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He can have a large language model generate one. Feed it the Wikipedia articles on how the government is supposed to work, pepper it with Robin’s speech mannerisms, and it might be passable enough. She probably won’t even bother to read the thing.
“Class, to do politics, you need money. How do you get money? Well, you’re gonna buy my new textbook, comin’ out next week, and I’ll get money from that. Also I get free labor from my teacher assistant here. ‘Kay, see you next week.”
I’m both surprised and not surprised that Robin managed to make Jason that weary in just one class period. He seemed pretty good at the start of class.
You know how extroverts get energy from interacting with other people? In Robin case is more like she suck the energy of anyone that is in too close proximity like a black and add it to her own.
The new edition with like a paragraph of added material they won’t even be tested on and the rest are slightly relevant stock photos to fill out the chapter. That will be 200 bucks.
other than a specific prof’s theories and such, and college credit, i’m sure there are ppl who would record and upload lectures for free, if not by the teacher themselves so there’d at least ppl getting knowledge for free (tho i guess other than discussion/clarification comments on a place like YT would have to be disabled lol)
Then again these days i’m sure ‘educational podcasts’ are a thing lol
(consideirng history was just memorization i’m sure listening to a podcast on facts/dates 20 times prolly would’ve helped me more than skimming a text book. well, i suppose in high school we weren’t allowed earphones during tests but that was always more to not disturb other students while we were doing it, versus someone actually bothering to actually have a ‘helpful’ recording where they could cheat with it)
Nowadays the best money-making trick is to sell the subscription to the students. It’s online in separate segments, it can’t be easily dowloaded, and the questions and answers are randomized from a bank. More evil, yet, is it’s a yearly subscription, not a semesterly one.
I once had a man try to hire me to ghost write a book about the stock market. He gave me three pages of material to work with. Oh, and he wanted me to write it on spec. Which he had no intention of paying if I did create a publishable work.
Yeah, I feel like this is a pretty normal grad student assignment. Maybe not rhe deadline, but it really depends on the prof. I know people who have been kicked out of their programs for not conforming to expectations at least as ridiculous as this.
Brilliantly opportunistic, avaricious, morally bankrupt, and with little to no apparent understanding of the means or difficulty regarding the labor and projects she demands from subordinates. No wonder Robin was a successful politician before she had that fleeting and fatal moment of empathy.
Robin is awful. I hope Jason stands up to her, eventually. Also, how does she think her class will respond if they need to purchase another expensive (and shoddily written) textbook?
She’s asking the TA who doesn’t know anything about the subject to write a textbook in under a day. I don’t know how so many people are reading that as 100% serious, and not her having fun at his expense.
Are all of you pretending not to understand that she’s joking, as a joke?
Yes. Because it’s Robin. It’s practically impossible to tell where her boundaries are or how her perception of reality works.
She hired a homeless kid who’d “hacked” her phone to run her campaign and it worked for her. Why doesn’t ordering her intern to write a textbook for tomorrow make just as much sense?
You’re joking, right? This is a very delusional person we’re talking about here. So yes, I totally believe that Robin, an adult who barely understands anything but the art of fucking people over, believes a textbook can be written in a day. Either a.) she has a plan to plagiarize it or b.) she doesn’t understand how difficult it is to write.
But if you’re taking it as a joke, you’re the one whose not paying attention or reading the comic. Because Robin does this shit all the time and usually totally believes it.
Jason stands up to her: “And, class, this is an example of what? That’s right – a COUP!” *hands the chalk to Jason, falls dramatically sideways off the chair, and sprawls across the floor under that side of the blackboard* “Now we’ll see how well-prepared he was to take over the reins of control!”
–Dave, *props her arm under her head and stares interestedly at Jason*
Th things is, in a few years with AI, this won’t actually be at all difficult for Jason. I mean, it’s not like the textbook has to be accurate, after all…
i mean, unless it’d be considered extortion i’m surprised they wouldn’t be like “Venmo me 50 bucks if you want 5 extra points on your gpa for my class” or so XP
We’re already pretty much there, people in law already use AI to write for them. In a few years with AI, the machines will hopefully keep a few breeding pairs of us in some kind of human zoo.
Considering how AI scientific work can often be summed up as “I’m pulling this out of my ass” we shouldn’t worry about AI revolution… AI-enhanced human incompetence on the other hand…
both of these are correct. A”I” at this point contains 0 non-stolen IQ points, and can best be described as “Markov-chained MadLibs”, filling each new word or pixel on the basis of the previous several, and ONLY those, as compared to the giant digested database of copied data
You do understand that by the *way* they make these programs, they literally can’t improve past a certain point, right? The entire make of them is to be, to a degree, random. The AI of today is extremely limited because it’s NOT AI.
I saw a story from an acquaintance that in her school, when you took your final exam up to the professor he would kindly sign your copy of the textbook that he’d written. If you didn’t have a unsigned copy for him to sign, your odds of passing the final dropped precipitously…
Some of the best professors I ever had would nudge us in the direction of textbooks that could be found online while maintaining plausible deniability.
“I could never condone such behavior of course and what you do on your own time is up to you, but it has been rumored that such and such edition of X textbook has been found on occasion to be freely available online. I wouldn’t know anything about that of course.” In before they have a weblink hidden away on the board or the projector or something that’d get erased by the time everyone left the lecture. That kind of thing.
And then you’d get the reverse, where profs would hawk their own textbooks or make buy a subscription to a web service code with the homework in order to get access to the text.
I had one course that was taught mostly out of photocopies of a typescript of the main text. I don’t recall whether we bought them in the bookstore or were handed them in the first session, but we paid little if anything.
In hindsight, one of the more interesting things about college is how different the various classes (and prof.s) are, even in a single field.
“I cannot condone nor recommend this behavior, or a location to do this-talk to the guy behind you”. That was…probably the funniest part of that entire class.
Good gods, this reminds me of an asshole accounting prof in my uni days. He was happy to fail people (which I did fail, not entirely his fault), and when I retook his module (he was the only one teaching it then and it was a compulsary module), he changed the textbook completely and it was one of the most expensive textbooks.
I didn’t get the textbook, and had to get by via a lot of Google searches (Google was still usable back then). Got a C for that in the end. What a hard ass.
i mena, not that i support ai overall but i wouldn’t be surprised if an ai textbook of robin’s thoughts was more coherent than anything she actually wrote (tho maybe he can talk to becky and get some data fro m her lol)
christ she sounds like my least-favourite prof in grad school right here
(yes, he did this; yes, his textbook was shite; yes, i’d like that money back but he also did the “new textbook next year” routine so you couldn’t even sell it back to the bookstore, not even for half-value store credit)
(he was not my worst prof, i’m leaving out the incohate thumb-head who literally no one could understand. literally no one. not from language barrier; he was english as a first language. it just didn’t help when he just didn’t seem to know what sentences were in front of a class and his idea of answering a question was to repeat what he’d just said, but louder. i talked to several other students, not one of us understood a word of his lectures and we all just went off the book. or they did; i dropped the class because i didn’t have to have it.)
In university, I had a class where the lecturer recommended his own textbook. It also turned out that his textbook was out of print, so he ended up giving the bookshop permission to sell photocopied versions of it.
There are times a professor writes the book because they think the others out there are bad. But to be honest nobody in academia tends to get rich off of textbook sales that I know of. Those huge prices translate to profits for the publishers.
Having edited two academic books I can tell you guys right now that profs aren’t making money off of textbooks the way that Robin thinks. One of the two sells for over $100 and I didn’t even get an author’s copy :/
My husband had a (business, I think?) professor who wrote a ludicrously expensive ‘textbook’ (coil bound printouts) every year, and changed the questions and rearranged chapters every year so they couldn’t be sold or reused. No shock he was a real piece of shit in class too.
The more I hear about American… anything the more I’m getting this impression that it’s a Con disguised as a country. Everything seems designed to squeeze as much money out of people as possible O_o
Interesting. From my own personal experience in Canadian post-secondary where the prof wrote the textbook, it was actually a decent text and very much a case of “if you have this and read it, everything’s covered in here.”
I had some profs too who effectively had their own via printouts with a lot of “fill in the blanks” spots, with the mindset being “you have to actually come to class to finish making these notes usable.”
I had professors who would tell us not to buy the textbook (but that they were required to assign one*), or to find and buy it with a group so in a pinch you could use it but no one was stuck with a $300 payment themselves, or that all the books for their lit classes could be found in used book stores or free on project gutenberg.
but there were also people like that guy
*I never asked in college, but in high school I was told they were required to provide a text book so you had an alternate way of learning the material if you missed class or didn’t get the professor’s teaching style
Basically, USA is what happens when you maintain late-stage capitalism for way longer than usual before it tips into outright fascism. The irony of the parallels between 21st Century USA and late Weimar Republic Germany is that the economic downturn that’s hitting the population so hard is entirely internally generated. No treaties sucking the life out of America, just Americans themselves.
What economic downturn? We’re just freaking out over inflation, that hasn’t even kept up with wages over the long term.
Housing costs are high, which is a real problem, but unemployment is low, we’re not seeing big layoffs across industries, no real signs of a downturn. Consumer spending is still up. Surveys show that people think the economy is bad, but their own finances are good – which is not a sign of real trouble, but of a perception of trouble.
“no treaties” – sir appears to have forgotten the previous Prez waging economic war on his own people by imposing tariffs on foreign _imports_, and CLAIMING it would be costing the other countries instead
I’ve worked in book distribution – not textbook, but retail. There something like 40% of the cover price goes to the actual retail shop, the distributor gets a cut and the publisher gets theirs. There ain’t 50% left.
I’ve seen estimates from 10% to maybe 25%. That high end is rare.
Mostly you get a advance up front and hope someday if the book does well you’ll earn enough royalties to cover that and start a trickle of new money coming in.
Wait a moment, where is Robin’s other TA? The one very prepared for that Job? Looks like Robin enjoys way too much exercise her power on Jason and only on him. I kinda hoke to see Ruth very gently explain to her that she has to treat him with respect.
So…in the US university lectures actually use or are based on some kind “textbook”?
I mean, my classes certainly had obligatory reading lists and/or perhaps recommendations, but never a “text book” to follow – that sounds more like school.
A lot depends on the field too. Iirc, most literature and history type courses would use multiple different texts, but things like math and physics would have textbooks.
A “reading list” for Calc II doesn’t really make sense. And the texts come with problems to work through.
Pretty much every class I took “required” at least one book, sometimes 2-3 but I would say more than half of my books went completely or mostly unused. Maybe I’d have used more of them if I had bothered to study more but I got my degree so whatever.
And yeah, I had a couple professors that had written their own overpriced textbook that they required for their class.
My lecturers would sometimes just post the textbook pdf in the online class container, mostly during the pandemic. Even when they didn’t, I am very proud to have never paid for a textbook in my entire college career. Thank you z-li
Technical textbooks in Tech are the most waste of money you can spend.
In 3 years, I have to throw a 500 pages Deitel Java book on trash, because almost entire content got outdated.
Where did Hollywood go so wrong? I thought movies were supposed to be an escape from reality, a chance to put your worries aside and not have to think about any underlying ideas or concepts. Well, not anymore.
theonion.com/you-can...
It's not a new argument, of course, but Chesterton dismissed it effectively in 1908.
"You will hear everlastingly... this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man."
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com ⋅ 19h
Hawley dismisses Trump lining his pockets with his memecoin: "Listen, I think nobody believes that Donald Trump can be bought. I mean, what does Donald Trump need more money for?"
wilbur, savvy enough to know he's in a comic strip but still not a great actor, awkwardly lifts a muffin up into frame so that we, the audience, understand that he has a muffin right now, which is very important narratively, but he's not really selling it well as an organic, human action
confirming that the reason there's been no Galaxy Version female characters in Blokees until now is that they felt they needed to make Round Lady Thighs For Ladies
It's #webcomicday? We have a special day???
Well, my name is Pat McHoarney and I draw 69 Mouse-Ear Blvd, a multigenerational story about women who all have sexy legs and probably other features. There was a grandmother, but she wasn't hot and so she died off-panel.
Elizabeth Holmes is in prison for defrauding investors through her blood-testing company, Theranos. Her partner, Billy Evans, is now trying to raise money for a company that describes itself as “the future of diagnostics.” nyti.ms/3FbtZm9
www.ebay.com/itm/23609767...
selling my netflix war for cybertron megatron -- the walmart exclusive one that came with pinpointer and lionizer (but being sold here without pinpointer and lionizer)
Gran... IS ALIVE?
okay, juliette still has brown hair, so this is probably definitely a flashback
i'm just surprised that the comic has remembered her, at all
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 19h
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 10d
The New York Times @nytimes.com ⋅ 5d
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 3d
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is it ghostwriting if everyone can literally see him doing it
reminds me of SmugAlana and chat making a billion-dollar game together
Judging by the eye bags, it would be zombie writing
He can have a large language model generate one. Feed it the Wikipedia articles on how the government is supposed to work, pepper it with Robin’s speech mannerisms, and it might be passable enough. She probably won’t even bother to read the thing.
I wonder if there’s enough data in Shortpacked and DOA to create a Robin chatbot.
I wonder if there’s enough money in the universe to pay me to talk with a Robin chatbot.
at least it would be quick
The grift never ends is the real takeaway from this class.
Well, it is a class on how politics works.
“Class, to do politics, you need money. How do you get money? Well, you’re gonna buy my new textbook, comin’ out next week, and I’ll get money from that. Also I get free labor from my teacher assistant here. ‘Kay, see you next week.”
I’m both surprised and not surprised that Robin managed to make Jason that weary in just one class period. He seemed pretty good at the start of class.
At least now he can go home to Ruth and relax.
You know how extroverts get energy from interacting with other people? In Robin case is more like she suck the energy of anyone that is in too close proximity like a black and add it to her own.
*like a block hole
*lice a black hole
*like a black hope
*like a bleak house.
So what you’re saying is that being Robin’s TA is as exhausting as being involved in the Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce case?
Yeah, I can see that.
oh _deep_ cut
Like a bloke howl
The laws of physics say that energy has to come from somewhere.
How much of that five gallon bag of soda syrup do you think she drank already?
You’re coming at this all wrong.
How many of those has Jason had to fetch for her during this period?
The laws of Robin say that it has to come from somewhere else.
I’ve dealt with energy vampires before. It’s super fun when you room with one and work under another.
He’ll be dead in a week
RIP in pepperonis, Jean Luc.
I’m surprised she remembered his name.
The trick is to write a new edition each year, so the
suckersstudents can’t buy them secondhand.That insight reminds me of this comic by the illustrious Mr. Weinersmith (also in the hive network): https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3621#comic
Uncle Randy has one as well: https://somethingpositive.net/comic/price-point/
The new edition with like a paragraph of added material they won’t even be tested on and the rest are slightly relevant stock photos to fill out the chapter. That will be 200 bucks.
A new edition with nothing changed but rearranged questions so they can’t buy an older edition or else they won’t be able to use it for homework.
And the professor will know you didn’t buy the latest edition of their textbook because your answers will be correct but in the wrong order!
other than a specific prof’s theories and such, and college credit, i’m sure there are ppl who would record and upload lectures for free, if not by the teacher themselves so there’d at least ppl getting knowledge for free (tho i guess other than discussion/clarification comments on a place like YT would have to be disabled lol)
Then again these days i’m sure ‘educational podcasts’ are a thing lol
(consideirng history was just memorization i’m sure listening to a podcast on facts/dates 20 times prolly would’ve helped me more than skimming a text book. well, i suppose in high school we weren’t allowed earphones during tests but that was always more to not disturb other students while we were doing it, versus someone actually bothering to actually have a ‘helpful’ recording where they could cheat with it)
Harvard has a bunch of online courses for free (to audit)
Nowadays the best money-making trick is to sell the subscription to the students. It’s online in separate segments, it can’t be easily dowloaded, and the questions and answers are randomized from a bank. More evil, yet, is it’s a yearly subscription, not a semesterly one.
My prof made copies of the relevant bits and diatributed them as study material to the students for like ten bucks.
That’s right, fuck The Man.
*distributed, obvs.
Speaking as a TA I have had supervising Professors that felt this demanding. At least she is giving him a clear deadline.
I once had a man try to hire me to ghost write a book about the stock market. He gave me three pages of material to work with. Oh, and he wanted me to write it on spec. Which he had no intention of paying if I did create a publishable work.
Yeah, I feel like this is a pretty normal grad student assignment. Maybe not rhe deadline, but it really depends on the prof. I know people who have been kicked out of their programs for not conforming to expectations at least as ridiculous as this.
Though it’s usually at least in their field.
Brilliantly opportunistic, avaricious, morally bankrupt, and with little to no apparent understanding of the means or difficulty regarding the labor and projects she demands from subordinates. No wonder Robin was a successful politician before she had that fleeting and fatal moment of empathy.
Hey, it took multiple fleeting moments of empathy to bring her down
You mean like that unpleasant man who hired someone else to write “The Art of the Deal”?
I remember when my politics professor found out other profs did this.
She said professors that did that should be drawn and quartered.
good policy
She sounds like a good person and a cool professor, though I would hate to see what she does to any students she catches cheating on her exams.
Robin is awful. I hope Jason stands up to her, eventually. Also, how does she think her class will respond if they need to purchase another expensive (and shoddily written) textbook?
she’s making a joke.
Has she ever shown any ability or inclination to crack a joke?
seriously this is exactly how she ran her campaign
No-one said she realized it was a joke.
She knows she’s making a joke.
And now someone has.
She’s asking the TA who doesn’t know anything about the subject to write a textbook in under a day. I don’t know how so many people are reading that as 100% serious, and not her having fun at his expense.
Are all of you pretending not to understand that she’s joking, as a joke?
Yes, that’s EXACTLY what we’re all doing (/jk)
(I wonder how many more layers we can put on this…)
Yes. Because it’s Robin. It’s practically impossible to tell where her boundaries are or how her perception of reality works.
She hired a homeless kid who’d “hacked” her phone to run her campaign and it worked for her. Why doesn’t ordering her intern to write a textbook for tomorrow make just as much sense?
gonna go see how many folks thought Walky really couldn’t tell the difference between Jason and Rhys Darby.
You’re joking, right? This is a very delusional person we’re talking about here. So yes, I totally believe that Robin, an adult who barely understands anything but the art of fucking people over, believes a textbook can be written in a day. Either a.) she has a plan to plagiarize it or b.) she doesn’t understand how difficult it is to write.
But if you’re taking it as a joke, you’re the one whose not paying attention or reading the comic. Because Robin does this shit all the time and usually totally believes it.
lol, fuck off.
at this point i’d just expect robin to print out like 500 selfies and sell versions of it with her signature on it
Jason stands up to her: “And, class, this is an example of what? That’s right – a COUP!” *hands the chalk to Jason, falls dramatically sideways off the chair, and sprawls across the floor under that side of the blackboard* “Now we’ll see how well-prepared he was to take over the reins of control!”
–Dave, *props her arm under her head and stares interestedly at Jason*
Do you live in Chile, by any chance? More or less what’s going on there right now.
i had a professor who handed out copies of the new chapter that would be in the next edition.
Go Go Gadget Prof!
Th things is, in a few years with AI, this won’t actually be at all difficult for Jason. I mean, it’s not like the textbook has to be accurate, after all…
i mean, unless it’d be considered extortion i’m surprised they wouldn’t be like “Venmo me 50 bucks if you want 5 extra points on your gpa for my class” or so XP
We’re already pretty much there, people in law already use AI to write for them. In a few years with AI, the machines will hopefully keep a few breeding pairs of us in some kind of human zoo.
Considering how AI scientific work can often be summed up as “I’m pulling this out of my ass” we shouldn’t worry about AI revolution… AI-enhanced human incompetence on the other hand…
both of these are correct. A”I” at this point contains 0 non-stolen IQ points, and can best be described as “Markov-chained MadLibs”, filling each new word or pixel on the basis of the previous several, and ONLY those, as compared to the giant digested database of copied data
You can write a textbook using AI now. It won’t be any good, but you can do it.
But the thing is, two years ago you couldn’t and they are never going to be worse than they are right now.
You do understand that by the *way* they make these programs, they literally can’t improve past a certain point, right? The entire make of them is to be, to a degree, random. The AI of today is extremely limited because it’s NOT AI.
I saw a story from an acquaintance that in her school, when you took your final exam up to the professor he would kindly sign your copy of the textbook that he’d written. If you didn’t have a unsigned copy for him to sign, your odds of passing the final dropped precipitously…
Jesus that’s blatant.
Any recourse for students?
As I understood it, no. This was decades ago in another country, FWIW.
Some of the best professors I ever had would nudge us in the direction of textbooks that could be found online while maintaining plausible deniability.
“I could never condone such behavior of course and what you do on your own time is up to you, but it has been rumored that such and such edition of X textbook has been found on occasion to be freely available online. I wouldn’t know anything about that of course.” In before they have a weblink hidden away on the board or the projector or something that’d get erased by the time everyone left the lecture. That kind of thing.
And then you’d get the reverse, where profs would hawk their own textbooks or make buy a subscription to a web service code with the homework in order to get access to the text.
I had one course that was taught mostly out of photocopies of a typescript of the main text. I don’t recall whether we bought them in the bookstore or were handed them in the first session, but we paid little if anything.
In hindsight, one of the more interesting things about college is how different the various classes (and prof.s) are, even in a single field.
Also one of the most valuable things.
“I cannot condone nor recommend this behavior, or a location to do this-talk to the guy behind you”. That was…probably the funniest part of that entire class.
Good gods, this reminds me of an asshole accounting prof in my uni days. He was happy to fail people (which I did fail, not entirely his fault), and when I retook his module (he was the only one teaching it then and it was a compulsary module), he changed the textbook completely and it was one of the most expensive textbooks.
I didn’t get the textbook, and had to get by via a lot of Google searches (Google was still usable back then). Got a C for that in the end. What a hard ass.
i mena, not that i support ai overall but i wouldn’t be surprised if an ai textbook of robin’s thoughts was more coherent than anything she actually wrote (tho maybe he can talk to becky and get some data fro m her lol)
Jason regretting his life decisions.
a story as old as time.
christ she sounds like my least-favourite prof in grad school right here
(yes, he did this; yes, his textbook was shite; yes, i’d like that money back but he also did the “new textbook next year” routine so you couldn’t even sell it back to the bookstore, not even for half-value store credit)
(he was not my worst prof, i’m leaving out the incohate thumb-head who literally no one could understand. literally no one. not from language barrier; he was english as a first language. it just didn’t help when he just didn’t seem to know what sentences were in front of a class and his idea of answering a question was to repeat what he’d just said, but louder. i talked to several other students, not one of us understood a word of his lectures and we all just went off the book. or they did; i dropped the class because i didn’t have to have it.)
I can’t relate to anything in this strip. Not the textbook thing, not Robin’s impossible demand, not even their hair colors.
Not even Jason’s sartorial choice of bowtie/vest/button-down long-sleeve shirt [*] with khaki pants?
[*] cherck back at prev strip from this slice; he’s apparently got them shoved up to his elbows now, i’m betting from sheer frustration
It is what it is
Christ I hate that phrase.
Can’t it please be what it *ain’t* for just, maybe, a couple weeks?
“I’d do it myself but I don’t have super speed in this timeline!”
Poor Jason. Probably wishes he were still a bartender
In university, I had a class where the lecturer recommended his own textbook. It also turned out that his textbook was out of print, so he ended up giving the bookshop permission to sell photocopied versions of it.
Were the photocopies at a lower price?
There are times a professor writes the book because they think the others out there are bad. But to be honest nobody in academia tends to get rich off of textbook sales that I know of. Those huge prices translate to profits for the publishers.
I don’t really remember: I think they might even have been sold at cost.
It looks like the book would have been 14 years old at the time, so I don’t think he set it for the money.
Having edited two academic books I can tell you guys right now that profs aren’t making money off of textbooks the way that Robin thinks. One of the two sells for over $100 and I didn’t even get an author’s copy :/
This.
Am I glad we just got photocopies of the relevant stuff for lectures…
For some reason the rights holders would like to close these loopholes.
My husband had a (business, I think?) professor who wrote a ludicrously expensive ‘textbook’ (coil bound printouts) every year, and changed the questions and rearranged chapters every year so they couldn’t be sold or reused. No shock he was a real piece of shit in class too.
The more I hear about American… anything the more I’m getting this impression that it’s a Con disguised as a country. Everything seems designed to squeeze as much money out of people as possible O_o
This was actually in Canada, where college is slightly less fucked and significantly cheaper than the USA (though still inaccessibly expensive)
Oh that sucks
Interesting. From my own personal experience in Canadian post-secondary where the prof wrote the textbook, it was actually a decent text and very much a case of “if you have this and read it, everything’s covered in here.”
I had some profs too who effectively had their own via printouts with a lot of “fill in the blanks” spots, with the mindset being “you have to actually come to class to finish making these notes usable.”
I had professors who would tell us not to buy the textbook (but that they were required to assign one*), or to find and buy it with a group so in a pinch you could use it but no one was stuck with a $300 payment themselves, or that all the books for their lit classes could be found in used book stores or free on project gutenberg.
but there were also people like that guy
*I never asked in college, but in high school I was told they were required to provide a text book so you had an alternate way of learning the material if you missed class or didn’t get the professor’s teaching style
That is an extremely accurate appraisal of America.
Basically, USA is what happens when you maintain late-stage capitalism for way longer than usual before it tips into outright fascism. The irony of the parallels between 21st Century USA and late Weimar Republic Germany is that the economic downturn that’s hitting the population so hard is entirely internally generated. No treaties sucking the life out of America, just Americans themselves.
Yeah I was getting an impression that you were overdue for your own French Revolution
What economic downturn? We’re just freaking out over inflation, that hasn’t even kept up with wages over the long term.
Housing costs are high, which is a real problem, but unemployment is low, we’re not seeing big layoffs across industries, no real signs of a downturn. Consumer spending is still up. Surveys show that people think the economy is bad, but their own finances are good – which is not a sign of real trouble, but of a perception of trouble.
“no treaties” – sir appears to have forgotten the previous Prez waging economic war on his own people by imposing tariffs on foreign _imports_, and CLAIMING it would be costing the other countries instead
That’s not a treaty, I’m still technically correct.
Cases like this are very common in Italy too. I think it’s one of those things that arises spontaneously wherever the conditions are right.
Yes. But more specifically, it’s a cult.
Should the third panel be “if I had”?
Alot of my proffesors wrote books the publisher takes most of the money from sales no suprise.
Traditionally 50% of the cover price goes to the author, but maybe the rules are different for fantastically overpriced textbooks.
I have never heard 50% going to the authors. What country are you in?
Sweden, but my main sources are Stephen King and Neil Gaiman who probably only know about the US.
My professors said they wrote the books as a manner of securing tenure or they were actually passionate about the subject.
I’ve worked in book distribution – not textbook, but retail. There something like 40% of the cover price goes to the actual retail shop, the distributor gets a cut and the publisher gets theirs. There ain’t 50% left.
I’ve seen estimates from 10% to maybe 25%. That high end is rare.
Mostly you get a advance up front and hope someday if the book does well you’ll earn enough royalties to cover that and start a trickle of new money coming in.
Just realised that Jason has become Kif.
Wait a moment, where is Robin’s other TA? The one very prepared for that Job? Looks like Robin enjoys way too much exercise her power on Jason and only on him. I kinda hoke to see Ruth very gently explain to her that she has to treat him with respect.
Barry does the real TA stuff. Jason is doing penance by being a PA / butt of her jokes.
Ruth: You need to treat Jason with respect.
Robin: Why?
Ruth: I dunno, it kind of feels like someone should.
<- cackling
So…in the US university lectures actually use or are based on some kind “textbook”?
I mean, my classes certainly had obligatory reading lists and/or perhaps recommendations, but never a “text book” to follow – that sounds more like school.
depends on the course and professor.
A lot depends on the field too. Iirc, most literature and history type courses would use multiple different texts, but things like math and physics would have textbooks.
A “reading list” for Calc II doesn’t really make sense. And the texts come with problems to work through.
… in the US, a university IS a type of school
Pretty much every class I took “required” at least one book, sometimes 2-3 but I would say more than half of my books went completely or mostly unused. Maybe I’d have used more of them if I had bothered to study more but I got my degree so whatever.
And yeah, I had a couple professors that had written their own overpriced textbook that they required for their class.
My lecturers would sometimes just post the textbook pdf in the online class container, mostly during the pandemic. Even when they didn’t, I am very proud to have never paid for a textbook in my entire college career. Thank you z-li
Sh!
Technical textbooks in Tech are the most waste of money you can spend.
In 3 years, I have to throw a 500 pages Deitel Java book on trash, because almost entire content got outdated.