different. You are force to buy new ones every semester, and the window for selling it back is getting smaller and smaller.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm very happy I went to a University that had text book rental. When I was in school it was $7 per credit. So taking a full 16 credit load would cost $112 per semester for text books. Regardless of if the course used one, ten, or no books the fee was included. So I paid $7 for text book rental for water polo (1 credit "class" with no books), $21 for an upper level CS course with perhaps 1 book, and $21 for an English class that may have required reading 10 books. We never had to deal with selling the books back since we never bought or owned the books. If after a course, particularly a course in your major, if you wished to keep the book you could by paying for it.

EDIT: I have heard that most people would spend $112 on a single course, let alone even a single book. I don't think the publishers and text book companies really like(d) my University. Yes, this is in the U.S. too. I think if a school's student body comes together and "demands" text book rental they can get it. Talk to your student council and apply pressure on the staff and faculty to incorporate it.

</comment><comment><USER22> These guys just got a deal with Mark Cuban on Shark Tank. They let you rent textbooks for $5 a day. [http://www.packbackbooks.com/](http://www.packbackbooks.com/)

When I was in college, I figured out the textbook scheme by my second semester. We would buy expensive books and next semester the bookstore wouldn't buy them back because they were "outdated editions."

So every year after that, I never bought any textbooks. I would either find the professor's powerpoints online, or make a friend who did buy it and make copies of their book. If I absolutely needed a book I would rent it from Chegg or buy used off Amazon, but now Pack Back books looks like an even better solution.

</comment><comment><USER23> I didn't go to school for more than a semester, but I can vouch for this system: piracy.

I found all my books available without a hitch.

The publishers don't lose out on any money, so I don't feel too bad. I wouldn't have bought the books otherwise.

<comment><USER24> I think most of the HN crowd is too old to have experienced this, but even worse are "course textbook access codes" that some schools require students to buy a stupid token that locks them into a high price regardless of whether or not the purchased unit is used, new, or pirated. This especially goes on at certain lower-tier institutions like cc's, FPUs, etc.

Several of my younger friends in the 20s or going to continuing ed have reported on this phenomenon.

<comment><USER23> I can vouch for those access codes. Until there's some sort of bulletproof DRM (that negates even taking screenshots), there will always be the availability of pirating any sort of print-based media.

You can't get a search function with that hard-cover stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In France, the universities and engineering schools I know use _polycopiés_ , which are teacher-made, paperback bound books (sometimes actual LaTeX- formatted text, sometimes just printed versions of course slides), given to students freely or priced according to their actual printing cost (in average, 200 pages long, ~5€).

Granted, sometimes the quality is not as good as that of a rich textbook, but it is usually sufficient for the course. And much lighter to carry around as well.

Besides, the university library contains a small amount of textbooks, which is usually sufficient for those few interested students which want to learn more.

</comment><comment><USER26> Its entirely possible at a community college to pay more for books than tuition.

</comment><comment><USER27> The author left out one major reason textbooks are so expensive-- course adoption lists (i.e. which books go with which courses) are kept private or disorganized so that students or businesses can't offer rival "Search by Course" type sites without scraping the local bookstore. As a result students go to the bookstore which knows their requirements unlike Amazon.com.

I open sourced a course data scraper a while ago to help solve this problem: [https://github.com/bsgreenb/Open-Textbooks](https://github.com/bsgreenb/Open- Textbooks)

<comment><USER28> There was a law that was supposed to make this easier, to make it so that students have more time to look for books rather than the week before the semester starts.

Starting in 2010 schools that receive federal financial aid are required to list the ISBN and title of books (or author, title, publisher, and date if an ISBN is not available) at the time of course registration.

In practice, though, one wonders how many courses have their texts listed as "TBD" up until the week prior to the semester.

<comment><USER27> The law was called the Higher Education Opportunity Act, and the bookstores responded to it mainly by offering seperate, inconvenient search forms. If you found your way there, you you'd then have to copy and paste the ISBN.

The law was good in spirit but in letter it didn't require making the data available. A good law would just be that every school has to offer all the data they send to the bookstore to everyone for bulk download.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Yes. I've pirated books from online and among peers. Most of the text books I have used are available on the Internet. Only a few exceptions.

But as I take upper level classes I have stopped purchasing text books unless required and necessary. I still like holding a book or reading it off my iPad but most of the time I prefer not to read anything but my notes. Quality of textbooks vary, just like quality of online sources vary. Textbooks should be reference. Teachers are the one supposed to explain the details to me, but few can do that well :/ well, teaching is hard.

</comment><comment><USER30> After about a year into undergrad through an online program I've been pleased to find that most of my classes have used affordable books affordable, mass- market sources.

In one case I simply opted for an alternative course rather than pay $148.00 for the textbook.

At the same time I've been doing ID Verified courses on edX. edX courses and materials are a fraction of the cost with vastly superior interfaces for everything.

Rather than just fixing the cost of materials at traditional Universities I hope to see the whole racket of higher education broken by the MOOCs.

</comment><comment><USER31> I understand how textbooks can be expensive. It's simple supply and demand. Fewer people buy textbooks than other types of books, so they cost more.

That's where my empathy ends. It seems to me that there's a huge problem with unethical sales practices and underhanded tricks to reduce the used textbook market. This article's title should have been about the shady textbook companies rather than simply the prices of new books.

</comment><comment><USER32> This becomes especially clear when you look at the prices of international editions of the textbook, which are often 1/10th of the price of the us equivalent book. Such a price difference isn't caused by a publisher worried about volume. If it sells for lower elsewhere, why not here.

</comment><comment><USER33> Submitted something similar earlier today, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7453448](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7453448) which discusses an idea for combating these costs.

<comment><USER19> Are there any good repositories of open source/free textbooks?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> "In the UK there is much less demand on textbooks, because we don't have the same pushy publishers. "

I wonder why?

</comment><comment><USER35> Its a completely ridiculous system, but students can buy used and international-edition books for much cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER36> If the price keeps going up, there will be a silk road for pirated college textbooks.

<comment><USER37> There kind of is one already: [http://libgen.org/](http://libgen.org/)

<comment><USER19> That URL doesn't load :(

<comment><USER37> It works for me =/

I know the www prefix doesn't work. Perhaps there's some sort of filtering being done at your location?

<comment><USER19> Ahh, working now! I could've sworn it had www before.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Terrorists used false DMCA claims to get personal data of anti-islamic YouTuber - <AUTHOR> http://beta.slashdot.org/submission/3961131/terrorists-used-false-dmca-claims-to-get-personal-data-of-anti-islamic-youtuber <comment><USER2> This can be meta-gamed. Suppose you create a Youtube account and use a fake identity: that of someone you would like to be targetted as terrorists. Then post videos which make them upset, and so it goes.

<comment><USER3> Some kind of honeypot?

<comment><USER4> This was done to some extent/similarity by people honeypotting the standard your standard email scammers, having the scammers run around the country to "pick up the check", go through hilarious hoops, etc, so it's certainly not without precedent.

I shouldn't find this as entertaining an idea as I do, already don't have nearly enough free time...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems to me that, if anything happens to the author of the video, YouTube is likely to have some serious financial liability issues. That consideration may give some incentive to people like YouTube to be less trigger-happy when they receive a DCMA request.

It's a shame if someone has to die for people to learn that lesson, though...

</comment><comment><USER6> It's been pointed out that it's Youtube's policy and not the DMCA that allowed this leak of personal info.

<comment><USER2> Also: it's the stupidity of giving your personal info to Youtube in the first place that allows it to leak personal info.

<comment><USER7> Maybe I misunderstood but Youtube asked for its identity if he wanted the channel back online because of the false DMCA notices. And it is Youtube, most people will trust the website to do not disclose their identity like that. They may be wrong, but it is not that stupid if you are not fully informed of the risks.

<comment><USER8> Youtube is a safe-harbor under the DMCA because they facilitate this transaction. Here is the workflow:

1) You put something online.

2) They come and submit a DMCA takedown.

Little or no verification is required at this point, because the penalties for filing a false DMCA takedown are very limited and the penalties for not responding appropriately to a DMCA takedown are huge (eg. youtube can lose their safe-harbor status and become directly liable for your infringement.) The appropriate response to a DMCA takedown for a safe-harbor is in almost every case to take it down.

3) (Two?) weeks pass. You file an appeal or "counter-notice." YouTube can accept your appeal if it contains the necessary information, with no court oversight, at the end of the two weeks. They put your content back up, they forward your information to the DMCA claimant, and they are thus absolved of any direct liability and retain their safe-harbor status.

4) If the entity from (2) believes that you are indeed infringing, they now have your information and can file in a court of law, or as it was shown here, firebomb your house.

This is actually the way the process of DMCA law is written in my understanding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Broadcasting on YouTube is very public. Someone needs to stand behind each piece of content. When it's not safe for an individual to do it, someone stronger needs to step in. This is why Edward Snowden needed The Guardian to publish his revelations, instead of posting them on YouTube or SlideShare himself.

</comment><comment><USER9> Has Google forwarded the original complainants' personal information to the FBI and DoD for follow-up?</comment>


Paris' Bet on E-Bikes - <AUTHOR> https://shared-micromobility.com/paris-bet-on-e-bikes/ <comment><AUTHOR> "Paris has been one of the first french cities to introduce a grant for e-bike (and cargo-bike) purchase in 2009. Any Parisian can now get up to 33% of the bike price (limited to 400€ for an e-bike, 600€ for a cargo-bike)."

…

"Ile-de-France Mobilités launched its long-term e-bike rental service Véligo, with a fleet of 10,000 e-bikes available for the people of the Métropole. For 40€/month, one can get access to a high-end e-bike, with maintenance included."

<comment><USER2> Hi Troy, you beat me to quoting exactly what you quoted! (well, the part about Paris!) <g>.

It's a brilliant idea to give grants for eBike purchases, and I hope that other governments and municipalities will follow suit, and duplicate what Paris has done.

It would help save a lot of CO2 for the world, not to mention fossil fuels and car traffic...</comment></comment>


Startup Websites that Work - <AUTHOR> http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/193/Startup-Websites-That-Work.aspx What should be on the main page of the startup. <comment><USER2> great post. It's really true.

My rules for pages are:

tell the user what it is

tell the user why they need it

show the user what it is

show the user why they need it

and some general rules:

Make it easy to signup, make a live no-obligation demo ...

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of algorithm for giving a clear science talk:

      while have next slide {

         tell the audience what you're about to say

         go to next slide

         say it

         tell the audience what you just said

      }

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great points, but ... given the title and topic, I think this article would be more effective by including some examples and screenshots for each point.

<comment><USER5> That's a great idea. Will see if I can create a "Version 2.0" of the article (wrote it a while ago) with some concrete examples and screenshots.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yes, in addition to these points live no-obligation demo is very important. Unless you really have no competition... But that's hardly ever a case.

</comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for posting this. Am about to design our product homepage and I would have missed a few of the points.</comment>


Support an Open Internet, create your own freedom.txt - <AUTHOR> http://www.isingh.info/blog/2012/01/22/support-an-open-internet-create-your-own-freedom-txt/ <comment><USER2> Sorry but this is just more Facebook-style slacktivism, but worse because it's not even easily discoverable by mere mortals.

<comment><USER3> Maybe make it more useful by providing a set of DNS lookups for major sites? Since SOPA tries to compromise DNS it would be useful to evolve a decentralized variant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is nice and all but I don't think anyone is going to go to websites and type /freedom.txt to see if it has it. It's much like the humans.txt file. No one actually reads these things.

<comment><USER5> Maybe we should all resolve to do exactly that every now and then. Competent website owners will soon notice a spike in 404s looking for it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wrote the contents of freedom.txt on a piece of paper and put it in my drawer. That'll teach those Hollywood bastards!!

<comment><USER7> bravo campion!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love the idea, but the writing leaves something to be desired; swipes at governments and corporations distract from the message. I think short and sweet is the way to go:

"My name is ____ and I own this website. I staunchly oppose any interference with the internet's ability to connect people and share knowledge. The power to silence this website or any other violates a fundamental human right to free speech, and I vigorously oppose any such action, law, or policy."

On the surface, I admit this seems like an empty gesture. If it catches on, though, it could carry a few advantages: free speech advocates can cite how many domains oppose a given bill, and we can start pushing politicians and corporations to put this on their own sites to publicly display their commitment.

</comment><comment><USER9> > An open internet is more important than security, copyright infringement, > terrorism or child pornography.

I'm not sure this sentence does what you want it to do. It implies these things are all a similar level of evil, and it makes it easy for any reader to dismiss the entire text.

</comment><comment><USER10> Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C would disagree: <http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues.html#siteData-36>

<comment><USER11> Couldn't this be worked into the /w3c/p3p file instead as defined by the W3C in that doc?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why is "Anonymous" capitalized in the text?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Added a small landing page. Please do let me know if you have additional content that you want me to put up. <http://wastedcode.com/freedom/>

</comment><comment><USER13> How can you in one post extoll a free/open internet, and after it post links to nonfree sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+? Start walking the walk.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have a git repo up here: <https://github.com/mvanveen/freedom.txt>

Included is a Python script which automatically generates a freedom.txt file.

Please feel free to send pull requests. Add a separate line on locations.txt with your freedom.txt address and the script will automatically output it!

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm suspecting that anyone that knows where to look this up is already on our side.

The challenge isn't _recruiting_ more techies on our side, the challenge is _organizing_ said techies and recruiting & educating *non-techies.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I just feel that sometimes we're misguiding our efforts.

</comment><comment><USER16> hey zeppelin, thx for submitting this and giving it a little more attention. & cool to own up : <http://www.isingh.info/freedom.txt>

<comment><AUTHOR> Its a super cool move! Totally support you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Hi, my name is XXX XXX and I own this website. I no longer wish to stay Anonymous"

are you a part of Anonymous? :))

</comment><comment><USER17> Surely on a free and open Internet you wouldn't have to declare your real name to show support?

<comment><AUTHOR> Open internet is about choice. You can choose to declare your name, or not, like today. You can put your name in freedom.txt or not. But if its not an open internet, perhaps you will be forced to.</comment></comment>