Sadly it’s probably also the case that publishers’ ebook pricing to libraries is based on paranoia about them destroying all book sales, plus the usual corporate greed.

First thousand’s free. Yep, genius policy. (Which is why I doubt they do this).

I have heard this same story except with employers tracking employees who steal money. That one makes a lot more sense to me because they know the identity of the person involved.

Someone gonna tell me that the second I walk into Target their system is like “here comes Mr. Scara Bic, currently at $570.” ??

This is not a word that has a strict definition nor is certified by any agency or standard. As you can see by this thread, there may be a variety of personal opinions about what should count. But it’s like asking at what point in learning to ride a bike do you become a bicyclist? Is it enough to just know how to ride? It’s a semantic question, which, if you’re not familiar with that term, just means that it all depends on what you want to call something and is not a question of any objective criteria.

This might actually make sense. Borrowers can’t lose or destroy a digital copy, or bring it back late. Probably a digital copy enables more checkouts. Max of 26? Well think about he condition if the last library book you checked out that had 26 stamps on the list. Hard copies don’t last forever. Sad that they had to charge more based on these assumptions, but you can imagine some reasoning to them.

When your source throws a browser security warning, you automatically lose.

That’s a shame. They need more licenses per book, it sounds like. But at least your community is highly engaged with your library!

Since literally everyone could be described as a believer in the past that’s not what I meant. We started with the word “theologian” and yes I assume any reasonable definition of that word is going to have high, high overlap with the clergy, with perhaps some exceptions.

Newton was basically an astrologer.

You lost me, friend. I’m not even sure we can agree to disagree at this point. I’m just going to back away slowly…

Any Kindle owner should go find out how easy it is to get library books on their Kindle. It’s totally the way to go. You don’t have to buy their shit and deal with their rules.

If it’s reductive to say they were all morons, it’s fabulist to say they could step into the modern era and be nerds.

I get your point that curious people had no other outlet then, and that the clergy was just where they went. But there is one problem with that: science did in fact develop as a discipline. We did crawl out of the dark ages. We did discover we are not the center of the universe. And mostly it wasn’t the clergy who did that. There are notable exceptions like Gregor Mendel and Pope Gregory 13. But not enough to characterize the whole institution by. And in fact that same institution was a force for anti-curiosity quite a bit, as when they imprisoned Galileo, which is hardly the only example of them quashing open questioning as heresy.

If perhaps we focused only on theologians who were not part of the clergy, that could turn up slightly differently. I don’t know enough there to guess.

Okay you haven’t been very explanatory about your statement that theologians were scientists. But it seems you are using the term extremely loosely to mean anyone who explores questions.

This is not my definition at all. Science is a method of exploring questions that involves hypotheses and tests and building principles from observed results. Theologians do none of that and never did. They made shit up. That is not science.

I can understand calling theologians philosophers but being a philosopher does not make you a scientist.

“aka scientists?”

Not sure what that means.

Ah theologians. When we invented agriculture so that not everyone had to work on gathering food, this enabled some of us to specialize in advanced skills. But theology, wow. What a waste of time. Get those dudes out in the fields.

At this point the suggestions are getting pretty out there. So far I’ve heard in this thread that I should switch to Linux, download this and that code from GitHub, build my own keyboard and design a circuit board for it.

I think I’ll just take the adware.

Once I was moving house and we set an old couch out on the sidewalk. It was very large and heavy so we were concerned that no one would take it. But we lived in a poorer area where most everything got taken, and sure enough it did disappear.

A few more days went by and we continued packing to move. The big day finally arrived and I went out that morning to greet the mover truck and found that whoever took the couch had come back and returned it during the night! I was like “you can’t do that!” LOL

I know what you mean. The church is usually the last to recognize new realities so if they are open to it that definitely says a lot about where the Overton Window is.

This POV is too extreme but there’s some truth to it. Not only is the news cycle always relentlessly moving on, and not only are attention spans short, but TBH we’ve seen so much sci fi that discovering real aliens would practically feel like old news.

But two things:

1. you’re underestimating how much the news cycle would make of this - it’s a honeypot of ongoing intrigue. It’s got elements of science, government conspiracy, threat of war, and spirituality to it: the media would set up camp around this topic and make a permanent circus of it.

2. there are a lot of smart people in the world who would pay a great deal of attention to the details and facts coming out of this. Yes there are more stupid people than ever but I think there are also more smart people than ever. If you belong to those circles and subscribe to the right media outlets then you know. If you just consume an IG feed everyday, you don’t.

No man that sun drying shit is expansion universe, not canon. And the author has said himself that pig 3 was on retainer for a masonry company.

Kindergarten marxism be strong over there. 😂🫡

No some of the capital that paid for the pig’s upkeep during his build period was the proceeds from natural resources that were conserved during a season of plenty to be sold in a time of scarcity. If you want to call eating less in the summertime “labor” with a capital L you can while I sit here and laugh. Capital is just liquidity. You can generate it by labor but that doesn’t make it the same as labor or the property of others who have labor to give.