> the valorization of profit has blinded them to seeing the advantages of the public good as a worthy bottom line
This is, IMO, the critical line, and also one of the deepest problems in the world (and especially America).
A focus on profit is so frequently completely opposed to human wellbeing and a flourishing society. Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims. The result is a catastrophically expensive insurance bureaucracy and worse health outcomes. Not to mention the extreme stress any American feels when interacting with an insurance company over any meaningful amount of money. (Which I’ve experienced, and I have far better coverage than the average American.)
These companies are so clearly, obviously bad for human flourishing. But profit is great!
The incentives are so deeply messed up. Our economy only allows profit as an incentive, which works well when aligned with human wellbeing-being. But as the economy grows, companies consolidate, and profit growth is still expected, nearly every single sector looks for ways to cut costs. And with fewer competitors, it’s easier and easier for entrenched, powerful companies to raise prices and reduce quality with little consequence.
This is clearly bad for human flourishing. But profits are fantastic!
Just because profit is actually aligned with human flourishing in a couple sectors doesn’t mean the system as a whole will continue scaling effectively. It’s clearly not, and it must change to avoid completely suffocating us.
BrenBarn 37 minutes ago [-]
Totally agree. I think another angle to look at it is not "a couple sectors" but "a certain scale", as suggested by your remark about how companies consolidate. When businesses are small and need every customer, they are motivated to do a good job at what they do, build goodwill, protect their reputation. The larger they become, the more they tend to work against their customers rather than for them. They cross multiple markets, making them less responsive to the demands of any one. They become "too big to fail". And so on.
What we see in the modern era is a system in which success is defined as becoming large enough that your customers have no other option but to deal with you. That's not a healthy system.
leoedin 17 minutes ago [-]
You see that scale problem everywhere. Once a business has become large, it no longer cares about “small” costs like unused buildings. That’s basically the reason so many buildings in towns and cities can be left unused for decades.
The impact it has on that town is often huge. But for the business, it’s just a small overhead. A small landlord couldn’t afford to leave their asset unproductive. A multinational conglomerate can.
The death of local high streets is in part due to the unwillingness of landlords to actually rent their properties out for market rate.
dmurray 34 seconds ago [-]
I don't understand how massive corporations are both ruthless slash and burn cost-cutting profit optimizers and sloppy businessmen who don't care about the small things, even in aggregate.
What's the economics of not renting out high street retail properties? There must be millions of them across the first world, with a theoretical annual rent roll in the 11 or 12 figures. Are they owned by a million multinational conglomerates foregoing a million dollars each? In that case we are stretching the definition of "multinational conglomerate". Or are they concentrated in the hands of the same hundred companies? In that case they are each missing out on ten billion a year in opportunity. There isn't a company in the world where you couldn't make your name as Head of Global Unused Property managing ten billion a year of revenue.
I don't have an answer for this either, but it must be more complicated than "they're all owned by multinationals who don't care about such small numbers" - the point of multinational companies is that those numbers are no longer small at scale.
II2II 1 hours ago [-]
I would argue that greed is the problem, not profit.
One could argue that government policies are anything but altruistic. They fund public education because you need an educated workforce. They fund public health insurance because a healthy workforce is a productive workforce. You distribute the cost over the entire population. Both remove direct costs from employers (e.g. training and providing private health insurance). Both have a tendancy to reduce costs and improve consistency because you are working at a larger scale. It also creates order in society since people generally feel as though more of their needs are being met, and they feel less exploited. All of this contributes to profit both on a social scale and for individual businesses.
Somewhere along the line people forgot the lessons of the 20th century. They forgot that profit goes beyond a line on the current financial statement. It also reflects long term interests.
energy123 40 minutes ago [-]
Human nature (greed) is never the problem, because it cannot be changed. Focus only on what can be changed. Design a system that manages human nature, pointing it in a direction that is beneficial, while taming its side effects.
A denial of human nature is how you get authoritarian socialism with centralized planning, which leads to catastrophe because of the local knowledge problem, and because people have no private incentive to do anything.
"Capitalism" is an incomplete first step towards a system which channels greed into something that's beneficial for all stakeholders. A profit-driven actor making their production more efficient to increase profits is a good thing for everyone.
But capitalism is incomplete because the profit-motive can become pathological. Market failures are commonplace.
The only solution that is proven to work is a mixed economy done right, with clever and lean regulations, and a government not influenced by money, and with the government stepping in occasionally to provide public goods that the market cannot, and with private actors otherwise free to make profits as long as they are not harming any third parties.
fsckboy 44 minutes ago [-]
>I would argue that greed is the problem, not profit.
I would point out that's precisely what the "private equity firm"--is that true or just a buzzword? no private equity group is taking this library private--is saying about the current library, that the greed of the unionized employees is running the library for their own benefit and at great cost to library and at the expense of the public, and it could be run more efficiently. So, you agree with them at least that much.
>Somewhere along the line people forgot the lessons of the 20th century. They forgot that profit goes beyond a line on the current financial statement.
huh? that wasn't "the lesson of the 20th century". if anything, the 20th century represents democracy and market capitalism's greatest joint achievement, with much less disease and starvation and much more freedom at the end vs the beginning.
you live in one of the greatest times to be alive, and all you can do is complain. when and where from the past would you rather live out your life expectancy of half what it is now, coupled with no HN to bitch on?
kortilla 4 minutes ago [-]
Health insurance isn’t a great example. Profits are capped relative to premium costs so denying claims isnt a good strategy.
The only way denying claims can become a profit booster is to deny enough that premiums can be lowered enough to bring over more new members than was lost in revenue through the premium discount.
So denied claims come from people shopping for the cheapest insurance coverage possible.
44 minutes ago [-]
arjvik 48 minutes ago [-]
Is there a way to reward and incentivize improving human well being?
Perhaps a society where all income comes from the government in proportion to how much one improves the overall well being of society?
(Yes, it's difficult to measure this objectively, and even harder to agree on what the priorities for societal well being are)
kortilla 1 minutes ago [-]
It’s not difficult, it’s impossible under freedom of religion and just independent thought generally.
One person’s “well being” might be measured by how many wives and children you have. Another’s might be education level and physical fitness. Another’s could be financial independence.
These all clash with each other in fundamentally incompatible ways.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 19 minutes ago [-]
UBI would go a long ways to enforcing democracy. Money talks, so just give people money. Everything else is too abstract. We can't seem to encode justice into law but at least if everyone got UBI it would be harder to oppress poor people
(half serious)
burnt-resistor 15 minutes ago [-]
Public-private "partnerships" backed by private equity will always raise prices, cut costs arbitrarily, reduce service, take out loans, and saddle the organization with debt to pay themselves huge dividends before driving it into bankruptcy. This is what happens when corrupt, unregulated capitalism is allowed to run amok and have zero skin in the game except to extract maximum profit like vampires.
zx8080 50 minutes ago [-]
> A focus on profit is so frequently completely opposed to human wellbeing and a flourishing society.
Not surprising considering profit is taken from the people in the society.
Aurornis 1 hours ago [-]
> Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims.
This has been repeated so many times that I think people don’t understand just how small the profit margins are for health insurers. Low to middle single digit percentages. As low as 2-3% in recent years, and much lower than the average S&P 500 corporation.
There are also non-profit insurance companies out there. Their rates are not appreciably different, as you’d expect after seeing how low the profit margins are in for-profit insurers.
I also think people don’t realize that countries with nationalized health care also deny procedures, have pre-approval processes, require step therapy, and will not authorize procedures they don’t believe to be medically necessary or to have enough evidence. There is no health care system in the world which will simply approve and pay for every request.
So while health insurer profit margins are convenient bogeyman, if you deleted their profits entirely from the system it wouldn’t move the needle on costs. It also wouldn’t open the floodgates for approving everything, because no health care system will allow unlimited services. The amount of excess and unnecessary care would be astronomically expensive. I do agree that we need a more robust system in place for ensuring that incorrect denials don’t happen, but health insurance profit margins are barely a blip on the overall cost of health care in the United States.
It’s a combination of high prices for services, American’s unusually high utilization of health care services, and very high rates of drug prescribing that mostly contribute to the cost. I think most Americans would be surprised to discover that a lot of nations with nationalized health care would also be restrictive in their access to many services and prescription drugs. For as much as we talk about insurance companies denying claims, Americans still get far more services and prescriptions than most of their counterparts in other countries.
scottjg 27 minutes ago [-]
i have no doubt that other countries have some problems in their healthcare systems too, but i think you are downplaying a few key points:
1) united healthcare made 90 billion dollars gross profit in the last 12mo, and that's only one health insurance company. claiming that it's not a great business at a 2-3% profit margin ignores the scale of money involved, and ignores that the customer for health insurance is truly captive.
2) you're right that america has very high prices in healthcare. doesn't it seem bad that private insurance companies are incentivized to make things cost as much as possible so they can skim that 2-3% off the top? insurance companies negotiate and set prices for services and pharmaceuticals. they now own the pharmacy benefit management companies that would normally be incentivized to negotiate for lower prices.
i would expect in a public health care system that rejects procedures, they would follow consistent guidelines and rules. american health insurance companies will arbitrarily reject a percentage of procedures that they know they should be accepting in order to keep their profit margin in the right range.
i think it's hard for me to see the argument that health insurance companies are a net-positive or even net-neutral party in the united states. i don't think it's a coincidence that we have some of the highest prices and some of the worst outcomes.
kgwgk 7 minutes ago [-]
> private insurance companies are incentivized to make things cost as much as possible
> will arbitrarily reject a percentage of procedures that they know they should be accepting in order to keep their profit margin in the right range
So which one is it? Do they want to spend more or less?
> i don't think it's a coincidence that we have some of the highest prices and some of the worst outcomes.
It’s not a coincidence either that doctor compensation is one of the highest in the world.
omnimus 31 minutes ago [-]
The insurer margins can be whatever small but when the same company also owns the hospital and drug distribution it doesnt matter.
Somebody in the process makes extreme margins.
Also americans cant be at same time avoiding going to hospital because of costs and “still get far more services than most of their counterparts in other countries”
Believe it or not there are countries where there is mandatory health insurance (your employer or you or state have to pay it) and doctors dont look at costs because they dont really know them. They for sure try to not be wasteful but nobody is second guessing obviously best treatment because it costs 40% more.
bestouff 50 minutes ago [-]
Whatever. Simply come to a decent EU country and see how much it costs you for a bad cold or a cancer. Then compare that to the same event in the US.
itake 46 minutes ago [-]
I've heard a horror stories about NHS and Canada's Medicare. Their systems are backed up, so treatment goes untreated for long periods of time.
Presumably healthcare professionals are performing as many surgeries as they can per day. Just because one person was denied, doesn't mean another person isn't approved.
A big reason the US does better is Medicare (socialized medicine) not because we suffer for-profit insurance.
itake 49 minutes ago [-]
I'm interested in your point, but do you have any articles backing up your statements?
charles_f 41 minutes ago [-]
> I also think people don’t realize that countries with nationalized health care also deny procedures, have pre-approval processes, require step therapy, and will not authorize procedures they don’t believe to be medically necessary or to have enough evidence
Lines in private medical care are shorter because people with no insurance don't get in line.
nielsbot 19 minutes ago [-]
You can assert that but the US spends more while having worse outcomes.
seethedeaduu 38 minutes ago [-]
As long as you have money or good insurance US is WAY way better than pretty much every other country in that regards.
worthless-trash 32 minutes ago [-]
Having seen the results of both, I think i'll take the Australian current system.
kstenerud 34 minutes ago [-]
Oh bloody hell.
It astounds me how so many people can have such strong opinions about systems they have so little experience with.
I've lived long term in 4 countries (Canada, USA, Japan, Germany) and have dealt extensively with the medical systems in all of them (plus some experiences in Portugal and France).
Every system has its warts, and this is the first thing that naysayers will latch onto, of course. People love to use tu-quoque as a defense mechanism. "See? They're just as bad as we are because you have to wait sometimes, and look at this extreme case right here! It's probably even WORSE than us!"
The fact is, none of the systems are really that bad (with the EXCEPTION of the American system). There's a reason why travel insurance companies have two tiers: All of the world EXCEPT America, and all of the world INCLUDING America.
Have I had to wait for a procedure in Canada? Sure, but they do a pretty decent job of triaging, so yeah outside of the HORROR STORIES (of which you can find anywhere if you dig enough), it's pretty damn good. In Japan I paid a percentage of costs (which are pretty damn reasonable). In France I actually didn't have insurance, so I had to pay FULL price when I came down with pneumonia: 50 euros for the doctor and the antibiotics. In Portugal, I caught COVID, and got treatment within 2 hours of arriving at the hospital in Lisbon.
If you haven't actually been in the medical system of another country, you don't know what you're talking about.
ninja3925 1 hours ago [-]
> Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims
Despite being from Europe, I find this to be a shocking and erroneous interpretation.
Clearly, health insurances have the duty to allocate limited resources (“premiums”) across members. Denying and accepting claims is the mechanism to that end. Accepting all claims would increase premiums and reduce membership (by pricing people out). Would that an ideal state? Clearly not.
n4r9 57 minutes ago [-]
The point was not that all claims should be accepted. It's that adding a profit incentive to denials leads to worse outcomes.
Aurornis 53 minutes ago [-]
Healthcare debates in the United States are difficult because so many assume that insurers have very high profit margins and that arbitrarily denying claims is the reason they have high profit margins.
If you look at the actual profit margins it’s low single digit percentages. You could eliminate profits altogether and virtually nothing would change. We even have non-profit insurers to look at
It’s strange how the high prices of drugs and services aren’t drawing the ire of people who complain about costs. Drug prices are nearly 3X higher here than international averages and doctors here also earn a lot more with in many cases fewer restrictions on prescribing or offering services than in most EU countries.
The meme that insurance company denials are generating huge profits comes mostly from the public murder of a health insurance CEO last year. For some reason people assumed that insurance companies and their profits must therefore be the core problem with high costs, without making the effort to see where the money actually goes in our health care system.
As you said, there is no health care system which does not have approval processes, deny requests deemed unnecessary, require step therapy, and establish standards of care.
o11c 12 minutes ago [-]
> If you look at the actual profit margins it’s low single digit percentages.
Didn't I see somewhere that that's an artifact of Hollywood-style accounting? If you spin up a sub-business then have that sub-business charge high fees for services you can't live without, the main business might even be losing money!
What's indisputable is:
* in America, we pay more for less healthcare
* most of the money does not go to the doctors and nurses actually providing services
* it also does not go to research, which is funded elsewhere (assuming it keeps being funded at all)
* it's often possible to pay less for a service if you pay the provider directly rather get your insurance involved
klodolph 45 minutes ago [-]
> If you look at the actual profit margins it’s low single digit percentages. You could eliminate profits altogether and virtually nothing would change. We even have non-profit insurers to look at
Look at administrative overhead instead of profit. People understand that there are problems with the system, and maybe they’re misattributing the problems, sure.
nielsbot 27 minutes ago [-]
they’re the obvious scapegoat so they get blamed. i’m ok with that.
the US needs a healthcare system that doesn’t have a profit motive. (Or limit it to a second, premium market)
typewithrhythm 41 minutes ago [-]
Conceptually neoliberal societys do not have a strong way to seperate community and social goals from economic ones, because their very philosophy is that prosperity creates social improvement.
Meanwhile everyone is living in low trust economic zones with no community observable, other than anonymous services.
While the critique is valid, that does not offer a path to the solution.
Utilitarism is the ruling moral philosophy, and the only possible countermeasure is externalities but that depends on an effective government which is even more unlikely that asking for ethical behavior to corporations.
alpinisme 2 hours ago [-]
That may be widely believed but there are plenty of government institutions that actually function well. Libraries are a good example.
What’s more: the belief in govt “inefficiency” is one of the hardest to overcome factors that makes it hard to build good institutions, leading to a vicious cycle.
conception 1 hours ago [-]
Exactly, people who think the government is inefficient has never worked at any company of scale ever. All large organizations are inefficient.
A major problem of the US is just corruption. If people went to jail for things like congressional insider trading, we’d solve a lot of these issues.
jibe 47 minutes ago [-]
All large organizations are inefficient.
I agree, and that’s the case for dismantling as much of the federal government as possible - it is too big to work. Break up Apple, Google, Amazon, Washington DC.
pergadad 1 hours ago [-]
Public utilities and services are the default and work well in the majority of developed countries. This is true for everything from local transport to water distribution. As the joke says "universal healthcare is so difficult to get right that only all developed countries except the US have managed to put it in place".
markdown 1 hours ago [-]
Not to mention all the developing countries that have universal healthcare.
mkw5053 3 hours ago [-]
Interesting pattern here: manufacture a crisis (book banning complaints → funding cuts), then propose private "efficiency" as the solution. Meanwhile, this library was founded in 1799, is the second-oldest in Virginia, just won the 2024 state Library of the Year award, and had 400k+ checkouts last year. Hardly sounds broken.
anigbrowl 1 hours ago [-]
I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library/
Line up to the mind cemetery now/
What we don't know keeps the contracts alive and movin'/
They don't gotta burn the books they just remove 'em
hulitu 1 hours ago [-]
It worked so well in Europe with train companies, energy companies and local utilities.
jmyeet 2 hours ago [-]
In American politics, this has been an incredibly successful strategy, most notably starting with Reagan. It's called "starving the beast" [1]. The playbook is simple:
1. Cut taxes
2. "Pay" for those tax cuts by cutting expenditure;
3. Those programs begin to fail because of the funding cuts;
4. Use those failures to justify further cuts, usually by privatizing something or some form of public-private partnership, which is nothing more than a transfer of government wealth to the already-wealthy.
We saw something similar play out recently with Jane Street in India [2], which seems to boil down to market manipulation between options and the underlying securities.
Back in the 1980s we had corporate raiders who were famous for buying up companies that were trading below book value and then simply breaking them up for parts and selling those parts. I'm sure this went as far as corporate raiders manipulating the price.
Private equity is the latest form of this cancer. Here's the PE playbook:
1. Raise a bunch of money;
2. Buy some company with a large amount of debt, a so-called leveraged buyout ("LBO");
3. Once you control the company, take out massive loans on the company's assets;
4. Sell off any real estate holdings, often to some interested party who most certainly isn't at arms length, possibly for a discounted price, to raise further capital then lease back those holdings you need, ideally with complicated leases that hie the true future cost;
5. Use those loans to pay back the original investors and loans;
6. Sell the debt-ridden husk to whoever is stupid enough to buy it.
Now (6) is the tricky part because you have to make it look like the company is profitable, that you've added value by cutting costs or otherwise increased efficiency. And you do that with complicated debt. Sort of like ARMs in the subprime crisis.
I cannot think of a single success story with PE that has created a successful company that hasn't imploded. I belive most PE funds lose money too. Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me.
I suspect you can make a market-beating fund that simply follows the index but does not buy any PE-infected company.
> Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me.
From my own life experiences, I believe that, across a population, there is no correlation between the amount of money people have and their individual rational decision making ability.
mcmoor 21 minutes ago [-]
By this point, I suspect that PE is simply a sophisticated liquidation service. Where an owner doesn't want to deal with a company anymore and want to cash out, but can't just easily sell everything. By this perspective, any fault on a company's discontinuation lies solely with whoever sold it to a PE as it's him who actually wants to kill it.
jmyeet 57 seconds ago [-]
I consider PE to be equivalent to a crypto rugpull.
There's PE the theory and PE the practice.
The theory is that the buyers improve operational efficiency, restructure the business, dispose of underperforming assets, etc and "transform" the business. As another commenter reminded me, there are a handful of examples of this, most notably HIlton. And any of these successes will throw around "operational efficiency" a lot. Maybe Blackstone really did massively improve Hilton's operations. If so, I still consider it an outlier.
PE in practice seems much closer to the 1980s corporate raiders. It's done by people who have zero understanding of the business and zero interest in it. They've essentially decided to do a rugpull and ripoff the new owners so the "financial engineering" is how to structure the exploding debt in such a way that the new buyers don't realize it before it's too late.
That seems to be the case with many high-profile cases such as Toys'R'Us and Red Lobster.
I personally think this model of loading up a company with debt to pay off the LBO should be illegal.
bitmasher9 2 hours ago [-]
> I cannot think of a single success story with PE that has created a successful company that hasn't imploded.
Safeway had a leveraged buyout in the 80s, and was so successful the merger/acquisition with Kroger was blocked due to monopoly concerns. Hilton also had a leveraged buyout.
PE exists to buy bargain bin companies and extract maximum value from them. Sometimes that’s actually rehabilitating the company. Usually they are just the best at milking a dying cow.
markdown 1 hours ago [-]
2 examples, one from half a century ago?
jibe 44 minutes ago [-]
I can’t think of one
Here are two
Why only two?
0x3444ac53 2 hours ago [-]
For anyone curious about what books the group wanted banned:
It is worth noting that per the linked article below[0]. The library has a system for preventing readers under the age of 18 from accessing the books in the New Adult section of the library, and it's one that requires parents to opt into their child having access to those materials.
The library should serve the entire community, not a loud minority or even exclusively the majority. If 20% of the community wants LGBTQ books, 30% don't, and 50% don't care, why should the 30% be able to decide that the other 20% shouldn't have access to these books? The majority should not be able to strip rights that the minority should have access to. Tyranny of the majority is a real thing.
I find it hard to believe that even a plurality wants these books banned. Do we have proportions, or is it just a number of complaints?
0x3444ac53 2 hours ago [-]
It's the loudness of the minority that wants them banned. That, and the fact that they are often people who have enough privilege (land owning, ability to take off work to go to council meetings, and (most importantly) own a business) to be able to throw around to get there way.
Happens a lot at universities and non profits. A big donor will sometimes only agree to donate if certain conditions are met, and as a result can strong arm the other party into whatever they want. The public sector is the same; At the local level it's often business owners that have enough influence over the local economy.
This all would be so much easier, if libraries could give out electronic books
deathanatos 10 minutes ago [-]
… libraries can, and do, give out eBooks.
anon7000 2 hours ago [-]
And frankly, it’s a library. Every group should have access to books they’re interested in. But that doesn’t mean those groups should be able to ban books they don’t like, even if 75% of people want to ban them.
TimorousBestie 2 hours ago [-]
My local library has stacks and stacks of steamy Christian romance and I’ve never once complained about them being a waste of money or space.
But the same library orders one copy of Heartstopper and all hell breaks loose.
ryandrake 2 hours ago [-]
I honestly cannot understand how having LGBTQ books in a library even affects people who don't like them. Just don't read the books. It's not like their eyeballs are being glued open and they're being forced to read them. Book banners are such weirdos.
apparent 1 hours ago [-]
Were any of these books in the kids' section? That could be one reason.
Also, we shouldn't dilute the meaning of the term "book banners" to refer to anyone who doesn't want a particular book in a particular place (even if that place is a public library). In the US, we are spoiled to have zero actually banned books. Anyone who wants to is free to purchase any book they want, as long as it's for sale somewhere. People who don't want books that have sexual content (which a disproportionate number of sexuality-focused books do) in the kids' section might be fine with those books existing in a different section, or in a private bookstore. True "book banners" would want to enforce a ban on them existing anywhere. This is a subset—and quite possibly a small one—of the former group.
AlotOfReading 1 hours ago [-]
It's not just "sexual content". Take a look at any of the ban lists, like the one provided by the ACLU (https://www.aclu.org/cases/e-k-v-department-of-defense-educa...) from earlier this year. Many of the books are related to slavery, civil rights, climate change, and media literacy, and the orders banning them apply to schools on every military base around the world.
0x3444ac53 1 hours ago [-]
No. It seems like there was an age appropriate sexual health book for 9-12 year olds
I have another comment on this thread where I linked a lot of related information about this.
apparent 1 hours ago [-]
That was the only book that patrons sought to have removed from the kids' section?
Thanks for the wikipedia link. The criticism section is particularly enlightening:
> In a 2023 Slate article, Aymann Ismail, who until then had considered most attempts to ban books hysterical, was taken aback by the book's explicitness.
0x3444ac53 56 minutes ago [-]
The important thing to note is that the book is being called "pornography" by the Clean Up Samuels group. It is explicit, but it is not pornographic. There are many many other books they want to ban completely simply because they features trans or gay characters.
While digging for this there does seem to be a young adult novel about a young gay man that does feature sexually explicit content (although it doesn't appear pornographic at all). The library keeps it in the "New Adults section. Which requires that anyone under age get explicit permission from their guardian to access, and they even created a new kind of library card to help moderate said access.
apparent 30 minutes ago [-]
By "access" you mean check out to take home, or take off the shelf to peruse?
0x3444ac53 22 minutes ago [-]
Does it really matter? If a parent is so intent on restricting their child's access to certain text, then maybe they should accompany their child to the library.
This feels less and less like you're interested in discussing this and more like you're grasping for some kind of "gotcha" argument. I'm probably not going to respond again unless it feels productive.
SchemaLoad 1 hours ago [-]
It's obvious. They probably don't even go to the library, they just want control over other people. They don't want other people reading books which could help them out, they want those people to go to church where they can be told they will burn in hell instead.
eloisius 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
apparent 1 hours ago [-]
You've met evangelicals who would much rather have their children influenced by sexual predators than books? Or you're trying to make a snarky comment, so you're tying together two unrelated things, both of which evangelicals would like to avoid?
eloisius 1 hours ago [-]
In fact I have. I grew up in the 1990s evangelical movement, deeply within the culture, home schooled, pro-life rallies, had 10+ kids, women wore denim dresses, etc. Those people. They were hot and ready to ban anything they could get their hands on. Cabbage Patch dolls were demonic, Pokemon were demonic. Gay-anything, it goes without saying, were forces of demons. They were exactly the people who would praise book banning or book burnings.
Meanwhile within their church, on several occasions it was discovered that a man had sexually assaulted little boys. Did they kick him out of the church and go to the police? No, he was a sinner who could be saved by prayer. Until he did it again, and again. Some stupid parents even let him take their boy on a weekend trip years after the situation first came to light. You don't need me to tell you what happened on that trip. I think they finally did get the police involved, but that's after my family finally wised up and left the church.
Unfortunately this wasn't the only incident. There was another family that had two teenage boys. Their teenage boys? Molesting little girls on multiple occasions. Call the police? No, instead have the boys admit their guilt in front of the entire congregation, laying-on hands, prayer, etc. Until they did it again. That family finally high-taled it out of the state.
To this day I wonder why I got out unscathed, except second-hand knowing what was going on. So, yes I have met these evangelicals. Yes, I know their priorities and how they would rather turn a blind eye to sexual assault going on within their own church all the while trying to have Pride parades or whatever banned. Sure, they don't _want_ sexual assault happening, but did they do the slightest to prevent it? No. They tried to pray it away, but meanwhile were happy to expend countless man-hours protesting about obscene books to protect their children. No, I'm not making a purely-snarky comment.
If you're moved by this more in-depth explanation, I'd appreciate if you unflagged my comment.
seneca 1 hours ago [-]
I'm curious how you would feel about your local library carrying The Turner Diaries, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or The Camp of the Saints? What percentage of the local population would have to want those books for you to believe the library should serve them?
Are there any books that a public community library should not be willing to carry?
0x3444ac53 29 minutes ago [-]
I think that access to disinformation within a context such as a library is actually quite a good thing. You can read it, and then research it, and think critically about it. In an open ecosystem of information, with a little critical thought and media literacy, most people are able to spot bullshit when they need to.
Most University Libraries carry those text. I'm not sure if it would be particularly useful in the context of a public library (as the goal is to serve a local community with a wide range of needs). However, if there was interest then it would likely be put into circulation.
I would speculate that there was likely a time when each of those were on shelves, but they were likely weeded out due to lack of interest.
deathanatos 19 minutes ago [-]
Do libraries carry Mein Kampf? Would the books you suggest be categorized and contextualized appropriately? (… like all other books, and a job that I believe librarians already perform.) "Categorized and contextualized appropriately" might also mean "not on the shelf / by request, but available for research"; a good many books that are considerably less objectionable and of greater literary value already are in libraries, as there is only so much shelf. Again, deciding what merits shelf space is a function of the librarian.
But you see no qualitative difference between {a book written by a white supremacist, neo-Nazi organization; a fabricated text (i.e., propaganda); and a book the SPLC describes as "'widely revered by American white supremacists' and 'a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries', and attributed its popularity to the plot's parallels with the white genocide conspiracy theory."} and "The book Pride Colors by Robin Stevenson, which explains the meaning of the rainbow colors in the Pride flag"[1]?
What is the literary value of white supremacist drivel or a fabricated text to a community library? (I'd wager approximately none.) Versus the books being complained about (anything and everything LGBTQ+). (Definite value from helping people exploring LGBTQ+ topics for themselves, simply trying to learn about LGBTQ people, to helping non-homophobic parents raise inclusive, tolerant children who don't want to spread hate & intolerance, and which need only be checked out by those who actually desire to read them.) There is demand for books of the nature being banned here; I cannot see there being anywhere near the same demand for books filled with bile.
And again, the empirical position (and for some subsets, outright stated position) of the right is to remove any and all traces of LGBTQ media from libraries. (And more broadly, from society, as well.)
In this particular instance[1], we can see this in one of the complaints:
> “Our library should not be carrying ANY material about LGBT,” one person wrote.
and,
> “Family has 2 moms — unacceptable,” the person wrote of another book. They also complained, “This book makes LGBTQ+ look ‘harmless’ and acceptable.”
Someone else points out exactly your quip; what about equal representation?
> She continued, “You said taxation without representation. What about my representation in the library? What about what I want my children to read? What about the 4 percent [of] LGBTQ members in your community that you represent that only get 1 percent of the books? Are they not being represented fairly with their tax dollars?”
In the broader national debate, we've seen this pattern endlessly; "protect the children" is a wedge to open a fissure towards a wholesale and complete ban. E.g., see the FL Don't Say Gay Act, which started as objections that education on such topics needed to be "age appropriate" but was then subsequently expanded until is was a wholesale ban on education of numerous topics.
I increasingly think that our society isn't sustainable without some recalibration of the notion of responsibility, liability, justice and due process. The problem we face is that it is very easy for unscrupulous operators to exploit loopholes and cause lots of damage, but the process for holding them accountable faces a heavy burden of proof and itself can be exploited (e.g., by dragging out lawsuits for years).
We need some kind of sliding scale where certain actions by people who either "should have known better" (i.e., are exploiting insider knowledge) or "had no basis for acting" (i.e., are rich enough to not need to make any more money) can be quickly curtailed without a need to specifically prove everything that they did. Something loosely akin to "if you had a billion dollars, you'd better be able to affirmatively prove you did everything squeaky clean or we're just going to take $500 million".
ssuds 1 hours ago [-]
Brendan Ballou’s book “Plunder” is an excellent read about the effects of private equity across industries, if you want to go deeper on the topic. I recently had him on my podcast talking about the effects of PE in HVAC. There are quirks in each realm but the themes are common (I guess in libraries, too).
I love Front Royal. I'm also not surprised private equity tried to buy the library there. Money has been corrupting Northern Virginia for too long.
windex 2 hours ago [-]
Billionaires buy elections, elected officials break funding for public facilities, billionaires get tax cuts, public facilities get bought out with tax cuts.
I wonder when they start introducing their own currencies like in the old mining towns.
Back to feudalism we go, election by election.
lexiciccone 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
BJones12 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
slg 2 hours ago [-]
If the current public management is bad, the solution should be to bring in new public management. The fact that the alternative is private equity should be the indication that this fight is purely ideological rather than a fight against bad management.
zone411 1 hours ago [-]
It's a non-profit, they can't just replace their management.
Based on my experience with county boards of supervisors and their interactions with library management and library funding decisions, the Warren County Board of Supervisors' statement that the library has poor management shouldn't be given much credence unless backed up by evidence.
Somewhat amusingly, the library is a subordinate of the county. If the library is in fact poorly managed, the poor management is the fault of the board of supervisors.
gehwartzen 2 hours ago [-]
If doing a bad job is being the 2024 Virginia library of the year I doubt it.
o11c 2 hours ago [-]
It really depends on how "library of the year" is determined.
Some years back now, our local library got a new boss who was determined to do everything the new and modern way. In the process, the boss drove away half of the paid staff, I don't know what fraction of the volunteer staff, and the entire community support organization. But hey, those are all old people and their values clearly don't matter (who cares if they're the ones with tons of free time?). Help, I don't have the money or people to run programs anymore! Better run away and get another job. Now, the library still exists but a lot of people are going to the next town over, and the new new boss is struggling to rebuild from scratch.
It would be completely unsurprising if "do things the modern way" and "chases awards" are significantly overlapped without corresponding to "improves things for the actual users", and "support LGBT" is code for "gerontophobia".
fzeroracer 2 hours ago [-]
What library is this? Put a name to the story so we can actually confirm what you're saying.
hobs 2 hours ago [-]
You just fantasized an entire line of reasoning to hate a library for checks notes winning a best library award. Use more critical thinking.
o11c 25 minutes ago [-]
Ah yes, critical thinking, like taking an advertising article on the internet at face value and ignoring that there might be more to the story. Who needs Knoll's Law? Also, awards are always given to the party that deserves them and have absolutely no politicking or signaling involved.
I don't claim what I saw locally is exactly what's happening there, but ... my point is, there's probably a lot happening at the local level, and only the locals can really know more. And even then, until the dust settles, you may need to be careful which faction of local politics (which often is completely unrelated to the factions in national politics) you're talking to.
GavinMcG 2 hours ago [-]
Might be a case of ginned up accusations of “poor management” to cover for political animus.
phendrenad2 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
benatkin 1 hours ago [-]
You're accusing the article of being one sided, while espousing a view that to most on here is going to seem one sided. "They want to contract it out to a contractor." This completely leaves out that the contractor is also trying to get the transaction to happen, or at least to improve the likelihood.
So if some article offends your sensibilities enough to call it stupid, maybe give a more balanced take.
phendrenad2 1 hours ago [-]
You're just getting confused by the article, it seems. Nowhere in the article does it make any specific claims about LS&S is "trying to get the transaction to happen", rather it makes vague begging-the-question claims that it's a "takeover attempt". It's probably a slick way to make people assume the conclusion was proved somehow, without actually doing it.
But, on another level, what in the holy name of my increasingly annoyed sensibilities are you even talking about? A contractor wants a contract? Did IBM bid on the healthcare.gov job? What did LS&S do that IBM didn't?
insane_dreamer 1 hours ago [-]
peak capitalism :/
charcircuit 2 hours ago [-]
This title is misleading because the library is already owned by private equity.
>Providing for a community night not be profitable, but that doesn't make it wrong
>Efficiency shouldn't always be a goal
If you don't care about profit or efficiency then you are being wasteful and are not effectively delivering value.
goda90 2 hours ago [-]
Where did you get the idea it was already owned by private equity?
A public library delivers value to a community. Profit is not necessary for that, and can be argued to actually be harmful to delivering value to a community.
Efficiency might not deliver maximum value either when the community is the focus. Something taking a little more time or involving more human effort can actually be fulfilling for those doing and receiving. Firing the librarian that knows all the childrens' names so you can have a kiosk instead isn't delivering value.
charcircuit 2 hours ago [-]
The library is owned by Samual Library Inc which is not the government or a public company.
Profit is not neccessary to deliver value, but it helps optimize it.
If someone knowing kids names is worth it people would be willing to pay more for the service. If people would rather pay less and use kiosks then that may be a better option.
anon7000 2 hours ago [-]
You’re saying that nonprofits are the same as “private equity.” That’s an odd take.
It's a very common "gotcha" comment on HN unfortunately — latch on some specific definition of a term then dismiss anything that doesn't fit it. Not sure what we can do about it unfortunately
eesmith 2 hours ago [-]
Samual Library Inc is a "not-for-profit nonstock corporation ... organized exclusively for charitable and educational purposes." Its bylaws prohibit distributing earnings to "directors, officers, or other private persons, except that the corporation shall be authorized and empowered to pay reasonable compensation for services and to make payments and distributions in furtherance of the purposes set forth in article 6 hereof." - https://samuelslibrary.net/images/about/policies-more/articl...
And you think that makes it a private equity company?
My LLC, which I ran my consulting business under, was neither a government nor a public company ... and neither was it a private equity company.
shkkmo 2 hours ago [-]
You seem a bit confused. Samuels Library Inc is a tax-emempt 501(c)(3) non-profit, which is kind of the opposite of private equity.
oscillatingpie 2 hours ago [-]
Are you saying all public services need to turn a profit?
charcircuit 2 hours ago [-]
It should be a long term goal. At the very least the perspective of how it is being run needs to be thought of in terms of profit.
Xylakant 2 hours ago [-]
Do roads turn a direct profit? Water works? Canals? Flood Dams? Dikes? Are public parks profitable? Should schools be profitable? Is the police profitable? Does the fire department charge for every blaze they contain? Is the congress profitable? Are the courts? The president? The government as a whole?
Society funds a lot of public services because they cannot reasonably be billed to the individual, but enable the society to function and are the underpinning of economic activity. They are profitable because they allow society and the individuals to engage in economic activity which they otherwise could not.
We should strive to make public services efficient, but aiming for profit is against their very nature.
nucleardog 2 hours ago [-]
Or put another way:
Libraries, the fire department, the police department, congress, the courts, and the government are a "cost center". Their services are not directly charged for and on our balance sheet they cost money, however in general the benefit they provide allows all the other beneficial things we want to do to happen and support our "profit centers" like industry. We should work to ensure the money invested is used effectively, but a "cost center" will _never_ turn a profit and asking it to produce one does not make sense.
And for those not following... yes, this is exactly like the IT or legal department in a typical company. At Joe's Widgets the IT department does not charge the customers any money and therefore is a pure cost. But without IT keeping the machinery and networks online, they don't produce many widgets. They pay for their IT department because _overall_ the outcome is better versus going back to manually stamping widgets without computers or automation because "IT costs money". We want to make sure IT isn't spending wastefully, but we can't simply say "IT needs to turn a profit or else we're going to shut them down" otherwise overall things end up less efficient and more expensive and we go out of business.
(As an aside, it's really wild to me how many people in IT can hold the position that "things that don't directly turn a profit shouldn't exist!" while half of our industry is in positions that don't directly turn a profit.)
thelibrarian 16 minutes ago [-]
> The president?
The incumbent has certainly found many creative ways to make it extremely profitable for himself.
TheDong 2 hours ago [-]
A library will not profit from its members being able to read books for free, but society as a whole will profit.
Demanding each individual component of society be profitable leads to the overall detriment of the whole. It leads to hospitals only treating the rich and only for money, it leads to no-one producing art, it leads to homeless shelters not existing. It leads to society becoming an inhumane machine to produce and consume money, and nothing more.
Humans are more important than money, society is more important than money.
dragonwriter 55 minutes ago [-]
It should be an anti-goal. If it can be provided adequately at a profit (that is, if the benefits of purchasing the service to direct purchasers are sufficient to warrant direct users paying a sufficient price to not only offset the costs of providing a service but also to provide a profit to the service provider), then there is probably no reason to have a public service.
The reason to have a public service is primariy that it is desirable but not profitable, probably because of externalized benefits, or because the utility provided is concentrated in a financially disadvantaged population, such that the amount that they are able to pay underrates the utility delivered (the use of money as a proxy for delivered utility is only at best a loose proxy when money itself is unequally distributed), or for some other reason.
If it should be a public service at all, then it should almost without exception be publicly subsidized in whole or in part. Profitability in a public service is a "code smell" that you have something that likely should be a private industry that has instead been unnecessarily monopolized by the state.
MyOutfitIsVague 2 hours ago [-]
Public parks don't turn profits. Public roads don't turn a profit. Food stamp programs and housing assistance don't generate a profit.
Public goods can increase efficiency and well-being in a way that indirectly translates into increased economic efficiency, but no, profit is not a good direct long term goal of most public goods and services.
charcircuit 2 hours ago [-]
>Public parks don't turn profits.
If people don't care enough about a park to fund it, then that space may be of better use to something else.
>Public roads don't turn a profit.
They are a loss leader aimed to make more money elsewhere.
>Food stamp programs and housing assistance don't generate a profit.
If people don't want to fund such things people in those programs should make or buy their own food and housing.
>that indirectly translates into increased economic efficiency
Again the idea of things like loss leaders are not foriegn to entities that want to be profitable.
bluefirebrand 48 minutes ago [-]
> If people don't care enough about a park to fund it, then that space may be of better use to something else
Once the land is used for something else, it will never become a park again.
It is important for us to safeguard land for greenspace like parks and playgrounds and community gardens and stuff, because it is incredibly difficult to reclaim space to make those sorts of spaces once there is a building or different zoning on the land
andelink 2 hours ago [-]
Are you saying that people who use food stamps – because they cannot afford food – should instead buy food with the money they don’t have?
michaelsshaw 2 hours ago [-]
>If people don't care enough about a park to fund it, then that space may be of better use to something else.
No, public parks are awesome. They should remain free.
>They are a loss leader aimed to make more money elsewhere.
You're starting to get it. We pay for public services with our taxes, and in exchange, we get free stuff back that benefits society.
>If people don't want to fund such things people in those programs should make or buy their own food ans housing.
Oh my fucking god. This is seriously the most asinine sentence I have ever read. Bar none. It's honestly difficult to respond to something like this. I'm at a loss for words.
I genuinely don't give a single fuck if you, or anyone else, don't want to fund food stamps. We absolutely should continue funding it. The entire point of those projects is that the recipients specifically CANNOT afford to do these things on their own. You're advocating for further oppression of the downtrodden; it's difficult to understand how one comes to this position.
derbOac 2 hours ago [-]
If I hire a plumber, I hire them to fix my pipes. I don't hire them to generate a profit for me.
If me and my neighbors hire a library to lend us books, I don't expect them to generate a profit for me.
The beneficiary is the citizen receiving the service, not the government receiving a profit.
The idea of government profiting is like trying to make a profit from yourself.
samrus 2 hours ago [-]
Did the food you eat today turn you a profit?
afavour 2 hours ago [-]
> It should be a long term goal
Why?
charcircuit 2 hours ago [-]
Imagine what would happen if Uber never ran at a loss. It wouldn't have been able to grow into what it is now. Losing money in the short term can bring long term wins.
michaelsshaw 2 hours ago [-]
Way to completely dodge the question. The question was not "Why should we allow the public services to run at a loss in the short term?"
The question is: Why should public services aim to produce profit?
michaelsshaw 2 hours ago [-]
Public services serve the public good. Turning a profit for the government is proof of its inefficiency
bix6 2 hours ago [-]
You realize that’s impossible with certain public goods eg USPS? We can either have mail delivery to everyone in the country or we can make profit.
3eb7988a1663 1 hours ago [-]
Think it is easier to just point at something like Defense. Without more active imperialism, I am not sure how the Army/Navy/Airforce is going to pay for all of that Freedom they protect.
kevinventullo 2 hours ago [-]
Was writing this comment a way to drive profit and efficiency?
declan_roberts 3 hours ago [-]
Sounds like they should remove the LGBTQ books that parents and the community don't want and then they'll have their funding restored.
Libraries are not independent entities. They are accountable to elected officials.
mkw5053 3 hours ago [-]
I understand the concern about local accountability, and you're absolutely right that libraries should be responsive to their communities. But the data here suggests the broader community was actually supporting the library.
Most public libraries follow professional collection development standards that try to serve their entire diverse community including families who want those books available. It's a tough balance, but the goal is usually having something for everyone rather than letting any single group determine what everyone else can access.
The community seems to have spoken pretty clearly by successfully defending their library. Sometimes the loudest voices aren't representative of the broader sentiment.
0x3444ac53 2 hours ago [-]
Your comment is inline with how the libraries operate, and I can't tell if some of the others here are just a little homophobic or just woefully misinformed about how libraries function.
Books that aren't being circulated frequently enough get weeded and removed from the collection, usually once or twice a year. Moreover, if books are requested frequently from other branches, or have long hold times, then that volume will typically be added to a collection.
0x3444ac53 3 hours ago [-]
This is against the ethics standards of the ALA, and the entire philosophy that underpins libraries as a whole.
apparent 2 hours ago [-]
My understanding is that the ALA is an ideological organization that has values that are much more aligned with one political party (the one with a very low approval rating). It is not surprising that communities would not want their libraries doing some of the things that the ALA advocates for.
MyOutfitIsVague 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think your understanding is accurate. Their positions are overwhelmingly in support of freedom of information, freedom of speech, privacy, and the public domain. They're opposed to anything that locks down and restricts information, generally oppose unnecessary copyright extension and overbearing copyright laws and rules (including the DMCA and DRM). They have a wide array of positions that are both frequently aligned with and opposed by both major American political parties.
People distort the ALA's position as pushing LGBTQ books on children, but that's just the most in the limelight right now because those are the books that are being challenged the most, and the ALA is generally against book banning.
The ALA is aligned largely with classical liberalism, not modern progressivism, and most American conservatives I knew before 2016 would have agreed with their positions on freedom of information and personal privacy.
apparent 2 hours ago [-]
This is a perversion of the phrase "book banning". Choosing not to have certain books in libraries, or in the kids section of libraries, is not "book banning".
I am aware the ALA takes various issues on topics that most Americans do not care about (copyright extension, DRM/DMCA). The point is that they have taken very strident positions on culture war issues, so the fact that a library is in line with the ALA (presumably on this issue, not on the other issues most people are not aware of/do not care about) makes it unsurprising that the library would get pushback from patrons.
Note that I'm not saying I agree with one side or the other. I'm just pointing out that "the ALA agrees with us" is not a particularly good metric for whether you'll be popular with library patrons in a particular town.
0x3444ac53 1 hours ago [-]
Yes. But the majority of the community seems to be explicitly against the removal of these text from the library. It is an extremely small and loud group of traditional Catholics whose stance on this is unpopular even among other catholics in the community.
apparent 1 hours ago [-]
Interesting; other commenters here were blaming evangelicals. I wonder what the evidence is for it being one or the other group, or if people just have their favorite groups to demonize.
This is a much better response than the one I gave. Thank you for having the patience that I did not <3
0x3444ac53 2 hours ago [-]
The ALA is a ideological organization that advocates for open access to information and resources. Those damn communist, they always want well informed citizens!!
While we're at it someone should really buy out and shut down wikipedia! Have you seen their article on Hitler? They make him sound like a criminal!!
apparent 2 hours ago [-]
This sounds like a response from someone who is not especially informed about the ALA. I work in a related field and am aware of the policy positions they have taken on lightning rod cultural issues. Perhaps you could look into this before claiming that they just want "open access to information and resources".
0x3444ac53 1 hours ago [-]
If that's the case, then please feel free to inform me of what policy positions they take on lightning rod issues that isn't related to their stated goal of providing open access to the public?
apparent 1 hours ago [-]
Drag queen story hours come to mind.
0x3444ac53 56 minutes ago [-]
Drag queen story hour wasn't a policy created by the ALA it was a popular program at some libraries.
The ALA did create a collection of resources for Libraries that wanted to host them, but even they are clear that that is a decision made at the local level [0]. You said you were very familiar with the ALA, because you "work in a related field". It might be helpful to actually read their standards and guidelines [1]. Just in case we're talking past each other, this might also be helpful [2]
And why stop at LGBTQ books? Remove anything that I or my religion don't like!
And why stop at removing them? Burn them!
Whoa, so much smoke! Better repeatedly wave it away from my chest with an outstretched, downward-facing palm!
ghiculescu 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mkw5053 2 hours ago [-]
Not at all, accountability works both ways. The elected officials tried to defund the library, but then the community pushed back and the takeover was withdrawn. That's exactly how democratic accountability should work.
Libraries need to follow constitutional principles and serve their whole community, not just the loudest subset. The broader community clearly supported keeping their award-winning library intact.
0x3444ac53 2 hours ago [-]
No. Libraries exist to serve the communities they are in. Whether it be the public, specialized fields, or universities. Collections are curated by librarians based on the needs of the community. That isn't a decision that is an elected official is qualified to make.
2 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 06:39:57 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
This is, IMO, the critical line, and also one of the deepest problems in the world (and especially America).
A focus on profit is so frequently completely opposed to human wellbeing and a flourishing society. Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims. The result is a catastrophically expensive insurance bureaucracy and worse health outcomes. Not to mention the extreme stress any American feels when interacting with an insurance company over any meaningful amount of money. (Which I’ve experienced, and I have far better coverage than the average American.)
These companies are so clearly, obviously bad for human flourishing. But profit is great!
The incentives are so deeply messed up. Our economy only allows profit as an incentive, which works well when aligned with human wellbeing-being. But as the economy grows, companies consolidate, and profit growth is still expected, nearly every single sector looks for ways to cut costs. And with fewer competitors, it’s easier and easier for entrenched, powerful companies to raise prices and reduce quality with little consequence.
This is clearly bad for human flourishing. But profits are fantastic!
Just because profit is actually aligned with human flourishing in a couple sectors doesn’t mean the system as a whole will continue scaling effectively. It’s clearly not, and it must change to avoid completely suffocating us.
What we see in the modern era is a system in which success is defined as becoming large enough that your customers have no other option but to deal with you. That's not a healthy system.
The impact it has on that town is often huge. But for the business, it’s just a small overhead. A small landlord couldn’t afford to leave their asset unproductive. A multinational conglomerate can.
The death of local high streets is in part due to the unwillingness of landlords to actually rent their properties out for market rate.
What's the economics of not renting out high street retail properties? There must be millions of them across the first world, with a theoretical annual rent roll in the 11 or 12 figures. Are they owned by a million multinational conglomerates foregoing a million dollars each? In that case we are stretching the definition of "multinational conglomerate". Or are they concentrated in the hands of the same hundred companies? In that case they are each missing out on ten billion a year in opportunity. There isn't a company in the world where you couldn't make your name as Head of Global Unused Property managing ten billion a year of revenue.
I don't have an answer for this either, but it must be more complicated than "they're all owned by multinationals who don't care about such small numbers" - the point of multinational companies is that those numbers are no longer small at scale.
One could argue that government policies are anything but altruistic. They fund public education because you need an educated workforce. They fund public health insurance because a healthy workforce is a productive workforce. You distribute the cost over the entire population. Both remove direct costs from employers (e.g. training and providing private health insurance). Both have a tendancy to reduce costs and improve consistency because you are working at a larger scale. It also creates order in society since people generally feel as though more of their needs are being met, and they feel less exploited. All of this contributes to profit both on a social scale and for individual businesses.
Somewhere along the line people forgot the lessons of the 20th century. They forgot that profit goes beyond a line on the current financial statement. It also reflects long term interests.
A denial of human nature is how you get authoritarian socialism with centralized planning, which leads to catastrophe because of the local knowledge problem, and because people have no private incentive to do anything.
"Capitalism" is an incomplete first step towards a system which channels greed into something that's beneficial for all stakeholders. A profit-driven actor making their production more efficient to increase profits is a good thing for everyone.
But capitalism is incomplete because the profit-motive can become pathological. Market failures are commonplace.
The only solution that is proven to work is a mixed economy done right, with clever and lean regulations, and a government not influenced by money, and with the government stepping in occasionally to provide public goods that the market cannot, and with private actors otherwise free to make profits as long as they are not harming any third parties.
I would point out that's precisely what the "private equity firm"--is that true or just a buzzword? no private equity group is taking this library private--is saying about the current library, that the greed of the unionized employees is running the library for their own benefit and at great cost to library and at the expense of the public, and it could be run more efficiently. So, you agree with them at least that much.
>Somewhere along the line people forgot the lessons of the 20th century. They forgot that profit goes beyond a line on the current financial statement.
huh? that wasn't "the lesson of the 20th century". if anything, the 20th century represents democracy and market capitalism's greatest joint achievement, with much less disease and starvation and much more freedom at the end vs the beginning.
you live in one of the greatest times to be alive, and all you can do is complain. when and where from the past would you rather live out your life expectancy of half what it is now, coupled with no HN to bitch on?
The only way denying claims can become a profit booster is to deny enough that premiums can be lowered enough to bring over more new members than was lost in revenue through the premium discount.
So denied claims come from people shopping for the cheapest insurance coverage possible.
Perhaps a society where all income comes from the government in proportion to how much one improves the overall well being of society?
(Yes, it's difficult to measure this objectively, and even harder to agree on what the priorities for societal well being are)
One person’s “well being” might be measured by how many wives and children you have. Another’s might be education level and physical fitness. Another’s could be financial independence.
These all clash with each other in fundamentally incompatible ways.
(half serious)
Not surprising considering profit is taken from the people in the society.
This has been repeated so many times that I think people don’t understand just how small the profit margins are for health insurers. Low to middle single digit percentages. As low as 2-3% in recent years, and much lower than the average S&P 500 corporation.
There are also non-profit insurance companies out there. Their rates are not appreciably different, as you’d expect after seeing how low the profit margins are in for-profit insurers.
I also think people don’t realize that countries with nationalized health care also deny procedures, have pre-approval processes, require step therapy, and will not authorize procedures they don’t believe to be medically necessary or to have enough evidence. There is no health care system in the world which will simply approve and pay for every request.
So while health insurer profit margins are convenient bogeyman, if you deleted their profits entirely from the system it wouldn’t move the needle on costs. It also wouldn’t open the floodgates for approving everything, because no health care system will allow unlimited services. The amount of excess and unnecessary care would be astronomically expensive. I do agree that we need a more robust system in place for ensuring that incorrect denials don’t happen, but health insurance profit margins are barely a blip on the overall cost of health care in the United States.
It’s a combination of high prices for services, American’s unusually high utilization of health care services, and very high rates of drug prescribing that mostly contribute to the cost. I think most Americans would be surprised to discover that a lot of nations with nationalized health care would also be restrictive in their access to many services and prescription drugs. For as much as we talk about insurance companies denying claims, Americans still get far more services and prescriptions than most of their counterparts in other countries.
1) united healthcare made 90 billion dollars gross profit in the last 12mo, and that's only one health insurance company. claiming that it's not a great business at a 2-3% profit margin ignores the scale of money involved, and ignores that the customer for health insurance is truly captive.
2) you're right that america has very high prices in healthcare. doesn't it seem bad that private insurance companies are incentivized to make things cost as much as possible so they can skim that 2-3% off the top? insurance companies negotiate and set prices for services and pharmaceuticals. they now own the pharmacy benefit management companies that would normally be incentivized to negotiate for lower prices.
i would expect in a public health care system that rejects procedures, they would follow consistent guidelines and rules. american health insurance companies will arbitrarily reject a percentage of procedures that they know they should be accepting in order to keep their profit margin in the right range.
i think it's hard for me to see the argument that health insurance companies are a net-positive or even net-neutral party in the united states. i don't think it's a coincidence that we have some of the highest prices and some of the worst outcomes.
> will arbitrarily reject a percentage of procedures that they know they should be accepting in order to keep their profit margin in the right range
So which one is it? Do they want to spend more or less?
> i don't think it's a coincidence that we have some of the highest prices and some of the worst outcomes.
It’s not a coincidence either that doctor compensation is one of the highest in the world.
Somebody in the process makes extreme margins.
Also americans cant be at same time avoiding going to hospital because of costs and “still get far more services than most of their counterparts in other countries”
Believe it or not there are countries where there is mandatory health insurance (your employer or you or state have to pay it) and doctors dont look at costs because they dont really know them. They for sure try to not be wasteful but nobody is second guessing obviously best treatment because it costs 40% more.
Presumably healthcare professionals are performing as many surgeries as they can per day. Just because one person was denied, doesn't mean another person isn't approved.
For example, I'd rather get cancer in the USA than UK: https://www.politico.eu/article/cancer-europe-america-compar...
A big reason the US does better is Medicare (socialized medicine) not because we suffer for-profit insurance.
Lines in private medical care are shorter because people with no insurance don't get in line.
It astounds me how so many people can have such strong opinions about systems they have so little experience with.
I've lived long term in 4 countries (Canada, USA, Japan, Germany) and have dealt extensively with the medical systems in all of them (plus some experiences in Portugal and France).
Every system has its warts, and this is the first thing that naysayers will latch onto, of course. People love to use tu-quoque as a defense mechanism. "See? They're just as bad as we are because you have to wait sometimes, and look at this extreme case right here! It's probably even WORSE than us!"
The fact is, none of the systems are really that bad (with the EXCEPTION of the American system). There's a reason why travel insurance companies have two tiers: All of the world EXCEPT America, and all of the world INCLUDING America.
Have I had to wait for a procedure in Canada? Sure, but they do a pretty decent job of triaging, so yeah outside of the HORROR STORIES (of which you can find anywhere if you dig enough), it's pretty damn good. In Japan I paid a percentage of costs (which are pretty damn reasonable). In France I actually didn't have insurance, so I had to pay FULL price when I came down with pneumonia: 50 euros for the doctor and the antibiotics. In Portugal, I caught COVID, and got treatment within 2 hours of arriving at the hospital in Lisbon.
If you haven't actually been in the medical system of another country, you don't know what you're talking about.
Despite being from Europe, I find this to be a shocking and erroneous interpretation.
Clearly, health insurances have the duty to allocate limited resources (“premiums”) across members. Denying and accepting claims is the mechanism to that end. Accepting all claims would increase premiums and reduce membership (by pricing people out). Would that an ideal state? Clearly not.
If you look at the actual profit margins it’s low single digit percentages. You could eliminate profits altogether and virtually nothing would change. We even have non-profit insurers to look at
It’s strange how the high prices of drugs and services aren’t drawing the ire of people who complain about costs. Drug prices are nearly 3X higher here than international averages and doctors here also earn a lot more with in many cases fewer restrictions on prescribing or offering services than in most EU countries.
The meme that insurance company denials are generating huge profits comes mostly from the public murder of a health insurance CEO last year. For some reason people assumed that insurance companies and their profits must therefore be the core problem with high costs, without making the effort to see where the money actually goes in our health care system.
As you said, there is no health care system which does not have approval processes, deny requests deemed unnecessary, require step therapy, and establish standards of care.
Didn't I see somewhere that that's an artifact of Hollywood-style accounting? If you spin up a sub-business then have that sub-business charge high fees for services you can't live without, the main business might even be losing money!
What's indisputable is:
* in America, we pay more for less healthcare
* most of the money does not go to the doctors and nurses actually providing services
* it also does not go to research, which is funded elsewhere (assuming it keeps being funded at all)
* it's often possible to pay less for a service if you pay the provider directly rather get your insurance involved
Look at administrative overhead instead of profit. People understand that there are problems with the system, and maybe they’re misattributing the problems, sure.
the US needs a healthcare system that doesn’t have a profit motive. (Or limit it to a second, premium market)
Meanwhile everyone is living in low trust economic zones with no community observable, other than anonymous services.
[1] https://www.un.org/unispal/document/a-hrc-59-23-from-economy...
Utilitarism is the ruling moral philosophy, and the only possible countermeasure is externalities but that depends on an effective government which is even more unlikely that asking for ethical behavior to corporations.
What’s more: the belief in govt “inefficiency” is one of the hardest to overcome factors that makes it hard to build good institutions, leading to a vicious cycle.
A major problem of the US is just corruption. If people went to jail for things like congressional insider trading, we’d solve a lot of these issues.
I agree, and that’s the case for dismantling as much of the federal government as possible - it is too big to work. Break up Apple, Google, Amazon, Washington DC.
1. Cut taxes
2. "Pay" for those tax cuts by cutting expenditure;
3. Those programs begin to fail because of the funding cuts;
4. Use those failures to justify further cuts, usually by privatizing something or some form of public-private partnership, which is nothing more than a transfer of government wealth to the already-wealthy.
We saw something similar play out recently with Jane Street in India [2], which seems to boil down to market manipulation between options and the underlying securities.
Back in the 1980s we had corporate raiders who were famous for buying up companies that were trading below book value and then simply breaking them up for parts and selling those parts. I'm sure this went as far as corporate raiders manipulating the price.
Private equity is the latest form of this cancer. Here's the PE playbook:
1. Raise a bunch of money;
2. Buy some company with a large amount of debt, a so-called leveraged buyout ("LBO");
3. Once you control the company, take out massive loans on the company's assets;
4. Sell off any real estate holdings, often to some interested party who most certainly isn't at arms length, possibly for a discounted price, to raise further capital then lease back those holdings you need, ideally with complicated leases that hie the true future cost;
5. Use those loans to pay back the original investors and loans;
6. Sell the debt-ridden husk to whoever is stupid enough to buy it.
Now (6) is the tricky part because you have to make it look like the company is profitable, that you've added value by cutting costs or otherwise increased efficiency. And you do that with complicated debt. Sort of like ARMs in the subprime crisis.
I cannot think of a single success story with PE that has created a successful company that hasn't imploded. I belive most PE funds lose money too. Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me.
I suspect you can make a market-beating fund that simply follows the index but does not buy any PE-infected company.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
[2]: https://www.ft.com/content/6789512f-8775-450b-b0a6-9d9d0c371...
From my own life experiences, I believe that, across a population, there is no correlation between the amount of money people have and their individual rational decision making ability.
There's PE the theory and PE the practice.
The theory is that the buyers improve operational efficiency, restructure the business, dispose of underperforming assets, etc and "transform" the business. As another commenter reminded me, there are a handful of examples of this, most notably HIlton. And any of these successes will throw around "operational efficiency" a lot. Maybe Blackstone really did massively improve Hilton's operations. If so, I still consider it an outlier.
PE in practice seems much closer to the 1980s corporate raiders. It's done by people who have zero understanding of the business and zero interest in it. They've essentially decided to do a rugpull and ripoff the new owners so the "financial engineering" is how to structure the exploding debt in such a way that the new buyers don't realize it before it's too late.
That seems to be the case with many high-profile cases such as Toys'R'Us and Red Lobster.
I personally think this model of loading up a company with debt to pay off the LBO should be illegal.
Safeway had a leveraged buyout in the 80s, and was so successful the merger/acquisition with Kroger was blocked due to monopoly concerns. Hilton also had a leveraged buyout.
PE exists to buy bargain bin companies and extract maximum value from them. Sometimes that’s actually rehabilitating the company. Usually they are just the best at milking a dying cow.
Here are two
Why only two?
https://www.advocate.com/news/front-royal-samuels-library-co...
Here's an opinion pledge where they stated their demands: https://royalexaminer.com/parents-matter-make-the-pledge/
It is worth noting that per the linked article below[0]. The library has a system for preventing readers under the age of 18 from accessing the books in the New Adult section of the library, and it's one that requires parents to opt into their child having access to those materials.
[0]: https://www.nvdaily.com/nvdaily/catholic-library-supporters-...
Books:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91010302-you-need-to-chi... ref: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16YUZFgYY2/
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53241064-this-is-why-the... ref: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16kKwC3PDD/
Found the list: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRzUaZiy2h4gi-c_...
I find it hard to believe that even a plurality wants these books banned. Do we have proportions, or is it just a number of complaints?
Happens a lot at universities and non profits. A big donor will sometimes only agree to donate if certain conditions are met, and as a result can strong arm the other party into whatever they want. The public sector is the same; At the local level it's often business owners that have enough influence over the local economy.
But the same library orders one copy of Heartstopper and all hell breaks loose.
Also, we shouldn't dilute the meaning of the term "book banners" to refer to anyone who doesn't want a particular book in a particular place (even if that place is a public library). In the US, we are spoiled to have zero actually banned books. Anyone who wants to is free to purchase any book they want, as long as it's for sale somewhere. People who don't want books that have sexual content (which a disproportionate number of sexuality-focused books do) in the kids' section might be fine with those books existing in a different section, or in a private bookstore. True "book banners" would want to enforce a ban on them existing anywhere. This is a subset—and quite possibly a small one—of the former group.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Perfectly_Normal
I have another comment on this thread where I linked a lot of related information about this.
Thanks for the wikipedia link. The criticism section is particularly enlightening:
> In a 2023 Slate article, Aymann Ismail, who until then had considered most attempts to ban books hysterical, was taken aback by the book's explicitness.
While digging for this there does seem to be a young adult novel about a young gay man that does feature sexually explicit content (although it doesn't appear pornographic at all). The library keeps it in the "New Adults section. Which requires that anyone under age get explicit permission from their guardian to access, and they even created a new kind of library card to help moderate said access.
This feels less and less like you're interested in discussing this and more like you're grasping for some kind of "gotcha" argument. I'm probably not going to respond again unless it feels productive.
Meanwhile within their church, on several occasions it was discovered that a man had sexually assaulted little boys. Did they kick him out of the church and go to the police? No, he was a sinner who could be saved by prayer. Until he did it again, and again. Some stupid parents even let him take their boy on a weekend trip years after the situation first came to light. You don't need me to tell you what happened on that trip. I think they finally did get the police involved, but that's after my family finally wised up and left the church.
Unfortunately this wasn't the only incident. There was another family that had two teenage boys. Their teenage boys? Molesting little girls on multiple occasions. Call the police? No, instead have the boys admit their guilt in front of the entire congregation, laying-on hands, prayer, etc. Until they did it again. That family finally high-taled it out of the state.
To this day I wonder why I got out unscathed, except second-hand knowing what was going on. So, yes I have met these evangelicals. Yes, I know their priorities and how they would rather turn a blind eye to sexual assault going on within their own church all the while trying to have Pride parades or whatever banned. Sure, they don't _want_ sexual assault happening, but did they do the slightest to prevent it? No. They tried to pray it away, but meanwhile were happy to expend countless man-hours protesting about obscene books to protect their children. No, I'm not making a purely-snarky comment.
If you're moved by this more in-depth explanation, I'd appreciate if you unflagged my comment.
Are there any books that a public community library should not be willing to carry?
Most University Libraries carry those text. I'm not sure if it would be particularly useful in the context of a public library (as the goal is to serve a local community with a wide range of needs). However, if there was interest then it would likely be put into circulation.
I would speculate that there was likely a time when each of those were on shelves, but they were likely weeded out due to lack of interest.
But you see no qualitative difference between {a book written by a white supremacist, neo-Nazi organization; a fabricated text (i.e., propaganda); and a book the SPLC describes as "'widely revered by American white supremacists' and 'a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries', and attributed its popularity to the plot's parallels with the white genocide conspiracy theory."} and "The book Pride Colors by Robin Stevenson, which explains the meaning of the rainbow colors in the Pride flag"[1]?
What is the literary value of white supremacist drivel or a fabricated text to a community library? (I'd wager approximately none.) Versus the books being complained about (anything and everything LGBTQ+). (Definite value from helping people exploring LGBTQ+ topics for themselves, simply trying to learn about LGBTQ people, to helping non-homophobic parents raise inclusive, tolerant children who don't want to spread hate & intolerance, and which need only be checked out by those who actually desire to read them.) There is demand for books of the nature being banned here; I cannot see there being anywhere near the same demand for books filled with bile.
And again, the empirical position (and for some subsets, outright stated position) of the right is to remove any and all traces of LGBTQ media from libraries. (And more broadly, from society, as well.)
In this particular instance[1], we can see this in one of the complaints:
> “Our library should not be carrying ANY material about LGBT,” one person wrote.
and,
> “Family has 2 moms — unacceptable,” the person wrote of another book. They also complained, “This book makes LGBTQ+ look ‘harmless’ and acceptable.”
Someone else points out exactly your quip; what about equal representation?
> She continued, “You said taxation without representation. What about my representation in the library? What about what I want my children to read? What about the 4 percent [of] LGBTQ members in your community that you represent that only get 1 percent of the books? Are they not being represented fairly with their tax dollars?”
In the broader national debate, we've seen this pattern endlessly; "protect the children" is a wedge to open a fissure towards a wholesale and complete ban. E.g., see the FL Don't Say Gay Act, which started as objections that education on such topics needed to be "age appropriate" but was then subsequently expanded until is was a wholesale ban on education of numerous topics.
[1]: https://www.advocate.com/news/front-royal-samuels-library-co...
We need some kind of sliding scale where certain actions by people who either "should have known better" (i.e., are exploiting insider knowledge) or "had no basis for acting" (i.e., are rich enough to not need to make any more money) can be quickly curtailed without a need to specifically prove everything that they did. Something loosely akin to "if you had a billion dollars, you'd better be able to affirmatively prove you did everything squeaky clean or we're just going to take $500 million".
Here’s that episode if any of you are curious: https://www.heatpumped.org/p/plunder-how-private-equity-is-r...
I wonder when they start introducing their own currencies like in the old mining towns.
Back to feudalism we go, election by election.
They've created a new library board charged with determining how to provide library services in the county: https://www.nvdaily.com/nvdaily/warren-supervisors-appoint-n...
Somewhat amusingly, the library is a subordinate of the county. If the library is in fact poorly managed, the poor management is the fault of the board of supervisors.
Some years back now, our local library got a new boss who was determined to do everything the new and modern way. In the process, the boss drove away half of the paid staff, I don't know what fraction of the volunteer staff, and the entire community support organization. But hey, those are all old people and their values clearly don't matter (who cares if they're the ones with tons of free time?). Help, I don't have the money or people to run programs anymore! Better run away and get another job. Now, the library still exists but a lot of people are going to the next town over, and the new new boss is struggling to rebuild from scratch.
It would be completely unsurprising if "do things the modern way" and "chases awards" are significantly overlapped without corresponding to "improves things for the actual users", and "support LGBT" is code for "gerontophobia".
I don't claim what I saw locally is exactly what's happening there, but ... my point is, there's probably a lot happening at the local level, and only the locals can really know more. And even then, until the dust settles, you may need to be careful which faction of local politics (which often is completely unrelated to the factions in national politics) you're talking to.
So if some article offends your sensibilities enough to call it stupid, maybe give a more balanced take.
But, on another level, what in the holy name of my increasingly annoyed sensibilities are you even talking about? A contractor wants a contract? Did IBM bid on the healthcare.gov job? What did LS&S do that IBM didn't?
>Providing for a community night not be profitable, but that doesn't make it wrong
>Efficiency shouldn't always be a goal
If you don't care about profit or efficiency then you are being wasteful and are not effectively delivering value.
A public library delivers value to a community. Profit is not necessary for that, and can be argued to actually be harmful to delivering value to a community.
Efficiency might not deliver maximum value either when the community is the focus. Something taking a little more time or involving more human effort can actually be fulfilling for those doing and receiving. Firing the librarian that knows all the childrens' names so you can have a kiosk instead isn't delivering value.
Profit is not neccessary to deliver value, but it helps optimize it.
If someone knowing kids names is worth it people would be willing to pay more for the service. If people would rather pay less and use kiosks then that may be a better option.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/540...
And you think that makes it a private equity company?
My LLC, which I ran my consulting business under, was neither a government nor a public company ... and neither was it a private equity company.
Society funds a lot of public services because they cannot reasonably be billed to the individual, but enable the society to function and are the underpinning of economic activity. They are profitable because they allow society and the individuals to engage in economic activity which they otherwise could not.
We should strive to make public services efficient, but aiming for profit is against their very nature.
Libraries, the fire department, the police department, congress, the courts, and the government are a "cost center". Their services are not directly charged for and on our balance sheet they cost money, however in general the benefit they provide allows all the other beneficial things we want to do to happen and support our "profit centers" like industry. We should work to ensure the money invested is used effectively, but a "cost center" will _never_ turn a profit and asking it to produce one does not make sense.
And for those not following... yes, this is exactly like the IT or legal department in a typical company. At Joe's Widgets the IT department does not charge the customers any money and therefore is a pure cost. But without IT keeping the machinery and networks online, they don't produce many widgets. They pay for their IT department because _overall_ the outcome is better versus going back to manually stamping widgets without computers or automation because "IT costs money". We want to make sure IT isn't spending wastefully, but we can't simply say "IT needs to turn a profit or else we're going to shut them down" otherwise overall things end up less efficient and more expensive and we go out of business.
(As an aside, it's really wild to me how many people in IT can hold the position that "things that don't directly turn a profit shouldn't exist!" while half of our industry is in positions that don't directly turn a profit.)
The incumbent has certainly found many creative ways to make it extremely profitable for himself.
Demanding each individual component of society be profitable leads to the overall detriment of the whole. It leads to hospitals only treating the rich and only for money, it leads to no-one producing art, it leads to homeless shelters not existing. It leads to society becoming an inhumane machine to produce and consume money, and nothing more.
Humans are more important than money, society is more important than money.
The reason to have a public service is primariy that it is desirable but not profitable, probably because of externalized benefits, or because the utility provided is concentrated in a financially disadvantaged population, such that the amount that they are able to pay underrates the utility delivered (the use of money as a proxy for delivered utility is only at best a loose proxy when money itself is unequally distributed), or for some other reason.
If it should be a public service at all, then it should almost without exception be publicly subsidized in whole or in part. Profitability in a public service is a "code smell" that you have something that likely should be a private industry that has instead been unnecessarily monopolized by the state.
Public goods can increase efficiency and well-being in a way that indirectly translates into increased economic efficiency, but no, profit is not a good direct long term goal of most public goods and services.
If people don't care enough about a park to fund it, then that space may be of better use to something else.
>Public roads don't turn a profit.
They are a loss leader aimed to make more money elsewhere.
>Food stamp programs and housing assistance don't generate a profit.
If people don't want to fund such things people in those programs should make or buy their own food and housing.
>that indirectly translates into increased economic efficiency
Again the idea of things like loss leaders are not foriegn to entities that want to be profitable.
Once the land is used for something else, it will never become a park again.
It is important for us to safeguard land for greenspace like parks and playgrounds and community gardens and stuff, because it is incredibly difficult to reclaim space to make those sorts of spaces once there is a building or different zoning on the land
No, public parks are awesome. They should remain free.
>They are a loss leader aimed to make more money elsewhere.
You're starting to get it. We pay for public services with our taxes, and in exchange, we get free stuff back that benefits society.
>If people don't want to fund such things people in those programs should make or buy their own food ans housing.
Oh my fucking god. This is seriously the most asinine sentence I have ever read. Bar none. It's honestly difficult to respond to something like this. I'm at a loss for words.
I genuinely don't give a single fuck if you, or anyone else, don't want to fund food stamps. We absolutely should continue funding it. The entire point of those projects is that the recipients specifically CANNOT afford to do these things on their own. You're advocating for further oppression of the downtrodden; it's difficult to understand how one comes to this position.
If me and my neighbors hire a library to lend us books, I don't expect them to generate a profit for me.
The beneficiary is the citizen receiving the service, not the government receiving a profit.
The idea of government profiting is like trying to make a profit from yourself.
Why?
The question is: Why should public services aim to produce profit?
Libraries are not independent entities. They are accountable to elected officials.
Most public libraries follow professional collection development standards that try to serve their entire diverse community including families who want those books available. It's a tough balance, but the goal is usually having something for everyone rather than letting any single group determine what everyone else can access.
The community seems to have spoken pretty clearly by successfully defending their library. Sometimes the loudest voices aren't representative of the broader sentiment.
Books that aren't being circulated frequently enough get weeded and removed from the collection, usually once or twice a year. Moreover, if books are requested frequently from other branches, or have long hold times, then that volume will typically be added to a collection.
People distort the ALA's position as pushing LGBTQ books on children, but that's just the most in the limelight right now because those are the books that are being challenged the most, and the ALA is generally against book banning.
The ALA is aligned largely with classical liberalism, not modern progressivism, and most American conservatives I knew before 2016 would have agreed with their positions on freedom of information and personal privacy.
I am aware the ALA takes various issues on topics that most Americans do not care about (copyright extension, DRM/DMCA). The point is that they have taken very strident positions on culture war issues, so the fact that a library is in line with the ALA (presumably on this issue, not on the other issues most people are not aware of/do not care about) makes it unsurprising that the library would get pushback from patrons.
Note that I'm not saying I agree with one side or the other. I'm just pointing out that "the ALA agrees with us" is not a particularly good metric for whether you'll be popular with library patrons in a particular town.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44517341
While we're at it someone should really buy out and shut down wikipedia! Have you seen their article on Hitler? They make him sound like a criminal!!
The ALA did create a collection of resources for Libraries that wanted to host them, but even they are clear that that is a decision made at the local level [0]. You said you were very familiar with the ALA, because you "work in a related field". It might be helpful to actually read their standards and guidelines [1]. Just in case we're talking past each other, this might also be helpful [2]
[0]: https://www.ala.org/advocacy/libraries-respond-drag-queen-st...
[1]: https://www.ala.org/tools/guidelines
[2]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/policy
And why stop at removing them? Burn them!
Whoa, so much smoke! Better repeatedly wave it away from my chest with an outstretched, downward-facing palm!
Libraries need to follow constitutional principles and serve their whole community, not just the loudest subset. The broader community clearly supported keeping their award-winning library intact.