embarcadero

NYPL services Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. That's 3.5 million people to Queens' 2.25 million.

While technically a private institution, NYPL is chartered by New York State, many of its buildings are publicly owned, and the mayor, council speaker, and comptroller each appoint a representative to the board.

"one of". It's unlikely to be bigger than NYPL, which has 92 locations to QPL's 62.

The NYPL board has discussed renovating and re-purposing these apartments. It's a good idea, though it should be pointed out that this board has a history of foolish, reckless, and possibly corrupt dealing, as when they sold off the Donnell Branch and nearly destroyed the iconic Main Library on 42nd & 5th (the one with the lions; look up "Central Library Plan" for details).

This year, SaveNYPL.org got federal and state protection for NYC's remaining 56 Carnegie libraries: https://www.savenypl.org/major-victory-landmarking-nycs-carn...

Now we are working on a local designation. This is important because real estate developers have many of these buildings in the crosshairs. Currently, hand in hand with the NYPL and the Robin Hood Foundation, they are looking to tear down the Inwood Branch, under the guise of building a shiny new library, inside a big condo with some "affordable housing". A few years ago, they did tear down the Brooklyn Heights Branch, replacing it with a smaller library inside a large condo (there is an argument that civic works ought to be freestanding to communicate import). Before that, the Donnell Library was torn down, replaced year later with a library that is a fraction of the original and squeezed into a basement beneath a luxury hotel, the latter valued at a multiple of what the NYPL got in the deal. And for a while, the developers behind the Barclays Center were itching to tear down the Pacific Branch in Brooklyn.

These libraries are important civic spaces. Whatever your feelings about paper vs digital, there is no denying that NYC's libraries are heavily used, and that they constitute an important part of the fabric of our civic life, a place where New Yorkers of all stripes congregate and mingle.

Historical footnote: NYPL is in fact a private institution chartered by New York State, formed through the merger of the Astor and Lenox libraries, to which was added a gift from the Tilden Foundation. It serves the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island, while the Queens Public Library and Brooklyn Public Library have their own systems (Brooklyn was a separate city until 1898). To further confuse matters, many of the libraries NYPL runs, including the Main Library, are owned by NYC, while others are belong to NYPL itself. Scott Sherman's book, Patience & Fortitude, provides a good, pithy history.

Always felt YT sold itself early because they needed someone with deep pockets to defend themselves from the lawsuits over copyright infringement. Insiders, am I wrong?

Was this recorded? Link?

Thanks. I tried to go all digital a few years ago -- getting rid of nearly all my 1000+ paper books -- only to conclude I'm generally better off reading paper and nearly always better off reading important things on paper. This because paper has a higher barrier to entry (I think of it as "slow information"), because the cookie-cutter sizing of tablets and ereaders screws up sizing (of code in particular) and, frankly, because I get tired of looking at screens and struggle to resist context switching. That said, I like to have an electronic copy of everything for easy referencing and corpus work.

The subject of paper vs digital is of particular interest to me because I volunteer with www.savenypl.org, a group created to thwart the NYPL's efforts to gut the stacks at the 42nd Street Library and sell of two branch libraries (we succeeded, mostly). I am not as skeptical of keeping books off site as some of our members, but I think many libraries are misguided in their rush to remove paper books, for reasons of both reading efficacy and surveillance. I know many technologists share these concerns. Richard Stallman was kind enough to help a few years ago (https://stallman.org/save-the-nypl.html). Now it would be good to have additional technical people weigh in on the issue of digitization / paper book removal.

May I add you to the list of such people and / or keep you posted?

Do you read on paper, tablet, phone, or all of the above? What do you think about the respective merits of these?

Nice. But doesn't confirm amount when processing payment.

I've been both gentrifier and gentrified.

As a white man from a relatively privileged background, I lived in Harlem long before it was deemed "safe". I remember apartment hunting north of Central Park around 2003 and getting a lot of dirty looks from the black Americans who had been there for generations. Who could blame them? To them I was another invader from Columbia U. And while I was there as a "pioneer" and not a "settler", as one paying about as much as they did, and while I resented the charm-bracelet girls as much as they did, I was changing the tone of the place, like it or not.

New York is now in the midst of a battle over absentee landlords. You might call it ground zero in the battle over the future of the US. You walk through Central Park and the Plaza Hotel, now mostly condos, sits dark. No one home. And behind there's a string of supertowers twice as high as the average skyscraper. The New York Times last year had an expose [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/nyregion/stream-of-foreign...] about the buyers: many foreign, many dirty, most masking their identities with shell companies. Since the owners often do not reside in New York, they're contribution to the city's coffers is mixed. More importantly, it seems pretty clear that a majority of New Yorkers resent the shadows being cast over their parks. We may have "air rights", but unlike San Francisco, we have no law guaranteeing sun rights. No wonder many of us are deficient in D.

Meanwhile, the mayor, Bill de Blasio, is happy to let the builders have their way, so long as they support his "affordable housing" agenda, ie, contribute. Until recently he refused to acknowledge what has been plain: that the homeless population has ballooned -- to 60,000, almost half of them children. Many of these people got priced out.

We can debate the fairness of all this as well as the wisdom of price controls, etc. What we should acknowledge, though, is the fact that policies have consequences, that sometimes change outpaces people's ability to adapt, and that we as a city / society will pay the costs, directly or indirectly. For a very moving but also nonjudgmental look at these dynamics, check out the documentary Homme Less: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=homme+less

Yeah, those, lamppost cameras, and mobile watchtowers.

I wonder how many of the people in the system the MTA/NYPD can identify in real time and with what precision it can locate them. I presume they know the identities of a large proportion through entrance swipes from credit/debit-purchased metrocards, but that still leaves the problem of determining when someone has exited and where they in the meantime.

Between the travel data they're storing on the metrocards (exhibit number one, the Ebola doctor) and the ubiquitous cameras, I think the WiFi has more to do with tracking the public than improving service.

I was the subject of one of Stanton's photos. While I admired his site at the time and what seemed like a commitment to free speech, I've since watched him sell out when it suits him.

HONY is a sandboxed version of New York and New Yorkers, and the political stands Stanton takes are cheap shots. He is more bond salesman than reporter. I'd be happy to see his credibility in a million little pieces.

This is a terrible idea. I lived in Argentina for two years and studied the country. It's a cesspool of corruption, with scant separation of powers (see Nisman, Alberto).

Even in less corrupt countries, electronic voting is a terrible idea: it's vulnerable to hacking and, because the system is opaque to the average citizen, erodes trust.

Richard Stallman has been emphatic on this point: https://stallman.org/evoting.html

The more at stake, the greater the temptation, the greater the likelihood of fraud. Leave online decisions to scheduling problems a la doodle.com

People should recognize that sometimes paper is superior to bits.

I'd be happy to talk. What's your email?

Yes, but how many of these are rallies (with people speaking)? Even though the south end of the square is usually free, including on market days, Parks will tell you that they do not issue permits when the farmers are in the other parts of the square. Ask them why they issued one to, say, March Against Monsanto, and they'll say that event was "grandfathered in" (ie, has been happening for several years). (And ask MAM and they'll tell you it was a huge hassle for them as well.)

Meanwhile, on the north end of the square the city is privatizing park space: http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/eats/restaurant-union-...

I tried applying for one of these permits on the largest stage in the US -- NYC -- on several occasions. The Parks Dept, which issues such permits, is a nightmare to deal with: they charge per application, require multiple applications merely to check different dates, and regularly lie about the availability of parks.

You might think spontaneous assembly is an option, and in some cases it is, but if you're going to have speakers (people), you need a sound system, and to set up a sound system you need a police permit, and to get a police permit you need a Parks permit. Start setting up without these and you'll be arrested before anyone utters a word.

Then there are the various "public-private spaces". Try applying for a permit to rally in Zuccotti Park and the go-to person will put you on hold, only to come back and say they are only issuing permits for cultural events. So the developers get their air rights, while the public gets the muzzle. Bullshit. Anil Dash has written about this some: http://dashes.com/anil/2012/03/captive-atria-and-living-in-p...

Indeed, the very frequency with which the Farmers' Market is now held in Union Square, the most central spot in NYC and a place rich in social movements, might be construed as little more than cover for crowd control, have as it does the effect of making this space all but inaccessible to protesters.