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A comment on The last thing libraries need is Silicon Valley “disruption.”. Parent comment

Re:The last thing libraries need is Silicon Valley “disrupti... by rayiner on Friday July 27, 2018 @11:48AM (#17626839)
Getting "Amazon to pay its fair share in taxes" is a pipe dream. The United States is, by design, a race-to-the-bottom internal free market. Any given county has to balance tax rates with attracting/keeping businesses in the county. So the tax money coming in is what it is. Especially if you're one of the 99.9% of counties outside the Silicon Valley halo. The policy question is how to spend that tax money, and what modes of analysis you use to justify your spending. Romantic notions are not a valid mode of analysis justifying expenditures of tax money.
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Re:The last thing libraries need is Silicon Valley “disrupti... by Djvacto on Friday July 27, 2018 @12:11PM (#17627002)
I think your discounting of a romantic notion, or the concept of "essential soul" overlooks the fact that this correlates highly with how the service is perceived, and thus used, as well as how it is run, which is something you can see discussed various other places in the comments. Replacing the library, whose purpose is the best interests of its users, with a business, whose purpose is the best interests of its shareholders, and expecting it to go well, seems like the real pipe dream to me.
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Re:The last thing libraries need is Silicon Valley “disrupti... by kaitai on Friday July 27, 2018 @12:20PM (#17627071)
This is exactly right. There are two ingredients to making money: providing value and externalizing costs. When the value provided by an entity is essentially that it doesn't externalize costs -- that it's a sink for societal costs -- it doesn't make sense to commercialize it. We fund libraries because we want them to do unprofitable things.
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Re:The last thing libraries need is Silicon Valley “disrupti... by maym86 on Friday July 27, 2018 @01:08PM (#17627434)
The romantic notion of a functioning free market where the largest corporations aren't subsidized by the tax payer and lobbying the government for tax breaks? The romantic notion that corporations can be used to run social services more effectively?
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