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Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive

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Re: Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive

#171

Post by sliverstorm »

mansolo wrote: post #115
feralchimp wrote: post #21

TL;DR - Just because you don't use the library doesn't mean no one needs them anymore. Not everyone's Real Life Issues are amenable to a self-service web portal, and that's not just because no one has built the right widgets yet. > it will be a slow death by a thousand cuts It will be a slow descent into budget fugue, followed by an extremely quick death when we pass an inflection point in "the number of people who r…

It's horrifying that we need a TL;DR for a modest chunk of text - a mere comment. If our attention spans are that fried, are we any better off than the hypothetical guy trying to fill out a government form? It's a bit like taking someone's synopsis for what the Bible is about. You can't. You have to read it, experience it and parse it yourself or you can't really know. Myself, I'm not going to pablum-feed you guys a…

TL;DR we all have short attention spans now, libraries are in trouble.

Re: Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive

#172

Post by kzrdude »

jonhohle wrote: post #138
tptacek wrote: post #121

Can I add to this one little point, which is a counterintuitive thing you can do to help your local library: 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 VP…

I leans heavily toward the libertarian side, but I think libraries are one of the most important social services provided by local governments. Unlike other programs, absolutely everyone can get some direct benefit from the library - no matter what age or income level. Libraries, in my opinion, are a model of what social services should look like: universally beneficial, only practical at the community level, little…

One example of how unliberal our society has become today I think is "imagine libraries being invented today: media industry would scream piracy"! Those libraries that today experiment with e-books pay ridiculous prices per loan to do so. It's yet another angle where I think it's evident that the copyright lobby is losing perspective and society has lost the compromise struck once over copyright.

Re: Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive

#174

Post by eropple »

nimblegorilla wrote: post #161
xenophanes wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are not "rational economic actors" and do not make all their life choices by "incentives" of this type. 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 creativi…

Interesting points, although I respectfully disagree. It's pretty silly to talk about economics if you don't believe in rational economic actors. A public list is a nice theory, but then you would still have people trying to get on the list for the minimum amount possible and hoping that others would donate more to be higher on the list of donors. And what happens when you have 60 local farmers and 40 corporation far…

> It's pretty silly to talk about economics if you don't believe in rational economic actors.

With respect: when you find rational economic actors in notable quantities, please do let the rest of us know. (My skepticism of the questionable assertions of libertarians is largely based on the conspicuous absence of such actors.)

Re: Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive

#175

Post by marshallp »

mcantelon wrote: post #110
greggman wrote: post #65

If you want a community learning center with computers then why are you asking for a library? http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/library Words matter. People skim, people read headlines. If I read "libraries are in trouble" or "more support for libraries" needed I think "no, anyone with a free smart phone can access the entire internet". They can get a netbook for under $300 or probably a used one for under $5…

Yeah, "economic integration centers" or something might help frame their utilitarian value. People who can't integrate with the system end up integrating with the criminal world, so it's worth the social investment to provide computer access, etc.

That's a great name for it "economic integration center". There's probably a business idea in there as well. Kind of a franchised system, where a company create a saas app and you local socialpreneurs who stand/park near offices with laptops help people. You often see this in third world countires near government offices such as passport offices who help people for a small fee. The socialpreneurs could probably even be crowdfunded on kickstarter/indiegogo.

Re: Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive

#176

Post by DanBC »

eropple wrote: post #169
philwelch wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a fanatical Randroid myself in my younger years, and while she may not have gone as far as "never accept handouts", she did go as far as "never expect handouts", and in Rand's system there is explicitly no right or expectation to anything unearned. Rand's opposition to "libertarians" was purely a personal dislike of the people in Rand's time who called themselves libertarians. Most sensible definitions of the w…

I'm in the same boat. I used to think that Rand had legitimate points and that hey, a society like that could work. Of course, I was fifteen at the time. Finding the intellectual discipline necessary to realize that Rand's philosophy was predicated on nonsense and that I had been wrong was important to my intellectual development.

I was a "communist" when I was 15. Visiting the Soviet Union taught me just how wrong I was.

I'm gently worried that young people aren't allowed to make similar mistakes - reading the wrong websites or sending the wrong tweets can be really harmful to some people's lives.

Re: Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive

#178

Post by notatoad »

icebraining wrote: post #148
snprbob86 wrote: post #41

This is a very well written story that takes what I already kinda of assumed to be true and made it feel very real. It's quite sad, really. I don't want to trivialize the plight of the poor, but I'm also concerned with the impact on the world's intellectuals. A somewhat relevant rant follows.... We were down in the bay area meeting investors a few weeks ago, and I took some time to walk around Standford's campus. It'…

Where I live most coffee shops have tables outside (is there a name in English for that space?), so you can work while you watch street vendors, people walking around and grandparents with children, not to mention the sun, trees, etc. It doesn't have a work environment, but it's very reinvigorating to stop for five minutes and appreciate the surroundings.

>is there a name in English for that space?

you could call it a patio, but that implies a bit more formality than there is at a lot of coffee shops. "tables outside" is probably pretty good.

Re: Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive

#179

Post by msbarnett »

icebraining wrote: post #148
snprbob86 wrote: post #41

This is a very well written story that takes what I already kinda of assumed to be true and made it feel very real. It's quite sad, really. I don't want to trivialize the plight of the poor, but I'm also concerned with the impact on the world's intellectuals. A somewhat relevant rant follows.... We were down in the bay area meeting investors a few weeks ago, and I took some time to walk around Standford's campus. It'…

Where I live most coffee shops have tables outside (is there a name in English for that space?), so you can work while you watch street vendors, people walking around and grandparents with children, not to mention the sun, trees, etc. It doesn't have a work environment, but it's very reinvigorating to stop for five minutes and appreciate the surroundings.

"Patio" is the English word for those spaces, generally.

Re: Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive

#180

Post by tptacek »

hermannj314 wrote: post #166
jonhohle wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I leans heavily toward the libertarian side, but I think libraries are one of the most important social services provided by local governments. Unlike other programs, absolutely everyone can get some direct benefit from the library - no matter what age or income level. Libraries, in my opinion, are a model of what social services should look like: universally beneficial, only practical at the community level, little…

I'd like to believe that but the tone I got from the story is that we shouldn't be using our local libraries. I'd hate the thought that I have checked out a book I could otherwise afford to buy and deprived the use to someone that could not. Or that I am using a computer to read Hackernews that an ex-convict needs to use to apply for a government program to keep his grandson alive. Using the library deprives a slice…

This simply isn't true. The library keeps stats on how many books are being loaned out, and when they drop, they lose an argument for funding the service. Meanwhile, the people who genuinely need the library don't need it to take books out; lending out books is a service that disproportionately helps people with the leisure time to develop a taste for reading books for pleasure.
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