You think data caps won't affect you?

Think again. This article from the website Techspot drives home the real issue with out current FCC / cable industry / Internet provider dynamic.

The data caps are punishing the group of people (of which I am one) called "cord cutters". These are folks who have left their cable TV subscriptions behind for a variety of reasons. There are two major reasons our family cancelled cable TV - cost and lack of use. By lack of use, I mean that we watched a handful of the channels to which we were subscribed and rarely viewed bundled-in channels on the various tiers we had to carry in order to see the few we wanted. That was tied directly to the cost factor. We could not justify $100 per month for the 4 or 5 channels we wanted.

So, we went our merry way with a data plan and Netflix and Hulu subscriptions. We could watch what we wanted when we wanted, so long as we could wait for our shows to appear on the service.

If you are streaming a lot of video though, you can easily hit lower-tier data package caps. I am convinced, as the article above states, that this is intentional with the aim to drive people back to cable TV packages.

What is needed is competition, cafeteria-style cable channel selection, and some governmental and regulatory backbone to make those things happen (in my humble opinion, of course).

I am on a ranting roll!

I have spent my entire working career so far as a public servant. I never expected to get rich doing what I'm doing. I am not a leech. I do not collect a paycheck off of "your" taxes and sit on my duff. I try to make the world a better place for all of HPL's patrons through prudent and responsible use of tax dollars to provide services that individuals could never afford on their own.

However, these past few years have made me reconsider. They have made me look around and seriously consider the private sector or a less contentious, out-of-the-fray profession. You see, after a while you just get tired. You get tired of always defending what you do. You get tired of explaining over and over that libraries are not obsolete, they haven't been replaced by Google, we have expertise you can't afford to buy on your own, we have access to tools far too expensive for the individual, and on and on.

What are we at HPL? We are champions of literacy - we want every single child and adult who wants to to be able to read, use a computer, and ultimately to have a good life. We are navigators - we can guide you through the flood of information and lead you to the bits you actually need. We provide a safe place to think and to connect. We want to be a hub for civic and cultural participation.

Yes, we have books. Yes, we have a copy machine. And yes, we have ebooks, downloadable music, audiobooks, and even a teaching tool for you to learn 100s of new marketable skills online - even from home.

And finally, yes, people do use the library. 41,872 people hold HPL cards (and have used them at least once in the last 3 years); our door counters registered 271, 247 entries in to the building last year; and our staff answered 47, 112 research questions last year. Oh, and our WiFi access points recorded 42, 350 connections in 2015 transferring many terabytes of data. 17,722 people of all ages attended programs in 2015.

/end rant

"Taxes are Evil"

I apologize in advance for the wall of text. I assure you though, that this is important.

The chickens are coming home to roost in Kansas. What enjoyed great popularity some 30-odd years ago, "Reaganomics" or "Supply-side Economics" is seeing something more than a resurgence in Kansas. Really, it's a doubling down on an idea that has demonstrably failed to do what its proponents claimed. In fact, it didn't work very well when Herbert Hoover tried it in 1932 in response to the Great Depression with his Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Whatever you want to call it, this theory of economics, coupled with a now ingrained mantra that taxes are evil have led Kansas to where it is today. For all intents and purposes, the state is bankrupt. The old way of doing things, a balanced, moderate, common-sense mix of property, income, and sales tax has been cast to the wind.

In its place we have no income tax for a certain group of "job creators", a movement to limit property taxes, and a rise in sales tax. Maybe the old system wasn't always fair. Maybe from time to time some taxes were disproportionately high. But now, the no income tax group who are supposed to now be generating more jobs aren't doing so; the loss of revenue is forcing local governments to look at increasing property taxes; while the high sales taxes are punishing the working class and causing Kansans to even cross state lines to buy basic goods like groceries!

Kansas is in a downward spiral because "taxes are evil". We want a business-friendly environment to make Kansas an attractive place to start or relocate a business and increase employment. But that will never happen in a place that can't govern itself properly. This legislator gets it. No one wants to pay taxes. But grown-ups understand that in order to have good safe roads to carry individual AND business traffic, you have to pay for them. Grown-ups also understand that if you are moving your business someplace, that business will be looking for an educated, motivated workforce and guess what - you have to pay for that by funding public education. Grown-ups also understand that while taxes are unpleasant, the rewards of properly funded, prudently managed public services make everyone's lives better. It doesn't matter if you are rich or poor, I would wager few want to pave their own potholes, fix their own water mains, all the while home-schooling their children, having to buy all the books and database access they need for that, and simultaneously hoping no one in the family gets sick and has to travel across counties to go to a hospital.

Yes, taxes are a boor. Taxes suck. But taxes are not evil. Not in a modern society that cares for the common good. Just as an example, I gladly pay taxes for public schools. Yes, I have school-age children. But I pay them for the other families and children as well. I don't want to live in a society of illiterate, low-skilled citizens. Lack of education leads to lack of opportunity which in turn leads to higher rates of incarceration.

Let's get back to the the days where fiscal conservatives, social reformers, moderate what-evers, social conservatives, the left and the right or whatever you label yourself agreed to disagree, but worked together for the common good. I don't understand why everyone seems to think that success is winning EVERYTHING. Success is getting on with it. Shutting the hell up (ironic, right :-) ) when you are being non-productive, stopping and listening to the other side, and finding common ground to advance the common good.

All this to say:

I hope my colleagues who drove to the State Capitol on Monday were successful in explaining to our legislators on the Committee on Taxation that their bill to defund regional library systems in Kansas is a dumb, shoot-yourself-in-the-foot idea. Thank you fellow librarians for your action.

This is where we are as public libraries...

The long, painful dismantling of the USA's social safety net is hitting still-functioning public institutions like public libraries right in the gut. This Washington Post article shows us what the end result of our war on poor people is going to look like.

Public libraries are not public health care providers. Public libraries are not homeless shelters. Public libraries exist for an entirely different sort of public service for all - life-long learning and entertainment.

I am strongly in favor of access to library services for ALL - rich or poor; old or young; homeless or gated-community dwelling. However, libraries are not set up for, designed to handle, or in any way truly capable of handling what they are increasingly being forced to deal with. Libraries on the whole are not always even funded to a level to effectively perform their main function. Asking libraries to be medical facilities, mental health providers, and more is the sign of, in my not-so-humble opinion, a nation that has given up and given in to stingy, hard-hearted sentiment.

The Post article states that the solution many of these not-lavishly-funded libraries came up with is to hire social workers, nurses, etc. This is a ridiculous diversion from the mission of public libraries. At least in Hutchinson Kansas we have organizations like New Beginnings to help people in housing crisis and the Salvation Army and many other groups to help with homelessness.

So, what is the role of public libraries in this crisis of poverty? I think it is to be in the second tier of support - helping people find jobs through providing access to resume help, application help, and providing access to training and coaching. Libraries should be places for moving forward. Forward movement can only be achieved once the basic needs of housing, food, and health are met.

Should libraries not be part of this process of change? Of course we should be active participants in this vital conversation, but we should not allow ourselves to be substituted for other institutions and services. We are being taken advantage of because of our collective urge to help people. We should never give up our desire to help people but we should also stop letting ourselves be used as a convenient rug under which bigger societal problems can be swept.

Where are ebooks headed?

I don't think anyone really knows what's happening in the ebook world. The sales of ebooks plateaued in 2015 and no one really knows if that was a pause or the peak. My thought is that with about 1/4 of the total book sales, ebooks probably haven't reached their peak yet. I do think that the future for them is very uncertain, as is the future of ebooks in libraries.

I say this because the big, mainstream of the ebook publishing world seem to be satisfied with selling ebooks as if their potential to be something more than their paper counterparts isn't worth pursuing. Think about what you could do with ebooks. At the very minimum, like digital versions of movies, you could have added features, interviews with the author, etc. Things that are not possible in paper.

Libraries need to figure out ways around the stranglehold ebook publishers have on them. After all, history has shown that libraries are one of the main places for people to try out, with very low or no risk, new authors, new media, etc. I maintain that publishers are shooting themselves in the foot and driving the growth in the the independent and self-published ebook explosion by making library acquisition of ebooks so clunky and restricted.

Libraries could be the biggest and cheapest sales force a publisher could want. Librarians like reading, we like sharing, and we promote by word-of-mouth the good stuff, the new stuff, the overlooked stuff. It's like having an army of volunteer sales people. Because readers buy the books they like. If they find a new author in a library and they come to love that author, they'll start buying that author's new material rather than wait to borrow. It happened years before ebooks were even remotely a thing.

What got me ranting about this old topic again? This article, which is a pretty good article from American Libraries magazine with the opinions of four experts in the field. I'd recommend a read.

Affordable broadband Internet?

This is an article from techdirt, an online technology magazine. The article is from their if-you-build-it-they-will-come department:

After A Decade Of Waiting For Verizon, Town Builds Itself Gigabit Fiber For $75 Per Month

I'm interested - Gigabit fiber for $75 per month? But how did they do it? The municipalities that were being ignored by the big Internet service providers got together and built it themselves.

After the $50 per month charge to offset the building cost, the actual subscription costs $25 per month...for Gigabit bandwidth. That's TEN times faster than the "up to" speed advertised by my local cable provider and their price (with TV of course) is $120 per month.

Reliable, inexpensive REAL broadband is a selling point for communities in today's growing work-from-anywhere job pool. I cannot understand why more small municipalities who want to attract people wouldn't want to consider this sort of public utility approach to Internet service. After all, it is just another connection like water and sewer.

I have nothing against commercial Internet, telephone, and TV providers. I just think there should be healthy competition, you know, like we talk about all the time. Competition is supposed to be the name of the capitalist game, right? That competition isn't going to happen when there are maybe two, or only one, or even zero viable providers in your area. There is no incentive to expand, no incentive to increase speed and capacity, and no innovation.

Danger Will Robinson!

Lost in (cyber?) Space

This is a true danger to democracy, to the citizenry of the USA and to the USA's standing in the world. The continuing push to cripple Internet access will throttle innovation and growth.

What sort of hysteria is this? Why the shrill alarmist tone? Because I truly believe that this is a threat to what's left of our open society.

This article from Motherboard details a disturbing phenomenon identified in a recent Pew Internet study: broadband Internet adoption in the US has DECREASED since 2013.

The article points out the obvious - in the same time frame from 2013-2015, smartphone adoption has increased the same amount that broadband adoption has decreased. Why? Cost. The cost of broadband Internet is appallingly high for what you get and in some locations not even available. There are towns within 30 miles of where I live that you can get satellite and wireless plans but nothing else. No speeds to knock your socks off (maybe 4G LTE) and with high cost and caps. The plan I found for Alden KS residents had 15Gb shared data per month for $100. $1200 per year to participate in what is arguably the most plying-field-leveling and democratizing creation in history - the Internet. There are no options in Alden for wired Internet, at least through AT&T and there are no cable companies there.

From the article:

The evidence is everywhere; the walls are closing in from all sides. The net neutrality victory of early this year has rapidly been tempered by the fact that net neutrality doesn’t matter if you don’t have solid access to said ‘net.

My point is that cost is prohibitive for many, services are unavailable or very limited for many, and if you are lucky enough to be able to overcome those hurdles, there are a myriad issues around data insecurity and data caps with which users must contend. People have to then make a choice - broadband or wireless. Wireless has been winning out because (I think) it goes where you go, mostly and you can sort of do most things you need to do on a smartphone.

Because of this choice though, again, from the article:

Many Americans may soon be left with an insecure, surveilled, and capped Internet connection dominated by broadband and cellular providers that funnel traffic to the companies they've made deals with.

So people have to pay right? That's how capitalism works and the USA is the King of Capitalism. But the free market in this case is not free. The government regulates it in a way that favors the big companies, crippling competition, and stifling opportunity and entrepreneurship. The exact OPPOSITE of a free market.

Ultimately, this situation cripples our future as well. How can we as a country compete with other high-tech economies if the virtual world is capped, available to only some, and controlled by entities who have strong incentives to stifle competition?

The answer is, we can't. We will continue to lose ground in the world because we fail to make this most important of tools - access to information - a right rather than a privilege.

Who can change this? Only us, the citizens of the USA. We still have a right to vote. We can still make our voices be heard. Those we have elected to office are bought and paid for by corporations and individuals who DO NOT have the best interests of the United States in mind. Access to the Internet - a good, solid, secure, uncapped access - needs to be a right and not a privilege. Treat it as a utility. Treat it as you treat electricity, gas service, or water. You need those things at home and you need them to grow a business or create new things. The Internet is the same - it COULD be a tool of innovation but it is still being treated as a toy, a frivolity, an "extra" that one can do without. This is a false and dangerous view to take.

No Internet for me

/rant

I feel a little like I've insulted the Soup Nazi, only with my home Internet provider. A short time ago, Hutchinson had a little ice storm. Not as bad as the one 7-8 years ago when the ice knocked out power to the library for 3 days, but serious enough to litter the street and sidewalks with tree limbs both large and small. While I never lost power at home, we did lose our cable Internet connection from Cox Communications. And that was when the fun started!

Joking. It wasn't fun. In fact, it was a lot of talking to a series of seemingly well-intentioned customer service reps who had no ability to do anything but empathize. Don't get me wrong, I am 100% sure that these folks would have helped me if they could, they just had no way to do it.

Here are the stories:

First contact the Sunday we lost service: Explain that my cable is out, and the tech support person confirms this. I'm watching, literally, limbs break and fall out of trees while on the phone and yet according to Cox there has been no "outage" declared for my area. Apparently an "outage" must be declared or you get shoved to the bottom of the service call pile. Nothing can be done until a WEEK from Tuesday. Nine days for a service call. What? Are all the repairmen on vacation? Tech support was polite and efficient, but could DO nothing.

Second contact in person at the store: Explain situation and ask if it is really possible that no one is available for 9 days to restore my service. Answer: yes, that is true BUT there is no widespread outage in the area. No reason given for the apparent lack of repair crews.

Third contact mid-week: Tech support person on telephone explains that our area is being "upgraded" to fiber (no explanation available for what that means). No technicians are available to hook customers back up until project is done. So, a weather event occurs that knocks out power to thousands, but the cable company doesn't want to interrupt an upgrade project to get service back to its customers?

Here's what this all says to me: There is no connection between the Cox decision-makers and the Cox customer. There is in place a "screen" of tech support and CSR staff who, intended or not, insulate the decision makers from problems. And there seems to be no way for the folks who are part of the "screen" layer to solve problems for their customers. Were there a choice, I would have already cancelled my Cox subscription.

But, what happens when one large company has, essentially, a stranglehold on a particular service or product? Truthfully, I have two choices for residential Internet service in my town - AT&T or Cox. At the speed level I subscribe to from Cox, AT&T has an advertised download rate 1/4th the speed for about the same price. So, not really any competition. IMO, there is no competition for high speed Internet in my town.

What is the solution? I think two things that lobbying and big corporate dollars will never allow. First, treating Internet service as a utility on the federal level. Second, on the state and local level, encouraging municipal broadband networks.

/end rant

The "Rich Guy" and "Those People"

It's no secret, I'm sure, that expectations for public behavior seem to be at a low ebb. People that work for public institutions and tend public spaces deal with daily behavior that 20 or 30 years ago would have been cause for calling authorities.

Today there is a much larger percentage of people whose sense of entitlement leads them to believe they can let their children (or themselves) run rough-shod over the rules. We at the library try to be there for all - young, old, rich, and poor. We try to create rules that make use of our library available to all. It's a balancing act.

Behavior and our expectations for how people should act in public occupy a lot of our time at the library. But there is a deeper issue at work.

When you combine an educational system that won't allow or acknowledge the failure of a student, an economic system that has bred chronic un- and under-employment, and a culturally embedded feeling that laying blame is preferable to taking responsibility you end up with people who don't know how or don't care to behave well in public.

I don't know how to cure society-wide ills like this, except through education. Unfortunately, public education is under such unwarranted pressure that that solution seems less certain now than in the past. I do know that most of what we are changing here at the library are attempts to contain undesirable individual behavior.

So, what do we do about behavior in the library? We continue to encourage good behavior, try to enlist the cooperation of our patrons, and ask that people be considerate of others, by pointing out unacceptable behavior before asking people to leave.

Sometimes this involves moving things around. For example, we're moving the smoking area on the West side of the building. Many people entering the building have complained, not necessarily about the smoking in the area, but the attendant bad language near where children enter.

We have moved an adult reading area from right next to the E.L.F. family area. Many adults have an expectation of quiet that we just can't provide near our children's library.

The behavior for which I have no answer has come in this form: "I don't go to the library any more because there are homeless people there." When I first heard that there are folks in our community who won't use their public library because "there are homeless people there", I was more than taken aback. I was hurt, and then curious (with a tinge of paranoia). Who do they say this to, and why?

Is it a surprise that those in need might make use of what few public services there are? Society at large has failed to end joblessness and homelessness and has failed to treat mental illness and drug abuse. I am not sure I can change a well-to-do person's assumption that homelessness=criminality or a well-to-do person's desire to avoid being uncomfortable when confronted by the reality of our local economy.

Now I'm just mad. Mad at the selfish, hard-hearted attitude. Mad and disappointed in an influential person in my community. The public library is THE place in a community where everyone should feel on equal footing. We will work hard to make sure that everyone is welcome here and that everyone is safe here. We will encourage good behavior and will not tolerate behavior that takes away from others' experience at the library. You are safe here, rich guy. I'm sorry if you have to see a homeless person (not really, I actually think it's good for you). But I can almost guarantee that it isn't the homeless person you need fear, it's your attitude and the behavior it breeds. HPL has a dizzying array of tools for everyone and for virtually every educational, inspirational, and even entertainment need. It is a place that can offer hope to anyone who comes in. The library is not a religious institution - no need "convert" or "confess" to get help. The concept of the public library is a societal good. A gift to us made possible by a compassionate, forward-thinking society that valued education and wanted it available to anyone. And if there is no where else to go, the "good" the library does for a person might simply be to let her or him warm up, sit, and maybe, just maybe pick up something to read.

Warning: Education Rant Ahead!

Ordinarily, I try to not stray far from the areas of reading, libraries, the effects of technology on libraries, and activities at HPL here on this blog. But today I am going to stray off topic and into the realm of education, migration, and the economy. With that in mind, the following are my opinions, not my library's, and I am expressing them to blow off steam...

First, education: Our great state of Kansas has long struggled with providing public education. Wide-open spaces, few people, and a great divide between the rich and the poor have long caused strife and acrimony. Mostly, we've ended up in court because we can't decide how to solve the problem ourselves as citizens and law-makers.

This past go-round has been different. The courts ruled that the legislature needed to better-fund schools. The legislature though, caught up in the lunacy that is "all taxes are bad, no taxes would be Nirvana", are on the verge of crippling our state by failing to provide any real solutions to the education issue. The group to suffer? Maybe you think I'm going to say the poor or disadvantaged. Of course, they always end up with the raw deal. No, the people who are going to suffer most are all of us. There are so many things wrong with the current funding proposals, I am not at all sure where to start.

Lawmakers in Kansas seem fixated on destroying public schooling. They hate Common Core (you can read the standards yourself at that link). Whatever. I hated No Child Left Behind because of its good intentions but unintended outcome of forcing teachers to teach the test so that they didn't lose their jobs. After reading about it, I can't imagine Common Core will be worse. What I find outrageous about the funding bill are the attempts to eliminate more taxes while supposedly fulfilling the funding obligations of the State. For example, Kansas lawmakers have tied tax breaks for corporations to private schooling in the education funding bill. What? If the schools are broken, we'll give you money to go elsewhere RATHER THAN SPEND THAT MONEY TO FIX THE SCHOOLS? What happened to providing for the common good? I am a tax payer with children in public school and in no way do I want to support an "opt out" philosophy. Well, hey, at least we're not embarrassing ourselves debating evolution or something.

The real problem though is my second and third gripes;  Kansas lawmakers keep cutting taxes to businesses saying that it's the only way to grow the economy. Information has come out that shows Kansas, despite gutting its revenue streams lags all states around us in economic growth post-recession. The State collects less in taxes, but has shifted much of the burden to counties and municipalities. The economy is still sluggish. That leads to more people moving away. Of course, that has been a topic of worry since I was in school some 30 years ago. Youth leave and never come back. Interestingly, the trend of folks (not just youth, but all ages) leaving the state at a faster rate than before has accelerated.

Here's my theory: people want to live in a place with a sense of responsibility. A place where corporate interest is balanced by responsible taxation. No one wants to move to a state where you can (theoretically, 'cause it ain't happenin' here!) get a great job, but have terrible, under-funded schools in towns that have to charge high property taxes just to keep the doors open. Would we all like to pay zero taxes? Of course! But reality intrudes into that simplistic desire. We want good education to build smart, capable young workers, to attract business...to grow.

OK, rant over. If you've stuck it out this long, here's a picture of Batman riding an elephant as your prize: