Today my 11yo fully grasped the concept of inflation. Visiting home to mark 1y since my mom passed, found my old LoTR paperbacks. Disgusted, she asks "why is the paper so... yellow?!"
"Because these are 42 years old."
"Ugh, so gross."
"Yeah, look: 1984 edition, $3"
"You could buy a book for $3?"
💙📚
![Excerpt from chapter 6 of Italo Calvino’s novel “If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler”, describing the work of the Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary Works (OEPHLW), which produces books using “computers… capable of completing [an unfinished manuscript] easily, programmed as they are to develop all the elements of a text with perfect fidelity to the stylistic and contextual models of the author.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:qvcmzr3ttriadi27yamf6k5v/bafkreiabtraod7lozipvmltzn4lb2zst6qqwwv6cfnf27dy2xxqvlqt26q)
![Passage from “The Uses of Life”, by Robert Bud. Key section states
“With high sugar prices in the United States during the early 1960s, [Japanese] work [on glucose metabolic enzymes] came to the notice of the Clinton Corn Processing Company, which in 1967 launched a complex enzyme system. It was commercially viable, but it was only in 1974 that Novo, and Gist Brocades in the Netherlands, developed cheap and effective methods. In the United States, this led to the widespread replacement of sunrise in the soft drinks industry. The 1975 glucose isomerase sales of $15m had increased to $40m by 1977 and $50m in 1980.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:qvcmzr3ttriadi27yamf6k5v/bafkreigfuu5utq2s7levjktfvujhvg2dtvzisnkwmy6vdonfxt3v6bbv44)
