10 ms·

The societies of North America have totally abandoned the middle class and its ambitions. Instead of staying true to their goals of education, libraries have b

The societies of North America have totally abandoned the middle class and its ambitions. Instead of staying true to their goals of education, libraries have become daytime homeless shelters driving away their original patrons. So have busses, and trains. Schools have opted out of their obligations to provide the best educations to the public instead tailoring the education to the least capable. Ultimately this will lead to the further hollowing of our civil society as the middle class realizes the bureaucratic core does not have their best interests at heart. But Brutus is an honorable man.

klyrs 3y ago
> libraries have become daytime homeless shelters My library looks nothing like this. You're painting all libraries with a broad brush, generalizing from a very small number of libraries in the downtown core of a handful of cities. But yeah. Our view of homelessness as a personal failure of the homeless person, rather than a societal failure to care for its people, is not working. More punishment and less services only exacerbates the problem.
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  Except that it’s cities which prioritize services that have this problem — eg, Seattle.
  - klyrs 3y ago
    It's also the cities for which housing is most unaffordable.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      Seattle has a levy on the ballot for a massive increase in property taxes in order to make housing more affordable. I am not making this up.
      - RugnirViking 3y ago
        I don't think property tax factors much at all into land price. Else wouldn't land price be relatively consistent across locations with same tax systems
        WalterBright 3y ago
        It factors very much into the rent price. Lots of people think the property tax is paid by the landlord, and think increasing it sticks it to the landlord, but it is paid by the renters.
      - zdragnar 3y ago
        See also California in 2009 had a proposal in their budget for a $1.2 million commission to promote the blueberry industry- paid for by a new tax specifically on blueberries.
      - klyrs 3y ago
        A levy of 45 cents per $1000, which according to the seattle times: > The bulk of money raised from the new levy, $707 million, would go toward the construction of new subsidized rental homes and improvements to aging affordable apartments. Those programs are focused on housing for people making 60% of area median income or less, about $74,000 a year for a family of three. Nearly two-thirds of the funding would fund housing for those making even less, 30% of area median income or $37,000 for a family of three. The current levy (passed in 2016) is 25 cents per $1000. A tax of a few hundred dollars per year on a million dollar home isn't making an impact on housing affordability. Expanding the availability of affordable housing might. I'm skeptical that $707M is enough to make a dent.
        ianburrell 3y ago
        The total Seattle property tax is $8.29 per $1000. $.20 is a massive 2% increase.
        WalterBright 3y ago
  - vkou 3y ago
    They are the cities that have to make up the slack for the rest of the country not pulling its weight, and exporting its poverty and problems to them. Or they are the cities with the worst housing affordability problems. Or they are just the cities that have these public services. Not a lot of people complaining about homeless people riding the subway in rural Texas, because rural Texas doesn't have a subway. ---- Seattle, by the way, got a 'prosecute everything and restart the war on drugs' city attourney and a 'sweep the homeless away' mayor. Strangely enough, neither policy has done shit to resolve any of the problems. Oh, now the camp isn't in the park, it's on the street bordering the park, what an improvement for everyone... It took the state legislature to fix the city's problem (by banning SFH zoning, and hitting NIMBYs over the head with a stick), and maaaaybe we'll see the fruits of that policy ripen in a decade or two.
    - zmgsabst 3y ago
      Seattle ended up changing to those policies because of their previous “let vagrants do whatever and spend endless amounts on services” failures — and people who pay taxes were understandably upset that negative results were produced for huge sums of money. The situation improved for average people after those changes. > Oh, now the camp isn't in the park, it's on the street bordering the park, what an improvement for everyone Yes, everyone is better off when parks are drug vagrant free and possible to be enjoyed by everyone — even if that policy doesn’t solve every problem. Toxic empathy is saying you should destroy society and afflict everyone with suffering because you haven’t yet created Utopia — and I think the responses to me show why excluding other voices under the guise of “mUh SyStEmS tHiNkInG” failed in cities like Seattle. You need both law and order and compassion for society to flourish. The only part we agree on is that cleaning up the mess is a decade scale challenge — especially now that toxic empathy has taken Seattle down the wrong path for the past decade.
      - klyrs 3y ago
        > “mUh SyStEmS tHiNkInG” If you're going to make fun of people like this, you shouldn't expect thoughtful responses.
  - drewcoo 3y ago
    So in Seattle you house the homeless in a giant Rem Koolhaas terrarium. There are worse things. When I lived there, I didn't know many other software folks who used the public library system at all. Not because of smelly homeless people. It was just more convenient for them to buy anything they wanted to read/watch/listen to. And there were lots of convenient branch libraries for kids - better than trekking to the terrarium downtown anyway.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      The vast bulk of books are available used on Amazon for a couple dollars & shipping. I buy a lot that way. The local public library doesn't have the books I want to read. But the library does have DVDs I can borrow and watch, and music CDs I can borrow and see if I like. Netflix will parcel out a miniseries one disk at a time, while I can borrow the box set from the library and binge it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Solvency 3y ago
What? My town has three libraries alone, all of which are large, spacious, extremely clean, super quiet, full of great material, and are constantly full of well behaved citizens. You're not describing a feature of modern libraries. You're describing a local problem.
- dangwhy 3y ago
  > My town i think GP is talking about big cities. My library ( heart of chicago) is def fits the description. streetview : https://www.google.com/local/place/fid/0x880e2d00ee6fbd09:0xe406d0af8ab672bc/photosphere?iu=https://streetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com/v1/thumbnail?panoid%3DT-OtSabslM4P0b9kLx5tbQ%26cb_client%3Dlu.gallery.gps%26w%3D160%26h%3D106%26yaw%3D88.96404%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100&ik=CAISFlQtT3RTYWJzbE00UDBiOWtMeDV0YlE%3D https://www.google.com/local/place/fid/0x880e2d00ee6fbd09:0x... This is outside my libary from st view: https://imgur.com/a/CE51r2v https://imgur.com/a/CE51r2v There is usually a huge congregation of homeless there by afternoon. And its even worse inside the library. You get hit with stench as soon as you open the library door. Sucks because libarians have exceptional knowledge that any book lover would enjoy talking to. > You're describing a local problem. Unless you are suggesting middle class can only exist in the burbs and small towns. I 've lived in pilsen chicago for over 25 yrs, this is my home. Hate to relocate in next few yrs because now i have newborn.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  It's an incredibly common local problem that you find across a great deal of the US.
  - geraldwhen 3y ago
    [dead]
- thebooktocome 3y ago
  Agreed. I live in a city with a noticeable homeless problem, but our extensive system of libraries is perfectly safe. Now, ten or twenty years ago, the main branch downtown was in what certain conservative commentators might have called a "no-go zone"—but really the neighborhood around the library was fine. It seemed to me that the drug gangs in the area back then had some kind of unspoken agreement that the library was neutral (dare I say sacred?) ground.
supertofu 3y ago
This is only true in big cities. Definitely true in LA and NYC. I was astounded to find that the small east-coast college town where I now live has a clean, bright, pleasant library that serves as a community educational space for all (not just the homeless or teenagers.) The bathrooms are usually spotless. I wonder: how have massive cities like LA and NYC allowed their libraries defacto homeless shelters? It's a shame that public libraries in these cities are essentially unusable to the average taxpayer.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  > I wonder: how have massive cities like LA and NYC allowed their libraries defacto homeless shelters? It's a shame that public libraries in these cities are essentially unusable to the average taxpayer. Somehow I doubt that all of the branch libraries of those systems are "homeless shelters." More likely the it's just the larger libraries near the actual shelters. Where "the average taxpayer" wouldn't spend time anyway.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > the small east-coast college town where I now live has a clean, bright, pleasant library that serves as a community educational space for all Small college towns have a couple of real advantages over big cities in this regard. First, they're small, which helps a lot. Second, they tend to have more funding available per-capita than large cities do.
- platyp 3y ago
  That has definitely not been my experience in NYC. I've lived in 3 neighborhoods in Queens, and all of them have had great local libraries that were clean and had friendly staff.
  - supertofu 3y ago
    I agree that borough libraries are very useable. The LIC library is wonderful, for example. But Manhattan libraries are pretty difficult.
- wombat-man 3y ago
drewcoo 3y ago
> Instead of staying true to their goals of education, libraries have become daytime homeless shelters driving away their original patrons. Previously, there had been private libraries for the elite. Carnegie libraries, making public libraries widespread across the country, were known by uppity folks for attracting "undesirables." People of all races, genders, and social statuses were welcome there. Those were the original patrons. That was Carnegie's goal. https://www.npr.org/2013/08/01/207272849/how-andrew-carnegie-turned-his-fortune-into-a-library-legacy https://www.npr.org/2013/08/01/207272849/how-andrew-carnegie... > Schools have opted out of their obligations to provide the best educations to the public instead tailoring the education to the least capable Our current school system was designed to create compliant factory workers. They're still making an uncreative, docile workforce, but where are the jobs? https://qz.com/1314814/universal-education-was-first-promoted-by-industrialists-who-wanted-docile-factory-workers https://qz.com/1314814/universal-education-was-first-promote...
lapcat 3y ago
> The societies of North America have totally abandoned the middle class and They've totally abandoned the the middle class and the lower class. That's why we're having these problems. Pitting middle class against lower class allows the upper class to get away with sucking every last penny out of society and abandoning the greater good.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  How does that reconcile with Washington State just passing a 7% tax on capital gains exceeding $250,000?
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    Comes far from even closing the gap on the net favorable tax treatment of capital gains which itself favors the wealthy, but, sure, “totally abandoned” the classes below the haut bourgeoisie may be a slight exaggeration; there is some concern which occasionally manifest is some small policy measures.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      Income is not taxed in Washington, so there is no favorable treatment of capital gains. Quite the reverse.
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        Washington is not separate from the United States, and income is taxed in the United States, and 7% at $250k plus doesn’t close the gap between it and normal (or, a fortiori, specifically labor, which has additional taxes on top of general income tax) income. The fact that Washington wasn’t further widening that gap between labor capital taxes by taxing regular income before adopting its capital gains tax is tangential.
        WalterBright 3y ago

klyrs 3y ago

> libraries have become daytime homeless shelters My library looks nothing like this. You're painting all libraries with a broad brush, generalizing from a very small number of libraries in the downtown core of a handful of cities. But yeah. Our view of homelessness as a personal failure of the homeless person, rather than a societal failure to care for its people, is not working. More punishment and less services only exacerbates the problem.

zmgsabst 3y ago
Except that it’s cities which prioritize services that have this problem — eg, Seattle.
- klyrs 3y ago
  It's also the cities for which housing is most unaffordable.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Seattle has a levy on the ballot for a massive increase in property taxes in order to make housing more affordable. I am not making this up.
    - RugnirViking 3y ago
      I don't think property tax factors much at all into land price. Else wouldn't land price be relatively consistent across locations with same tax systems
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        It factors very much into the rent price. Lots of people think the property tax is paid by the landlord, and think increasing it sticks it to the landlord, but it is paid by the renters.
    - zdragnar 3y ago
      See also California in 2009 had a proposal in their budget for a $1.2 million commission to promote the blueberry industry- paid for by a new tax specifically on blueberries.
    - klyrs 3y ago
      A levy of 45 cents per $1000, which according to the seattle times: > The bulk of money raised from the new levy, $707 million, would go toward the construction of new subsidized rental homes and improvements to aging affordable apartments. Those programs are focused on housing for people making 60% of area median income or less, about $74,000 a year for a family of three. Nearly two-thirds of the funding would fund housing for those making even less, 30% of area median income or $37,000 for a family of three. The current levy (passed in 2016) is 25 cents per $1000. A tax of a few hundred dollars per year on a million dollar home isn't making an impact on housing affordability. Expanding the availability of affordable housing might. I'm skeptical that $707M is enough to make a dent.
      - ianburrell 3y ago
        The total Seattle property tax is $8.29 per $1000. $.20 is a massive 2% increase.
        WalterBright 3y ago
- vkou 3y ago
  They are the cities that have to make up the slack for the rest of the country not pulling its weight, and exporting its poverty and problems to them. Or they are the cities with the worst housing affordability problems. Or they are just the cities that have these public services. Not a lot of people complaining about homeless people riding the subway in rural Texas, because rural Texas doesn't have a subway. ---- Seattle, by the way, got a 'prosecute everything and restart the war on drugs' city attourney and a 'sweep the homeless away' mayor. Strangely enough, neither policy has done shit to resolve any of the problems. Oh, now the camp isn't in the park, it's on the street bordering the park, what an improvement for everyone... It took the state legislature to fix the city's problem (by banning SFH zoning, and hitting NIMBYs over the head with a stick), and maaaaybe we'll see the fruits of that policy ripen in a decade or two.
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    Seattle ended up changing to those policies because of their previous “let vagrants do whatever and spend endless amounts on services” failures — and people who pay taxes were understandably upset that negative results were produced for huge sums of money. The situation improved for average people after those changes. > Oh, now the camp isn't in the park, it's on the street bordering the park, what an improvement for everyone Yes, everyone is better off when parks are drug vagrant free and possible to be enjoyed by everyone — even if that policy doesn’t solve every problem. Toxic empathy is saying you should destroy society and afflict everyone with suffering because you haven’t yet created Utopia — and I think the responses to me show why excluding other voices under the guise of “mUh SyStEmS tHiNkInG” failed in cities like Seattle. You need both law and order and compassion for society to flourish. The only part we agree on is that cleaning up the mess is a decade scale challenge — especially now that toxic empathy has taken Seattle down the wrong path for the past decade.
    - klyrs 3y ago
      > “mUh SyStEmS tHiNkInG” If you're going to make fun of people like this, you shouldn't expect thoughtful responses.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  So in Seattle you house the homeless in a giant Rem Koolhaas terrarium. There are worse things. When I lived there, I didn't know many other software folks who used the public library system at all. Not because of smelly homeless people. It was just more convenient for them to buy anything they wanted to read/watch/listen to. And there were lots of convenient branch libraries for kids - better than trekking to the terrarium downtown anyway.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    The vast bulk of books are available used on Amazon for a couple dollars & shipping. I buy a lot that way. The local public library doesn't have the books I want to read. But the library does have DVDs I can borrow and watch, and music CDs I can borrow and see if I like. Netflix will parcel out a miniseries one disk at a time, while I can borrow the box set from the library and binge it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Solvency 3y ago

What? My town has three libraries alone, all of which are large, spacious, extremely clean, super quiet, full of great material, and are constantly full of well behaved citizens. You're not describing a feature of modern libraries. You're describing a local problem.

dangwhy 3y ago
> My town i think GP is talking about big cities. My library ( heart of chicago) is def fits the description. streetview : https://www.google.com/local/place/fid/0x880e2d00ee6fbd09:0xe406d0af8ab672bc/photosphere?iu=https://streetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com/v1/thumbnail?panoid%3DT-OtSabslM4P0b9kLx5tbQ%26cb_client%3Dlu.gallery.gps%26w%3D160%26h%3D106%26yaw%3D88.96404%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100&ik=CAISFlQtT3RTYWJzbE00UDBiOWtMeDV0YlE%3D https://www.google.com/local/place/fid/0x880e2d00ee6fbd09:0x... This is outside my libary from st view: https://imgur.com/a/CE51r2v https://imgur.com/a/CE51r2v There is usually a huge congregation of homeless there by afternoon. And its even worse inside the library. You get hit with stench as soon as you open the library door. Sucks because libarians have exceptional knowledge that any book lover would enjoy talking to. > You're describing a local problem. Unless you are suggesting middle class can only exist in the burbs and small towns. I 've lived in pilsen chicago for over 25 yrs, this is my home. Hate to relocate in next few yrs because now i have newborn.
JohnFen 3y ago
It's an incredibly common local problem that you find across a great deal of the US.
- geraldwhen 3y ago
  [dead]
thebooktocome 3y ago
Agreed. I live in a city with a noticeable homeless problem, but our extensive system of libraries is perfectly safe. Now, ten or twenty years ago, the main branch downtown was in what certain conservative commentators might have called a "no-go zone"—but really the neighborhood around the library was fine. It seemed to me that the drug gangs in the area back then had some kind of unspoken agreement that the library was neutral (dare I say sacred?) ground.

supertofu 3y ago

This is only true in big cities. Definitely true in LA and NYC. I was astounded to find that the small east-coast college town where I now live has a clean, bright, pleasant library that serves as a community educational space for all (not just the homeless or teenagers.) The bathrooms are usually spotless. I wonder: how have massive cities like LA and NYC allowed their libraries defacto homeless shelters? It's a shame that public libraries in these cities are essentially unusable to the average taxpayer.

drewcoo 3y ago
> I wonder: how have massive cities like LA and NYC allowed their libraries defacto homeless shelters? It's a shame that public libraries in these cities are essentially unusable to the average taxpayer. Somehow I doubt that all of the branch libraries of those systems are "homeless shelters." More likely the it's just the larger libraries near the actual shelters. Where "the average taxpayer" wouldn't spend time anyway.
JohnFen 3y ago
> the small east-coast college town where I now live has a clean, bright, pleasant library that serves as a community educational space for all Small college towns have a couple of real advantages over big cities in this regard. First, they're small, which helps a lot. Second, they tend to have more funding available per-capita than large cities do.
platyp 3y ago
That has definitely not been my experience in NYC. I've lived in 3 neighborhoods in Queens, and all of them have had great local libraries that were clean and had friendly staff.
- supertofu 3y ago
  I agree that borough libraries are very useable. The LIC library is wonderful, for example. But Manhattan libraries are pretty difficult.
wombat-man 3y ago

drewcoo 3y ago

> Instead of staying true to their goals of education, libraries have become daytime homeless shelters driving away their original patrons. Previously, there had been private libraries for the elite. Carnegie libraries, making public libraries widespread across the country, were known by uppity folks for attracting "undesirables." People of all races, genders, and social statuses were welcome there. Those were the original patrons. That was Carnegie's goal. https://www.npr.org/2013/08/01/207272849/how-andrew-carnegie-turned-his-fortune-into-a-library-legacy https://www.npr.org/2013/08/01/207272849/how-andrew-carnegie... > Schools have opted out of their obligations to provide the best educations to the public instead tailoring the education to the least capable Our current school system was designed to create compliant factory workers. They're still making an uncreative, docile workforce, but where are the jobs? https://qz.com/1314814/universal-education-was-first-promoted-by-industrialists-who-wanted-docile-factory-workers https://qz.com/1314814/universal-education-was-first-promote...

lapcat 3y ago

> The societies of North America have totally abandoned the middle class and They've totally abandoned the the middle class and the lower class. That's why we're having these problems. Pitting middle class against lower class allows the upper class to get away with sucking every last penny out of society and abandoning the greater good.

WalterBright 3y ago
How does that reconcile with Washington State just passing a 7% tax on capital gains exceeding $250,000?
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  Comes far from even closing the gap on the net favorable tax treatment of capital gains which itself favors the wealthy, but, sure, “totally abandoned” the classes below the haut bourgeoisie may be a slight exaggeration; there is some concern which occasionally manifest is some small policy measures.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Income is not taxed in Washington, so there is no favorable treatment of capital gains. Quite the reverse.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      Washington is not separate from the United States, and income is taxed in the United States, and 7% at $250k plus doesn’t close the gap between it and normal (or, a fortiori, specifically labor, which has additional taxes on top of general income tax) income. The fact that Washington wasn’t further widening that gap between labor capital taxes by taxing regular income before adopting its capital gains tax is tangential.
      - WalterBright 3y ago