Yeah are they talking about themselves? Someone else? No one in the region is restraining themselves whatsoever.

Sadly it’s probably also the case that publishers’ ebook pricing to libraries is based on paranoia about them destroying all book sales, plus the usual corporate greed.

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Well, I have a plan and I’ll tell you what it is.

This idea of a majority Jewish state, kept so through military occupation of Arab-dense territories, needs to simply go away.

I’m a one-state solution guy. Let everyone there practice their religion in peace and access their holy sites freely, and let democracy reign.

Israel’s big sin is that they want democracy BUT only with a majority Jewish population and an official state religion etc etc etc. It’s more than a Jewish homeland - it’s an ethnostate.

That is what needs to end. It doesn’t go somewhere else. No one gets pushed into the sea. We just stop pretending like we can use arms to carve out the “democracy” we want, and Israelis and Palestinians all live in a state that guarantees their freedom and safety.

Some fear that extremists will rise and take over that pluralistic society: build a constitution that prevents this. Embrace pluralism. Marshall Plan the fuck out of Gaza until the Palestinians see they have more to lose than their misery.

Iran’s last change in ruler was barely noticeable: one ancient dude in a turban for another with almost the same name. I’m sure the next will be similarly unnewsworthy.

Israelis have been much more open about dehumanizing their enemies since last October, arguing outright that they are “not human beings” in many cases. I feel sad for them because they do not see how dehumanizing others is eating away at their own humanity, and that this is probably the very intention of their opponents.

Without getting into subjective topics like what it was like to be alive in the 1960s, there’s certainly a few ways you can argue that delivering on today’s building codes is more complex than it was back in those times. Buildings are also safer now as a result. This is a simple thing and surely never took up an iota of HST’s attention, but it’s a straightforward fact about how you just get more now than you did then, even if it is something invisible like the safety of improved electrical wiring.

You said:

There actually was a time when you could have a pretty good life with a simple job.

And my comment followed directly from this, wondering how possible it might be to achieve a past, arguably lesser, standard of living today. Attempting that would bring any wage/price gap with the past into focus by eliminating the overhead costs of modern regulatory bars, and the lifestyle creep factor that people sometimes cite. This is decidedly on-topic.

This might actually make sense. Borrowers can’t lose or destroy a digital copy, or bring it back late. Probably a digital copy enables more checkouts. Max of 26? Well think about he condition if the last library book you checked out that had 26 stamps on the list. Hard copies don’t last forever. Sad that they had to charge more based on these assumptions, but you can imagine some reasoning to them.

I mainly asked questions, positing only that lifestyle was simpler then, building codes were different, and materials were cheaper. What part of this are you having trouble with?

I’d love to try an experiment to see what it would cost to build a simple home to 1950s median norms and 1950s building codes, with no modern appurtenances like internet service and smoke detectors. One electrical outlet per room, small windows, no irrigation in the yard, just a hose. Plain telephone service to one jack. Rabbit ears for TV only. No microwave or dishwasher and only clotheslines for drying laundry. Middle of nowhere town with one store and a highway going by. How much would that actually cost?

I’m sure it would still cost more now because of materials, and there really isn’t a way to get around building codes. But the living one could achieve with a simple job, back then, was definitely simpler than what people consider a typical life now. I don’t really have a point here - I’m just wondering how big the cost gap would really be at the exact same living standard as yesteryear.

Sounds like you’re saying that the actual middle class is a small set of professionals at the upper end of what we generally call the “middle class?” And that 90% of people are actually working class? That seems like a really sensible interpretation. I mean, if you don’t own your home and can’t build significant savings, you are living pretty close to hand-to-mouth. And that’s a lotttttt of people these days.

When your source throws a browser security warning, you automatically lose.

I find myself wondering if this is even perceived as a negative at all by the public. Certain people no doubt look at service as a job opportunity and some actually support the goals of the war and believe Putin’s hype about fighting Nazis.

Has the war effort even gotten through those types yet? Is it really taking fathers away from their families? Are those fathers not bought in on the war?

This is what I worry about. That Russia is not even straining yet, let alone close to breaking.

That’s a shame. They need more licenses per book, it sounds like. But at least your community is highly engaged with your library!

Since literally everyone could be described as a believer in the past that’s not what I meant. We started with the word “theologian” and yes I assume any reasonable definition of that word is going to have high, high overlap with the clergy, with perhaps some exceptions.

Newton was basically an astrologer.

You lost me, friend. I’m not even sure we can agree to disagree at this point. I’m just going to back away slowly…

Any Kindle owner should go find out how easy it is to get library books on their Kindle. It’s totally the way to go. You don’t have to buy their shit and deal with their rules.

If it’s reductive to say they were all morons, it’s fabulist to say they could step into the modern era and be nerds.

I get your point that curious people had no other outlet then, and that the clergy was just where they went. But there is one problem with that: science did in fact develop as a discipline. We did crawl out of the dark ages. We did discover we are not the center of the universe. And mostly it wasn’t the clergy who did that. There are notable exceptions like Gregor Mendel and Pope Gregory 13. But not enough to characterize the whole institution by. And in fact that same institution was a force for anti-curiosity quite a bit, as when they imprisoned Galileo, which is hardly the only example of them quashing open questioning as heresy.

If perhaps we focused only on theologians who were not part of the clergy, that could turn up slightly differently. I don’t know enough there to guess.

Okay you haven’t been very explanatory about your statement that theologians were scientists. But it seems you are using the term extremely loosely to mean anyone who explores questions.

This is not my definition at all. Science is a method of exploring questions that involves hypotheses and tests and building principles from observed results. Theologians do none of that and never did. They made shit up. That is not science.

Never said otherwise. All I’m saying is that when I pay my $10 and visit the art museum, I profit.

I’m willing to bet that the huge majority of those here supporting these vandals have never been inside a museum.