Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive

Use your local library.

During the year we started Matasano our Chicago team spent about 40%-50% of our time working from the Oak Park Public Library, sometimes in meeting rooms we booked, more often at study desks. It was great. The Internet access wasn't amazing but it was totally functional and we could VPN out through it. The desks and working space were if anything better than what we have now (and we really like our office).

There were times I worried that we were being a burden, but the impression I get is that it's the opposite. What's deadly for a local library is for nobody from the community to be using it, for it to have no stakeholders from the tax base of the community. The library staff was always welcoming to us.

Your hip coffee shop on the other hand hates you with a passion it normally reserves for Scott Stapp solo albums. At the coffee shop, you take up space in a business that's driven by turnover. Someone's going to chime in here with a story about a coffee shop that truly loves the startups that park themselves at their tables and order 3 count them 3 cups of coffee in a day, but I've talked to hipster coffee shop people oh-yes-I-have and at least some of you who truly believe you're doing your coffee shop a favor are being tolerated gracefully, not welcomed, like you would be at your local library.

Libraries have an obvious role to grow into as IT hubs for their communities, now that so much of their knowledge-disseminating role has been subsumed by IT. But another related less obvious role is as a hub for local entrepreneurship; thing thing "hackerspaces" are supposed to do, but are (for so many companies) suboptimal at.

Most people will care a lot more about, for example, how they are perceived in the community. So simply making the payers list public would, in some cases, prevent people from playing chicken.

Many other solutions are possible, depending on context and culture. It's the job of the businessman to use creativity to find a solution, a way to persuade people to voluntarily participate in his project.

What's wrong with Government action?

Two main things:

1) some people will be taxed to pay for the dam who were not playing chicken but genuinely would rather have kept their money and not had the dam than have paid for it. Why? Because their kid urgently needs new shoes or expensive, urgent cancer treatments. Or their roof leaks, or many other reasons. Just because the damn project is profitable for them doesn't mean they don't have more urgent uses of capital at the moment.

2) some proposed projects should not be done. Why? Well maybe people are mistaken about it being a net win. Maybe it has hidden costs which I noticed but other people didn't notice. And I try to tell them but they don't understand my point.

The solution to the "same projects are mistakes" issue is voluntary participation so people use their judgment and win or lose based on their own choices.

Taxing everyone means the dissenters pay for it, and lose out if it fails, even though their judgment was correct.

The Government has no special skill at knowing which dams should be built now, which later (because some other use of capital is more urgent), and which never. Nor at knowing which look highly profitable now but will be rendered obsolete by new technology next year.

First, a library is most assuredly a public good in that it provides services that it can only provide which are not directed at profit-making. It serves many civic purposes and provides many services to the community. This is empirically true. It can be observed. Go to a public library in a city center and you will observe these functions being carried out to the great good of the patrons and the community at large. Your links to Wikipedia notwithstanding, you've made no real argument that libraries do not provide the public goods of communal learning, discourse, shared meeting spaces, free internet access (in intervals). I'm sure you'll go read your Wikipedia definition and come back to split hairs, but it really comes down to the notion of shared services and their potential for enriching the lives of the people in a given community. You've exhibited a great disdain for such here. It's distasteful, but I'm accustomed to it here on the internet, where every engineer who read a Rand novel got the idea that he was John Galt. So it goes.

Second, you've brought in this cable TV nonsense, as if it reveals that the poor are in fact not poor at all because they've found a way to scrape together enough money to enjoy just one small pleasure. Would you like to commission a study on how many poor children eat one or more pieces of candy during a given month? Would that vindicate your view that nobody is poor and that nobody benefits from shared services and that people with less money and opportunity than you are all lazy idiots looking for a way to mooch off of your bootstrapped successes? I think not. I think you'd still be dissatisfied after having ripped off the mask of those greedy little children in the bad neighborhoods, pretending to be poor while eating a piece of candy now and then. For shame! It's almost as bad as having a Playstation! You went looking for these data points as if they prove something. You went looking for data with a clear agenda. You didn't point out how few of these households have usable kitchen appliances or access to healthy, affordable foods. You didn't check out their schools. No, you went looking for evidence that nobody's really poor. I wish you were right.

Third, instead of picking on public libraries, let's talk about the NSF grant that you say is funding your own lifestyle on your homepage at NYU. Is that a public good? I'm paying for scientific research. You're sucking just as hard on the government teat as anybody. Shouldn't you explain to us why it's worth it when our libraries aren't? The truth is, I'm a big believer in funding scientific research and public libraries. You seem to want it both ways here, though. You want to bash libraries as useless and go on and on with these badly built, parsing arguments. Why don't you feel the same way about NSF grants? Are those a public good? I'd say by your criteria, they are not, since a grant for you means no grant for somebody else. I suspect that your logic only really applies to those less motivated, less gifted souls who haunt the dim and sad hallways of our dying public libraries. Is that it?

Fourth, your attitudes here, I'm sure, seem logical to you and your friends on the internet who love John Galt as much as you do. But these economic and social issues are about outcomes in systems which are (effectively) infinitely complex. And they carry moral weight. Your approach to these questions, in their selfishness and proud disregard for your fellow man and neighbor, is, as Gore Vidal described Ayn Rand's philosophy, "almost perfect in its immorality." An easier way of saying that is that you just sound like a dick. Sure, you're pompous and kind of a smartass, but that's most of us here in computerland. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how painfully careless you are with the hopes, the well-being, or simply the lives of others. You reduce our collective existence to atomic miseries, as if you've escaped most of them by your own virtue rather than through a series of accidents. You place blame where it isn't due and heap glory where it doesn't belong.

You can call it libertarianism. I just call it being an asshole.

See you at the library (not now - I'm headed to the bar).

We have a new library in my city that is beautiful and a massive 77,000 square feet on 4 floors. http://www.flickr.com/photos/petenator/6866904623/

I love studying at my school campus. Its open 24 hours and relatively quite. If libraries could stay open longer I would frequent them a lot more.