O city, your name exists but you have been destroyed

I love when ancient poets talk about how doomed & hubristic seafaring is. like yess lets surpass our natural limitations and travel to unknown places. let's test the boundaries between life and death with our human ambition. let's shipwreck ourselves and bring nothing but grief and tragedy to human history with our overstep. this is so sexy

There is simply no *principled* difference between book piracy and libraries. This doesn't mean you have to be in favor of book piracy if you like libraries, but it means you can't be so on abstract principled grounds, it has to be on a specific materialist "I think below this level of access libraries are good, but above it they are bad; it would be bad if everyone donated books more often, and libraries were much larger and easier to access"

authors are not paid when you borrow books from the library, except for the initial purchase of the book. in a world where everyone donated most books they read to libraries when they were done with them, and there were many more libraries, more easily accessible, people would buy fewer books, and authors would be paid less. and remember, those ebooks on a pirating website didnt come from nowhere, someone bought one and uploaded it. pirating websites are exactly the ideal of a world with more libraries, brought to an extreme. like to be clear: youre allowed to be against this ideal, you can be like, a "libraries moderate", theyre not sacred or anything. but that is the implication of your position: there is a ceiling on allowed library accessibility, above which they become bad