This is an "improvement" in the same way that abolishing police reduces the arrest rate.
That strategy was enough to bankrupt blockbuster.
So it can work for NY public libraries.
Maybe if blockbuster had been willing to forgo the late fees income stream they would still exist today.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna39332696
>Blockbuster tried dropping its late fees a few years ago, but that didn't work out well because it kept the most popular DVDs out of its stores for long stretches.
Got a 245 dollar demand letter a few letter a couple months later. For 2 unreturned movies.
Got a lawyer dads friend help me write a letter and the matter was dropped. Went from multiple rentals a week to never renting another video again.
Everything doesn;t have to have a simplistic analogy especially when the analogy isn't applicable.
It's not really.
There is direct financial buy-in from the user. Netflix subscription wasn't 0 cost to user service.
Late fees are a designed to de-incentivize a certain behavior. We have little data on how effective it is, but we know it has costs both for implementation and its effects on patrons.
Let's take another example- charging people to use public transportation. We could do away with that as well, and some places have done that- finding that the cost of collection came close to overshadowing the income it generated.
Late fees are not part of the structure of a library except when they're implemented as such.
NYC will now have the opportunity to see if eliminating the late fees will have an impact on patron behavior or overall cost of running the library.
NYC's position is that late fees disincentivize the most vulnerable from using the library. If that's true and eliminating the fees would increase usage and not generally harm the income stream, then NYC- the largest municipal library system in the US, will have been an incredible test case.
Telling someone that they will be automatically able to check out new books if they return the ones they have is really effective in practice. As opposed to the old system where you have to both return the book and pay money so lots of poor people would just ignore the library.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2019/10/30/20940677/chicag...
Words don't become true just because you thought of them.
"The flow of quizzes stands upon somebody else's legs."
It's not hard to think of something to say.
The difference is my sentence was knowingly ridiculous and nonsensical.
Words that don't contribute to a discussion are just noise. The equivalent of someone banging pots and pans in the middle of a conversation because they want to get noticed.
edit: Brilliantly, you wrote a comment 6 days ago that opened with: "Critical thinking is at an all-time low in Western society."...the irony is palpable.
My point, as it still stands, is that punishment is meant to deter, and deterrence doesn't reduce criminal activity, history has proven that time and time again. Case in point: The Taliban is back to cutting hands for stealing, a terrifyingly high punishment for a basic crime that gets community service on average across North America (first offense). By your logic, theft should be eliminated altogether in Afghanistan. Is it? Is the per capita rate of theft higher or lower than North America? I leave it to you as an exercise to uncover, with a minor hint: it's higher.
That's the whole point isn't it? That punishment doesn't work. Rich people can afford to shrug off the fine while the poor never return to the library again.
That might have been true twenty years ago. With hook-or-by-crook internet access, the only reading poor kids are doing are their group chats.