I found it amusing, considering all those memes about German words with 35 letters each.
And, as I get older, I began to consider letter size relevant to choose a book edition. Gave up buying new books and went for used, older editions with bigger letters.
Didn't expect Brazil being off the "List of Countries Qualifying for APC Waivers"
Knowing the reality of the Brazilian's public universities, the bureaucracy of the Government and the condition of the students in general, I'm pretty sure we won't have articles from Brazil anymore.
This is because of the fact that APC's are flat fees (usually given in US dollars, british pounds and euros only) and therefore there is no regional pricing. Most online markets have diffferent prices, for instance video games on steam are often much cheaper in brazil, for instance looking at battlefield 6's price on steam it is £40 in brazil but £60 in the UK [1]. Nature communications for instance has an APC of £5290, or $7k. This is 4 months of salary for a post doc in brazil, but only one and a half months in the UK. Given the number of articles submitted by brazillan researchers is much lower than from north america, europe and china it makes sense for the journals to simply waive fees for these countries, as opposed to keeping up with currency conversion and purchasing parity. It is usually relatively easy to use the waivers also.
Note the maths becomes substantially worse when you look at poorer countries than brazil.
These publishers are expecting to make deals with the Brazilian federal and local governments to guarantee access for researchers in public universities.
And good students are getting in trouble (meaning "have to explain themselves") to lousy teachers just because they write well, articulate ideas and can summarize information from documents where other regular people would make mistakes.
And now I know why the default font was changed in Word. Arg. Don't think I like Times New Roman but it was the recommend font for academic papers in Brazil (and the recommendation still persists).
When you go through a problem and have to solve it, you learn to see patterns (of mistakes) and develop a sense for similar problems. Outsourcing the thinking will speed you up for known problems but won't develop your thinking ability.
The gap between those who can solve new problems (and so earn money with it) and those who can't will only increase, with all the social consequences of it. Idiocracy[0] becomes more and more a documentary.
It's interesting to see that the bamboo are still holding it's structure despite all the fire. And that having one flammable material in all floors (the window-protecting foam) comes down to "the weakest link" is all it's needed to begin such hell.
