The mind virus will not stop spreading, making corporations do your critical thinking is not a good path. People will become dependent on a subscription service for everyday life.
We're already reliant on big tech regarding what information is presented to us and LLMs are just the next step in that direction.
For IT-related info, dial-up was expensive, and finding things either involved altavista or Yahoo indexes. Computer magazines were also a great source of info, as were actual books.
The key difference from today is persistence, and attention span. Both of these are now in short supply.
This was expensive.
IIRC, these books were purchased one small stack at a time from a locally-owned grocery store, which spread the expense over a longer period. One week, they'd have the books 1-5 on display and for sale, say. And the next week, it'd be books 6-10. After a time, a family could have the whole set.
Anyway, we had that. So when I wanted to find general information about a topic back then, before Google or Altavista or Webcrawler or whatever, I'd look in the encyclopedia first and get some background.
If it was something I really wanted to dig deeper on, I'd go to the library. If I couldn't find what I needed, I asked for help. Sometimes, this meant that they'd order appropriate material (for free) using inter-library loan for me to peruse.
If I already had enough background but needed a very specific fact, then I'd call the library's reference desk and they'd find it for me and call back. They'd then read the relevant information over the phone.
And if I wanted a reference to have and keep, then: We had book stores.
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Nowadays: Encyclopedias are basically dead, but we can carry an offline copy of Wikipedia in our pocket supercomputer if we choose. Books still get published. Libraries are still present, and as far as I can tell they broadly still find answers with a phone call.
It's not all lost, yet. The old ways still work OK if a person wants them to work. (Of course, Googling the thing or chatting with the bot is often much, much faster. We choose our own poison.)
It's a given that a book on programming is already out of date when it goes to print.
My main gripe with paper sources is that sometimes an important piece of information is only mentioned in passing when the author clearly knew more about it.
Doesn't matter. Even if civilization collapses and we're all miserable, if it means more money is flowing into OpenAI's coffers, it's all good.
However, besides that, subsidies from general taxation are not the same as payments for a service received (i.e. going back to it being a "subscription service"), whereas something like the German system where the payment is linked to entitlement to services (if other comments here are accurate) can be reasonably characterised as a subscription service.
I am making a distinction between being made to pay through general taxation (e.g. as a pacifist is forced to pay for the military, an extreme libertarian for public services in general) and being made to pay in order to use the service (e.g. like a Netflix subscription). Almost everywhere they exist, subsidies for religion are like the former, not the latter.
To be clear: (almost) no one is forced to pay church tax in Germany - only members of the churches that have an agreement with the government to collect it on top of income tax have to pay it, and you can choose to leave those churches. For Protestants ("evangelisch"), that's usually not as big of a deal as it is for Catholics who still believe; there are plenty of non-church-tax-collecting Protestant churches around the country, including the one I'm a member of.
"Almost": there were many couples with very unequal incomes in which the non/lower-earner would stay in the church so that the family would still get the various services (baptisms, weddings, preferential admission to church-affiliated schools, etc) while the higher earner would "leave" (on paper), leaving the family paying far less in church tax. That loophole was closed - if the higher earner isn't a member of another church collecting church tax, they can be required to pay church tax to their spouse's church. I'm not sure this is still in effect, but it was for a while.
Poland is the one I experience it. Church is funded in multiple ways. At least 3 billion PLN a year from concordat deal from 90's. Priests have pensions and annuities. Churches pay no taxes on (heating) fuels. Schools pay for Religious Education classes, very often run by priests or nuns. Uniformed services almost always pay for cleric's services or clerics fully in their services.
Of course church still gathers funds on their own, sometimes using dark patterns.
I do not know enough about the concordat or how Polish pensions work to comment on those. I would be interested but there does not seem to be a lot of information online (e.g. the wikipedia article is a stub)
Depending on the definition of services you are using (e.g. you only mean masses in a Catholic Church, or everything else churches do) lots of things are done without a link to donating: prayers and meditation of other kinds/formats, confession, pastoral care, food banks, religious education and discussion.... In poor countries often things like medical services.
Done the traditional way, no one can really see how much you put in the box and there is no reaction at all from anyone if you put nothing in. Only people right next to you can see anything at all.
Now churches in the UK offer envelopes on which you can write your name and postcode for tax reasons (they can reclaim part of the tax paid on the donation if you are a UK tax payer) so no one can see how much you put in if its in such an envelope.
If you have to pay then it's either a purchase or a tax.
But you know this of course.
Also, it's worth noting in the context of this thread, that people can use AI inference for free on many services, with payment only need for higher usage, and even then, if you don't care about expectations or inconvenience, it's trivial to abuse the free tier.
The protestant reformation was only about 500 years ago, and I'm pretty sure that Martin Luther wouldn't have bothered that much if the expected "donations" were really cheap. And even if you do go with "a coin", which was apparently the price of an annual indulgence for a regular peasant, that was about the same price as a whole pig, or on the order of $1k in today's money, so definitely not symbolic.
If you make it a habit to always lie in order to always be right, you start building castles of lies that hinder you in life. Just because of pride.
To be clear, I definitely didn't mean to imply that every coin in history is worth a thousand dollars, and suggesting that this is what I meant is clearly not the "strongest plausible interpretation"[0] of my message. I was referring specifically to the Florin/Gulden/Guilder coins being used across Europe in Martin Luther's time, which contained about 3.5g gold, which at today's gold price would be worth over $500 just as bullion, but it was apparently worth about twice that in terms of purchasing power. From my searches, it seems that the poorest of the poor would need to pay a quarter of a coin annually, the typical commoner would pay 1 per year, and merchants/middle-class would pay 3 or more per year, to eliminate/reduce their afterlife punishment.
You can argue that my focus on indulgences is not relevant for some reason, and I'd be happy to discuss other examples of expectations of monetary payments to the church, but would appreciate if you refrain from accusing me of lying.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Churches have directly taxed their followers on their income. Some of them still do, like the government churches in Scandinavia. That's a tax.
Churches have also sold the redemptions of your sins. Sometimes a bit cloaked as donations, like what you mention.
And churches have accepted donations, with expectations so low that everybody can donate. Who can't donate a kopek, or a bowl of rice? People who are too poor to donate anything are not shunned by any church, on the contrary they will be on the receiving end of donations if they wish to.
I would also like to quote the definite authority on this subject, Mark 12:41-44:
"Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. 42 But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents.
43 Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. 44 They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on."
That's pretty private, I think, in that one's fellow churchgoers can't discern much but the thickness of the envelope. It'd look the same if the donation consisted of 5 singles, or 5 hundreds.
(I have no idea if that's standard accepted practice everywhere, though I might imagine that someone would be getting pretty uptight at some level if people weren't giving enough to put another layer of gold on the roof of a Catholic church -- envelope or not.)
Mostly when people say "the Bible is not true" its usually a result of misunderstanding it (e.g. adopting Biblical literalism, not understanding the culture and context, not understanding nuance).
For example, you interpret Genesis as a story that makes a point and tell you something - it is like Jesus's parables (no one same says they are literal!). For example, that all human beings are made in the image of God - as we all look different that is clearly not literal. That we are all related and of one ancestry.
On the other hand you interpret the gospels as deliberately written biographies of Jesus. You interpret the epistles as letter written by their author to a particular person or group of people. You interpret the psalms as lyrics.
It is the traditional way of interpreting the Bible and few people had a problem with it until modern times.
However, much of the rest of the Bible should be read differently - the letters, biographies etc. Each document ("book") needs to be read appropriately and in context. Again, each can be compared to others in its genre, but its inclusion in "the Bible" (but there are lots of Biblical canons) gives it that extreme importance.
Sorry to nitpick, but there were quite a lot of "heathens" and "witches" who had faced some problems with the traditional interpretations of the Bible before modern times.