[maxawaytoolong]

no school subscribes to all journals a student might want.

I went to a crappy (but huge) state university and they did indeed subscribe to ALL of the journals. My family has a good number of academics and this seems to be the case at any large university, regardless of quality.

[sprout]

I went to a ~3000 student private liberal arts college and we subscribed to a handful. 90% of what I needed was out of reach. I suspect there are some economies of scale, but those economies are completely artificial; there's no reason the per-student rate should be different for a small college than a large one.

Well, I suppose there is one: most of the cost is administrative overhead in actually collecting the bill, so it's easier if you've got one bill for 40k as opposed to one bill for 3k

[Ardit20]

What you needed, not the students.

[sprout]

I was a student (now graduated). And I was not alone in lacking needed resources. I had numerous friends in other departments who complained of lacking needed journal articles.

[Ardit20]

Desirable and necessary resources are different. The entirety of the night in regards to hacker news however has been quite revealing.

This place is no less a waste of time than telly. Your insistence simply proves so. Anyone who has been in a university just knows that they had access to the journals they needed, but perhaps not some they might have wanted to.

Yet regardless, neither helps us in our endeavour. Whether the person publishes all the journal articles, I care little. This is no longer a community. No longer are etiquettes and the culture of the site enforced, it is a play ground instead where populism wins.

That is fine, that is how things have been working. You go there first and leave when so it becomes. Yet I thought naively perhaps that this time it would be different.

It is not. Only in the physical world is it different, only in the physical world do we have the freedom, for in that sphere, nature has had the advantage of many years.

Not even the best and brightest can come even close to it. Though maybe I am just naive to suggest that PG is either of those in regards to the internet. He is of a different generation, of a different age too, in his 40s or 50s, chasing money or whatever he chases.

This is our net to make. Ours to learn the mistakes and implement their solutions.

Long Live Youth perhaps I should have said.

[sprout]

>Desirable and necessary resources are different.

That's a bit of a retreat from where your argument was.

But yes, I'm sorry HN is becoming such an echo chamber with no regard for honest discourse. In a lot of ways I prefer Reddit, since there's no pretension that the downvotes are anything other than a mindless disagree.

Honestly, I think that pg probably has it backwards, and that comments should be flag-only while posts should have downvotes. Of course, any system is vulnerable to abuse given enough time.

[maxawaytoolong]

How did we get here from academic journal pricing?