Notices by dB Cooper (coolerpseudonym@wandering.shop)

Librarians, being good public servants, will tell you to borrow books without guilt. You’re a taxpayer, or the child of one, and library material is for you; in any case, the library can advocate for realistic budgets based on what the patrons actually use.

I think this is a kindly lie. Library budgets are shrinking, never increasing, and the opportunity cost of these huge ever-growing Libby contracts is severe. They’re strangling everything else the library might do.

My sort of back of the envelope figure is that one borrowing of an ebook costs the library system on the order of ten times as much as one borrowing of the physical book.

A common contract for an ebook via Libby is a two-year rental that allows 26 circs, for—depending—something like a hundred bucks. That’s a few dollars per circ.

Hardback books cost about a third that much and circulate many more times. Probably tens of cents per circ or better.

Public library ebooks are basically a thing of the past.

Libby is bleeding the libraries to death, sucking tax money straight to private equity. (KKR owns it).

For that cost, you get very little, beyond hockey-playing-vampire romance novels and other dumb bestsellers.

If your experience with Libby is still good:

1) You live in one of the few remaining cities in the US with a well-funded library

2) It won’t last. Libby is a parasite that’s indifferent to its host’s long-term survival 🧵

I love kitties

Here is Smudge the Cat

@apps @thibaultmol Our account? What?

@apps Opt me out

@thibaultmol @apps I don’t want to visit the web page. I don’t want to read about it. I don’t want to learn the “easy” actions I must take. I don’t want to think or know about this “tool” in any way. I didn’t ask for it; I don’t even want it to exist. But now I have to. It’s all an unwanted imposition.

So you do it. Opt me out. It’s your job anyway, whoever made this, whoever runs it. I decline to accept the assignment.

I didn’t even know there was a global magazine of culture called “aramcoworld” and that it really is published by Saudi Aramco

Dreamed last night I got a spider underneath my shirt and it bit me several times before I got it out. Also we were both journalists and the spider was my editor

@futurebird The democrats are th weakest major opposition party in the western world

@futurebird Which is pretty weird when you realize that a strong majority favors their policies. They are utterly in the wilderness

Conan Doyle was good at micro fiction. These little stories he drops into Holmes stories as asides:

❝A third case worthy of note is that of Isadora Persano, the well-known journalist and duellist, who was found stark staring mad with a match box in front of him which contained a remarkable worm said to be unknown to science.❞

Anyone remember how, before the year 2000, the U.S. party identifications of the colors red and blue were switched every four years by the TV networks’ electoral maps? The two colors only got locked in to their parties during the Bush / Gore endlessness, when people started talking about “red states” and “red America”, and so on

So if you wondered why the fascist party got socialist/revolutionary red, and the liberal-centrist party got Tory/royalist blue, that’s why. Pure historical accident

I would argue that an LLM can’t be AGI, by definition. That’s my intuition

I call on republicans to realize that Trump speaking now sounds like he has a brain injury - it’s word salad

Seriously the case for Trump having an organic brain disease is much more convincing than the case for Biden having one.

Nobody seemed to give a shit about the Leagues Cup this year.

Maybe we can retire it.

#MastodonFC #FediFC #Soccer

@reesecommabill @olympicschat including a queer threesome in the Bibliothèque nationale de France

@CedarTea People like libraries