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And They Shall Know You By Your Books
Val42K writes "People have been concerned about provisions of the Patriot Act that would grant law enforcement access to your library records. Now libraries are considering placing RFID tags into books instead of barcodes. The RFID tags will (supposedly) be turned off when you check out of the library, but could they be turned back on? What about the possibility of you being located and tracked by the books that you carry?"
They're them because I don't want anything. I don't want a big bunch of freebies. I don't want to exercise influence over other people's lives.
Since I don't want anything, government can only take from me. They can't help me.
They're them because if they were us (at least the us that includes me), they wouldn't be anyone. They'd be substantially disbanded.
They'll always be them. The desire, by you or anyone else, to make them anything more, amounts to a desire to take from me for your own benefit. It's ethically wrong.
I don't care if authors get paid. I don't care whether they write books.
I care if money is stolen from my paycheck to pay for useless (useless to me anyway) libraries.
And I'm tired of listening to people bitch about something that's going on in libraries that's "a violation of my rights". It's not. The government funds the libraries, they get to make the rules. Want better rules? Fund the libraries privately.
Funding the libraries privately will get you more accountability. It gets you the amount of influence over the rules that you're willing to pay for. And it's ethically better than taking the money from people against their will.