Referring to this? https://www.huffpost.com/entry/thieves-apology-note-san-bern...

I am not a crook, but sounds like it was a pretty high-skill thief. So relatively low risk - and catching & punishing that thief mighta been a pretty low priority for everyone from the on-shift cops to the most idealist juror.

i bet Sam is getting some e-books /j

The point is that there are surely targets that are better funded and thus more likely to pay out large sums of money in order to fix things.

Really? Have you seen a man eat his own head? No? So then you haven't seen everything. And neither have I.

Kind of like "erase the debts" from Fight Club? "Haven't returned that digital book? Keep it!"

Yeah. But if 0.1% of humans are in the bottom 0.1% for personal morality, and there are more than 8 billion humans on the Earth...

I say this as a government-skeptical conservative: libraries are a great use of taxpayer money. Of all the things that people can vote to tax themselves for, here’s something that everyone can use. It’s great.

Many other uses of tax dollars are handouts for a very small number of people that most of us see no benefit from (and may even have side-effects that make things worse for everybody else).

I have never seen a service the library provided that I didn't think was at least marginally worth throwing some tax cents to provide for free for people that need it. I looked at the NYPL services page https://www.nypl.org/help/services and none of it looked not useful. Were any of them necessary? I mean, probably not in the way nobody needs a library, only that libraries are a fundamentally good service to a community.

That sounds awesome!

A beloved public institution, that improves society as a whole, is equally available to all, has enough money to do their mission well offer auxiliary services and to take advantage of PSA programs?

What a treasure.