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.
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.
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'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'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 seems like a huge amount to me. 431 million dollars?
I like parks and public libraries, they enrich society for everyone. I just would have thought the the library's budget would be less of the total budget.
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NYC_Public_Library_Research_Room_Jan_2006.jpg and a bunch of the books are 600 years old or have George Washington's handwriting on them, so it's real fucking expensive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
If the city cares about aaving money theu would be buying useless military hardware for the NYPD. Tokyo, Seoul, Jakarta, and Osaka all do fine without blowing massive amounts if the municipal budget on military gear for their police departments. The NYPD "officially' had a 2022 budget over $5billion with aroind 36,000 officers. That's comparable to the entire military budget of Romania. Hell, the NYPD has field offices in 6 foreign countries.
So you're telling me that if we just started grinding cops into a fine powder we'd not only save on their salaries and benefits, we'd also save on the amount of equipment they need and could fund things like libraries and social safety nets? And that we could sell that fine powder for uses such as food for heads, surgery, delousing, cosmetics, bomb disposal, firepower, and head transplants and fund even more things?
I'm not saying we should be grinding cops into a fine powder. I'm saying let's take a look at where we could save more money while helping more people.
Torgo's Police Powder is certainly not a thing we should turn those fucking pigs into. No sir. And if someone tries laying this at my feet I'll deny it.
You’ll have to spend some of those savings on industrial dehydrators though. It can be very difficult to get the texture of the powder right when you start grinding all willy nilly.
I mean, I dunno, ACAB and fuck tha police and all that jazz, but 5 bil for 36k is 138k/each, and that's not too unreasonably bad for NYC cost of living vs the inherent danger and work regime of the job as a police officer in such a populous city.
They've got 55 police per 10,000 residents. That's more than twice as many as LA per capita with a 3% decrease in violent crime per capita. That tells me we could, but definitely shouldn't, grind up one fifth of them into a fine powder freeing up a whole bunch of money in the budget. NYC does seem to have a significantly smaller property crime rate than the national average but that number is suspect. How much of that is them just not dealing with property crime and not filing the paperwork?
And that $5b? That's not their whole budget, that's their personnel budget. Total budget for FY2025 is closer to $11.9b/yr. Their salary is closer to 80k/yr/officer on average.
Can.. can you run for governor of Texas? Grinding up 1/5 of our police force is 1000x the platform Abbott is rolling on.
Note: no harm meant to differently abled people. I just hate Abbott, among a litany of other reasons, in that he got paralyzed by a neighbors tree limb falling on him, sued his neighbor for 10 million dollars, got elected, then helped pass legislation to make sure none of us Texan's could ever sue for that amount again. Max is now 250k per person, up to 3 people can sue one asshole, so max 750k for non medical suits. Even fully limiting the types of suits that can be brought. The epitome of "Fuck you, I got mine!"
They won't have me, friend. I can stand on a stage and sound like a Pentecostal preacher. I'm not inbred but I dress like I am. With exactly the right amount of alcohol I'm pretty likable (too little and I'm weird, too much and I'm over the top, and the difference is razor thin). And there's pictures of me at a whole bunch of Pride events and taco trucks. I support the gays and the immigrants.
It's an uphill battle that I'm not prepared for, don't really have time for, and have no desire to get into. But we've got 2 years to find someone who hasn't said "Hell, yes, we're going to take your AR-15, your AK-47". There are a lot of single issue firearm voters in Texas, as stupid as that is. I like Beto but pragmatically there's no way back from that statement here at this time.
There may be enough cop hate here to run on a platform of grinding 1/5th of them into a fine powder. Even the staunchly red area I come from hates the cops, who are at best thought of as meddling piles of shit.
Pretty sure the only guns Eve carried were her own biceps but she'd make use of anything available. Flynn and
Jenkins have both wielded Excalibur. Ezekiel would rather use evasion but has been known to steal a weapon. Mild-mannered historian Jacob knows how to use weapons of any age and besides we all know him from Leverage. Cassandra has non-weapon skills but she's been known to bonk a baddie on the back of the noggin.
