the ruins of my mental health

Torrez is the same guy who as DA fought tooth and nail to keep from having to prosecute cases in a timely fashion, in accordance with the inconvenient-to-him Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, instead being absolutely comfortable with letting arrested people rot in jail for weeks because timely case management conferences was too much trouble for his office. He got slapped down by the courts for that.

The civil trial, which began with opening arguments in Santa Fe last month, centered on allegations that Meta violated state consumer protections laws and misled residents about the safety of apps like Facebook and Instagram. New Mexico attorney general Raúl Torrez sued Meta in 2023 following an undercover operation involving the creation of a fake social media profile of a 13-year-old girl that he previously told CNBC “was simply inundated with images and targeted solicitations” from child abusers.

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When the New Mexico trial’s second phase, conducted without a jury, commences on May 4, a judge will determine whether Meta created a public nuisance and should fund public programs intended to address the alleged harms. The state’s lawyers are also urging Meta to implement changes to its apps and operations, including “enacting effective age verification, removing predators from the platform, and protecting minors from encrypted communications that shield bad actors.“

We already know that the American Justice System doesn't do shit to protect kids from predators, especially not wealthy ones. Therefore, Meta being liable for criminal actions taken through its platform isn't really a good thing. To put it another way, it is already illegal to drink and drive - Toyota shouldn't be held responsible for making the car used in a drunk driving accident.

The principled difference is "I want people to be compensated for their labour."

I'm not in the field anymore, but I was a librarian once (degree and all) and wow do people not know how libraries work. To a degree that never ceases to astound me.

I'm gonna try not to go into everything in deep detail because I have things to do right now but I want to address two major myths being so confidently asserting here.

This might seem like the less important myth but it's actually the more misunderstood of the two: when patrons donate books to a public library, by and large those books are not going to end up in the collection. Many municipal libraries (in the US at least, the only place I have firsthand experience with) have a "Friends of the Library" (or similar) group that supports the library, primarily through fundraising. If your library also has a little shelf of books for sale (or in bigger systems maybe a whole separate book shop!), that's where donations are going. The reasons why are many but essentially boil down to the varying quality and condition of donations that come in. I can count on one hand (in fact on two fingers) the number of times I've seen a donation become part of a collection, and both times those were items of a local history interest that did not circulate for checkout. One rare book and one collection of papers, donated basically for archival purposes.

The library field is a major pillar of the publishing industry, and libraries frequently buy multiple copies of a book if they buy one at all because collection developers are experts at stretching their ever-shrinking budgets and can only buy what they think is needed, wanted, and will circulate. When I worked in collection development (a job I loved until it burnt me out) we occasionally had wiggle room for small presses, local authors, etc., but buy in large when I submitted my vendor carts to my boss I was buying more than one of everything. I was in a larger system, so we wanted coverage for multiple branches, but sometimes I ended up having to buy more of something if it developed a following.

You know that friend who goes to the library all the time and is in book clubs and is always recommending books to you? That person is powerful, and their interest in contagious, and in addition to creating more circulation at the library (which makes collection developers buy more copies of a book), a lot of their friends will just buy the book themselves. Ask any author (especially if fiction) and they'll tell you the same.

Pirating a Disney movie is not going to lead to anyone losing their job, but pirating a book can almost certainly lead to that author not getting a second book deal AND directly cuts into their income. Why? Because big collaborative projects like movies/TV shows/video games pay most of their talent up front more than residuals/from sales. It MIGHT mean an individual doesn't get put on the team for the next project, but they still got compensation for their work.

When you pirate books, you are cutting directly into the income the creator will be paid for their work. The advance you get for signing with a publisher is generally Very Small, and most of your income comes from sales. If your novel doesn't sell, you're not going to get another book deal from the same publisher, and it's not likely you'll get a book deal from another person.