Are people actually against libraries dying? What the hell is this deluded take?
Libraries provide a host of public services beyond “warehouse for books”. A big part of our digital archives come from library digitization programs. And knowing how to sort, store, and distribute this information is a vital piece of library science.
Losing libraries means losing the tools we use to organize information on a national scale.
yes. Personally, i use libraries because I cannot afford buying a book (mostly programming) and I don’t like split screen and can’t afford another monitor. I have used the library here in Toronto so many times they know me by name now at two branches.
I don’t care if libraries get used or not, they NEED to be kept open. For the sake of information keeping and internet for those who don’t have any at home
Oh no. You know shit is really terrible when they cannot even afford to communicate at 8 bits. It’s 5 bits Baudot code. Capital letters only. They actually had to pay extra for @, #, and $. Thankfully, by 1870s, % was part of the character set. My heart’s with anyone who can’t just blast UTF-8 out wherever they can.
(Edit: In case you’re wondering why it has a weird gif attached to it: The Memelord, Musky Elon, has decreed that you can actually attach a shitty random gif FOR FREE. So of course any cash strapped institution will do so.)
This what happens when you elect a cop.
As the cousin of a NY public librarian, fuck mayor Adams, but for so many more reasons than this.
Stop voting cops in as mayor’s, because at the end of the day they’re still just corrupt cops.
Good! How else are we supposed to fund POLICE OFFICERS who get to PICK and CHOOSE what crimes or people to Investigate if we don’t defund School and Libraries?
“So are you going to let me cum in your ass or not?”
Idk about NYC, but my local library might as well rebrand to a homeless shelter. I love the concept of libraries, but if they aren’t going to throw out the homeless people using it as a place to jerk off and do drugs, then idk what to do. I personally don’t feel safe at ours, especially with my kids.
Not one of the responses to your comment seem to actually address the issue.
As usual, lemmy users are too busy trying to prove that they’re way holier than thou and forget they live in the real world, not the idealized ones they make up in their overly politicized fantasies.
People not feeling safe due to homelessness at a library will not be using a library, they will not see value in the library because it’s not a place they would go to. They also likely won’t care about them enough to make additional funding a major concern for them.
If you want to procure more funding for a library, it needs to be a place people see value in.
You can work to solve homelessness and also improve safety of libraries, demonizing someone for not wanting to go somewhere because they’re uncomfortable and feel unsafe is not helping support your issue.
“I hate seeing homeless people trying to cope with being homeless”
ok so do something about it, vote for people who will fix it, donate money to places that will help, volunteer at food banks, community centres, soup kitchens, be the change you want to see.
you: no, I prefer to complain
you’re part of the problem.
“then idk what to do.”
good lord you’re an idiot. and the terrifying thing is you procreated.
“I hate seeing homeless people trying to cope with being homeless”
This is called a number of things:
- putting words in someone’s mouth
- mis-using quotation marks
- a straw man
He didn’t say that. He said he hates to see homeless people in there jerking off and doing drugs.
Respond to that. Don’t respond to something else that so heavily distorts what the other guy said. There’s no point, other than to sacrifice anything valuable the conversation could have been into being a play about how morally superior you are.
Ugh.
Was going to say the same thing, only you said it much nicer then I would have.
Libraries are the last bastion of indoor public spaces. If you have a problem with people experiencing homelessness, do something about it. Don’t complain about the one remaining place that welcomes all people.
If you can’t be in a library without jerking off in the shared spade, you have to go outside.
Yeah, you shouldn’t see homeless people. no one should!
(/s)
I don’t think the words “jerking off or doing drugs” were accidental in that comment. The request isn’t to ban homeless people from being in the library respectfully.
A rule like “no large backpacks” is bullshit, and anti-homeless. Backpacks aren’t a disruption to the library.
A rule like “no jerking off or doing drugs” is perfectly reasonable.
I mean, this but unironically? No one should be seeing homeless people because they shouldn’t be homeless.
But they do exist, something systematic must be changed for then not to exist. (Public housing, maybe?)
But until than, what?
There is no system under which nobody will be homeless, unless some people are kept inside by force. We can reduce homelessness, but if we don’t stop until there is ZERO then we will have gone far into the realm of cutting people’s rights down so much they can’t screw their own lives up.
I hate that this is true, but we don’t benefit from pretending (or legitimately believing) that it isn’t.
In order to have a world where people can determine their own destiny, ie in order to have a world with freedom, we must allow people to destroy themselves.
The system is badly rigged and unfair, but even the perfect system will still have some homeless people.
you can ease it by volunteering. That’s what I do. I volunteer with my local community center and food bank. I mean it’s something instead of nothing.
Until that point in time people have to accept that there will be people living on the streets, they will be drinking, they will be doing drugs to cope with living on the streets and nothing will change until people stop complaining and attempt to make said change.
There’s maybe two problems with this:
- public housing is a part of the picture, and so are public libraries. The solution is certainly not to cut library spending just because there are homeless people using it
- Thinking there being homeless people around is an issue that needs solving is itself pretty bigoted. Like, maybe you have a problem with people who haven’t showered for a while? or people who use the library for personal activities because there are no better places for them to do them? But ‘these people are a problem’ itself becomes problematic because you’ve consolidated those qualities you find objectionable into a class of person, and that makes it really easy to forget/misplace/dismiss the humanity those people deserve.
It’s a common attitude, so don’t feel like i’m picking you out personally to scold. More people should be aware of how that attitude dehumanizes people experiencing shelter insecurity.
Seriously, have you considered that the same ideology that strive to choke public libraries, also the one that push people to homelessness? (At least unsheltered homelessness)
Only at the lowest possible resolution image of the situation.
I’m sure it’s possible to enforce a “don’t do drugs or jerk off here” rule at libraries, without destroying all forms of civic responsibility for the downtrodden.
You don’t get it. We are saying that the same people who want to close down libraries are also the ones causing more people to become homeless and/or closing down homeless shelters.
No they probably shouldn’t be jerking off at a library, but they don’t have anywhere else to do it. Maybe if you had been homeless you might understand.
Adams sucks and it’s embarrassing that people here elected him.
Election is next year
Might vote for brad lander
Yeah we really don’t like him. Was super bummed he won.
It’s hysterical to hear right-wing commentary about how New York Democrats are socialist Marxist communist hippies when the reality has much more goose-stepping to it.
He won by 7k votes in an election with 21% registered voter turnout.
He won not by broad appeal but rather by apathy - his voters were engaged by fear mongering bait plastered on every news outlet about “crime” so they elected a goose stepping cop.
You don’t understand though, that’s millions we could throw at building another stadium for a private individual to own and profit off of!
It’s the same with the federal budget and NASA. It pisses me off to no end to see the only x-ray telescope we have get the axe so we can throw fucking Raytheon more money to bomb Palestinians.
DON’T YOU CARE ABOUT THE POOR BILLIONAIRES!?
Devil’s advocate -
Isn’t 0.4% of a gigantic city’s budget for just library services really fuckin expensive?
Do they mean that their budget’s been cut by 50+ million?
Isn’t 0.4% of a gigantic city’s budget for just library services really fuckin expensive?
No. You’re talking about something on the order of $3-5 / resident / year. That’s significantly less than residents spend on Netflix - $192 / resident / year - by comparison. And they get access to physical space and materials, rather than having to source their own hardware to access the service.
If there’s 20 million NY residents and the budget is 435 million then that’s $21.75 per resident.
Fair enough. Still incredibly cheap.
I was talking about the actual figures, which I couldn’t find. Did they have their budget cut by 50+ million?
I did a quick search and the library service in England costs 840 million per year for an entire country.
Just wondering what the budget is for a city like that, and why
I’m not sure this is the big gotcha you think it is. To serve a large population in a big relatively small area, you can easily achieve your goals with fewer, larger locations. This will allow a greater selection per location, which reduces the odds you will have to wait for the desired product to be shipped in. Moreover, land isn’t cheap in New York, whereas it may well be in smaller locales in England. Either way, a reasonable metric is cost per capita to provide services for a region, and England is only about 2/3 as expensive as New York. I suspect the cost of living is higher in New York than England, and it will certainly have an impact of the relative budgets of the two organizations. And we haven’t talked about the climate control requirements in England vs. New York because, frankly, I’m not too clear about the relative climate differences to say whether that’s a significant issue in the first place.
It’s about a 13% cut in funding. Between the aprox. 207 libraries it cuts almost 300k from each leaving about 1.9 million per branch. These numbers are inflated in straight division like that because some of the libraries are not normal libraries, but research libraries which would have higher budgets so maybe around 1 - 1.2 million per regular branch. If you think that sounds like a lot because 1.2 million sounds like a big number, you’ve obviously never run a business.
I did a quick search and the library service in England costs 840 million per year for an entire country.
Or roughly $12/resident/year. Admittedly, England has also been cutting deeply into their social services budgets, with library spending falling by over a quarter over the last decade. The UK has lost over a fifth of its public libraries during this time and continues to cut deeper and deeper into these budgets. So its per-capita cheap, but also a popular target for enormous budget cuts.
Compare that to the city’s police budgets and you’ll find a yawning gap that’s only growing larger with time.
Bloody hell are you a politician?! 😂 I’ve asked two simple questions about the post you shared and your response is a) downvote then b) dodge the question
It seems like a huge amount to me. 431 million dollars?
It’s a gigantic library, #1 in the world by visitors by a lot, #4 by number of books, and they’re doing that in NYC in buildings that look like this and a bunch of the books are 600 years old or have George Washington’s handwriting on them, so it’s real fucking expensive.
I always only see this, when i encounter that image:
Sorry for the distraction.
Eric Adams is a fucking piece of shit.
It was wild to see, but New Yorkers seem to love picking the guy who promises to be the biggest asshole to homeless people.
I had the homelessness situation described to me yesterday as such: When people see homelessness, they equate it to crime. But when people think of crime, they think of violent robberies and murders. This makes those people view the homeless only through a lense of prosecution. And this view and subsequent treatment only exacerbates the problem.
I asked nypl to let me pay for a library card. they won’t issue. they will issue if I walk into a branch, but it’s a temporary card unless I can prove residency.
I don’t think they should have their budget cut but I would pay a subscription fee to access it from out-of-state.
Can someone help them be on the fediverse and help set up indy fundraising that way?
