My son is a "bouncer" in a university library. It is hard to believe that university libraries are no longer places where persons interested in scholarship can go for a peaceful browse through the archive that defines the knowledge accumulated in human history.
Instead, libraries are "Student Union Lite," and even boom boxes, food deliveries, and beverages are often tolerated. Instead of asking people to be quiet, free ear plugs are available at the circulation desk. And if patrons want to concentrate on some scholarly material and need quiet for this purpose, they may find themselves in a literal verbal or physical fight with other patrons who are there to socialize.
With this backdrop, one of the issues that has started to surface is people using the library computers to browse ****. No ... not the bikini clad models of the post above. Hard core ****, all the way to beastiality. And they did not stop at just "watching" as appears to have been the case in the mass transit post above. They were "participatory" if they thought they were private "enough."
When this stuff first started to appear on the public computers, in the public areas of the library, the staff of bouncers had as a task to ask people to stop.
Eventually the policy was modified. It was decided by management that people should be able to use the library to meet their needs. After all, this is the goal of a library, right? The policy became that if another patron complained, then the bouncers would act ... but otherwise, they would look the other way. I dunno... maybe some of the bouncers looked toward it instead ....
Another sign of the times.
I can't remember if there's ever been a discussion here on this forum about the movie "Idiocracy." It is supposed to take place 500 years into the future, but I think we're at the tipping point, and it will not take more than a generation or two to get there, and that's if we're lucky.
