> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://bareeconomy.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # THE ALGORITHM BANNING BOOKS IN TEXAS DOESN’T READ THEM - URL: https://bareeconomy.ghost.io/the-algorithm-banning-books-in-texas-doesnt-read-them/ - Published: 2026-10-13T18:41:16.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-13T18:41:16.000Z - Description: Soaring interest rates, 50% insurance spikes, and rent control caps are freezing out individual housing investors while politicians claim to solve affordability. - Author: Brook Vance - Tags: Newsletter, #Migrated-1785857905698, #Import 2026-08-04 15:39 8,193 bans in one school year, a compliance vendor in 150 districts at $2–3 a student, and software that flags a title by checking what other districts flagged. Jane Austen got caught. --- ## A STATUTE CREATED A MARKET, AND THE MARKET BOUGHT SOFTWARE The secondary school libraries in this town closed in October. The district reopened them after parents turned up angry. I was through here six days ago writing about bond yields. The story on this street is the same shape: a rule written in one place, a cost landing in another. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cd/fb/cdfb58c0-652d-463c-a766-e899e4b817ba/content/images/2026/10/bare-economy-book-count.png) PEN America counted the bans. The vendor numbers come from reporting on the districts doing the removing. --- ## The Next Starbucks Grows Its Own Beans (AD) [![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cd/fb/cdfb58c0-652d-463c-a766-e899e4b817ba/content/images/2026/10/img-1---2026-10-13T201400.208.jpg)](https://clkgrid.com/6a7b417f62391bcda7f4c46a?email=not%5Ftracked&domain=327TBEG&type=SA&product=PAGCI630&ref=bareeconomy.ghost.io) **A $1,000 stake in Starbucks at its 1992 IPO is worth over $400,000 today.** That is a 40,000% return. Enough to fund a retirement. Buy a second house. Cover a decade of not caring what the market did that morning. Wall Street almost missed it. Starbucks priced at $17 a share in June 1992\. Split-adjusted, that is about **$0.27**. The IPO was oversubscribed, but nothing about the pitch screamed 40,000%. Starbucks was a Seattle chain with 165 stores. The biggest coffee brand in America was still Folgers. The investors who bought at $0.27 did not need to be geniuses. They needed to be **early**. A new coffee empire is being built in the same window right now. Different country. Different model. Same window. **Green Coffee Company** owns 45 coffee farms in Colombia. 10 million trees. 10,000+ acres. Vertically integrated from tree to shelf. Own the farm, own the mill, own the distribution. They hold the **exclusive US and Canadian grocery rights** to **Juan Valdez**, Colombia's most iconic coffee brand and a 75-year heritage name. Ten-year commercial agreement, locked in. The products are on the shelf at **Target, Walgreens, Harris Teeter, and 3,000+ North American stores across 21 states**. Revenue grew from **$1M in 2021 to $26M in 2025**. The company is still private. Reserved NASDAQ ticker. Reg A+ qualified. Open to all investors, no accreditation required. Individual investors can buy in at $1.15, per interest. Minimum $1,001\. Up to 20% bonus shares. | [**INVEST AT $1.15 →**](https://clkgrid.com/6a7b417f62391bcda7f4c46a?email=not%5Ftracked&domain=327TBEG&type=SA&product=PAGCI630&ref=bareeconomy.ghost.io) | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ***P.S.*** *Starbucks was a 1992 story. This one is still pre-IPO.* *Juan Valdez is a licensed brand. The Juan Valdez parties are not sponsors of this offering.* *This is a paid advertisement for Green Coffee Company's Regulation A offering. Please read the offering circular at* [*https://invest.greencoffeecompany.com/*.](https://clkgrid.com/6a7b417f62391bcda7f4c46a?email=not%5Ftracked&domain=327TBEG&type=SA&product=PAGCI630&ref=bareeconomy.ghost.io)*Timelines are subject to change. Listing on the NASDAQ is contingent upon necessary approvals, and reserving a ticker symbol does not guarantee a company's public listing.* | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --- ## THE BREAKDOWN: WHAT THE LAW ASKS AND WHAT THE SOFTWARE DOES **1\. SB 13 set a process, and the process has a clock.** The 2025 law requires board approval of books, a 30-day public review period, and removal of material deemed “harmful,” “indecent,” or “profane.” A district must seat a local advisory council if petitioned by parents of 10% of enrolled students or 50 parents, whichever is fewer. The stated purpose is that “local community values are reflected in each school library catalog.” **2\. A six-figure catalog cannot be read by a committee.** New Braunfels holds more than 195,000 books and resources. There is no version of a volunteer council reading its way through that, and no district budget line for the staff who could. So districts bought tooling. Bookmarked serves at least 150 Texas districts at two to three dollars per student per year. **3\. The tool does not analyze the books.** This is the part worth sitting with. Bookmarked’s current product does not read content. It compares titles against online buzz, social media, and existing banned-book lists. Its chief executive, Steve Wandler, acknowledged that some of that input is “hearsay” and opinion. Among the titles flagged at New Braunfels: memoirs by Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Michelle Obama and Muhammad Ali, plus three Jane Austen novels. An Iowa district using ChatGPT in 2023 wrongly identified three books as containing sexual content. A Texas district briefly pulled the Bible. **4\. Districts are squeezed from both directions.** Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said in August that most districts were not complying and floated legislation that would lower a school’s accountability rating if an inappropriate book sits on a shelf. Meanwhile lawsuits argue the standards are unconstitutionally vague. Kevin Brown of the Texas Association of School Administrators called it a “no-win situation.” Over-remove and you face a suit. Under-remove and you face the state. --- ## [Trump’s Dollar Reset Scheduled on December 14 (AD)](https://clkgrid.com/6a183375410969846edf7ed2?email=not%5Ftracked&domain=327TBEG&type=SA&product=PCTN631BS1&ref=bareeconomy.ghost.io) --- ## THE FRICTION: THE CASCADE NOBODY VOTED FOR ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cd/fb/cdfb58c0-652d-463c-a766-e899e4b817ba/content/images/2026/10/bare-economy-flag-cascade.png) Put the politics down for a second and look at the mechanism, because this part should bother everybody. The case for the law is real and deserves stating properly. Parents have a legitimate claim on what a public school puts in front of their children. Some material genuinely is wrong for a middle school shelf. A statute with board votes and a 30-day public comment window is a more transparent process than one librarian deciding quietly, and “community values” is a coherent standard when an actual community applies it. Here is the problem with the implementation, and it cuts against that argument rather than for it. A tool that flags a title because other districts flagged it is not applying local community values. It is importing somebody else’s. A parent in Comal County who wanted a say in their own district’s shelves instead gets a catalog shaped by what happened in Escambia County, Florida, filtered through social media chatter. That is a feedback loop, not a judgment. The first removal becomes evidence for the second, which becomes evidence for the third, and the original reason stops mattering entirely. Nobody voted for that, and it is not what the bill text describes. --- ## [I bought more gold and silver — Robert, 4 days ago (AD)](https://clkgrid.com/6a60e145f8e25a6511316c60?email=not%5Ftracked&domain=327TBEG&type=SA&product=FFJI7&ref=bareeconomy.ghost.io) | Most financial gurus tell you what to do.Robert Kiyosaki tells you what HE'S doing.Four days ago, he posted this to 443,000 people:**"During this last 'retracement' or 'crash' I bought more gold and silver."**Not "you should buy." Not "consider buying." Not "this might be a good time."**"I bought more."**That's the difference between talkers and doers.Silver crashed from $118 to $56\. Gold crashed from $5,405 to $4,006.While everyone else panicked, Robert bought.**"Gold and silver are going to the moon!!!!"**He's putting his money where his mouth is.Now he's revealing ONE stock — a streaming company that could deliver 3X-5X silver's gains — so you can do the same.[See What Robert's Buying Into →](https://clkgrid.com/6a60e145f8e25a6511316c60?email=not%5Ftracked&domain=327TBEG&type=SA&product=FFJI7&ref=bareeconomy.ghost.io)Talk is cheap.Action builds wealth.— Robert Kiyosaki | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | | --- ## THE MACRO EXTRACTION The transferable lesson here has nothing to do with books. Write a compliance standard that is expensive and vague, and you have created a market for a vendor who promises to make the problem go away cheaply. The vendor will not solve the hard version of the problem. It will solve the cheap version and sell it as the same thing. Two to three dollars per student per year across 150 districts is a real business built entirely on a statute passed last year. That is the pattern to watch in every regulated industry, because it is how most compliance software gets sold: not because it does the work well, but because doing the work properly costs more than any district can afford. The liability question is the one still unanswered, and it is the same hole this newsletter has been circling since the chip-collateral issue and the AI accord at the White House. If software removes a book it never read and a district gets sued, who is responsible — the board that voted, the vendor whose list it copied, or the law that made reading 195,000 books the only alternative? Nobody has answered that, and districts are buying anyway. One honest caution on a comparison making the rounds. Texas fourth and eighth graders do read below the national average, and state officials have credited recent middle-school gains to the classroom phone ban. Those are two separate claims sitting next to each other, and neither establishes that library policy moved reading scores in either direction. Anyone telling you it did is selling something. Keep your capital guarded, hold your ground, and stay sharp out there. — Brook *The Bare Economy. From the road. For the road.* --- [Subscribe](#/portal/signup)