Technology

Always check your public library. The ones in m area have these which cost you nothing to use because they are supported as public services.

Always support public libraries.

With the size of housing units they build in condo buildings these days, who the fuck has any room to store appliances?

Plus, we live in an era where we produce too much shit anyway and it's damaging the environment. So by sharing stuff like this, it means we need to produce less.

This sounds neat until it's run for profit.

Wait is this trying to suggest just renting is the same thing as a library?

The benifit of a library is you share the cost as a group and get some fractional use of it. Like books that you only really need access to for small amount of time.

Its not the same as say Amazon owning the book rental space and choosing, without any choice on your point, on what books are there or who could get access to them.

Growing up, there was an association in my area for common ownership of different types of machinery and other equipment for its members. You paid something like $10 a year, and for that you got to borrow all kinds of things you might need as a home owner, like a wood chopper/splitter, high pressure washer, trailers, leaf blowers, cement mixer, scaffolding etc.

I always thought that was brilliant.

Everything as subscription.

Yeah it is seem to be cheap now, until you become dependent on it.

On the flip side, when you lost your job, cancel your home subscription and become homeless.

I've rented things like carpet cleaners, floor polishers, chainsaws, splitters for the chainsawed wood, generators, a bunch of weird things from a rental place down the street that seems to have at least one of anything I could ever need. It's awesome! Not having to maintain a bunch of shitty two stroke engines is phenomenal.

Obligatory Library Socialism Link: https://librarysocialism.org/

In the simplest terms, the right of usufruct means you can use things, but you cannot deny them to others when you're not using them, and you do not have the right to destroy them to prevent others from using them. So, for example, the farmer is welcome to grow crops on a given plot of land - but if they choose not to, somebody else can use the land.

Given this, it's easy to see that this principle already exists in public libraries. You can borrow a book to help you start a business, but you can't prevent others from reading it after you - or threaten to destroy the book unless you receive the profits of the next reader's business. You can hold the book exclusively (of other library patrons), but only temporarily.

A friend of mine who lived in Berkeley in the early aughts was a member of her local tool library. I thought it was a brilliant idea. You just had to be live in the community and getting your library card was free.

At one point my roommate needed a drill to complete some home improvement, so I got the drill, committing to be the drill guy the buddy that had a borrow-able power drill.

Curiously, when I moved, I needed to reduce my stuff drastically, so my roommate inherited the drill.

When I was a kid in the late 80s/early 90s, we had a toy-library across from our house. You could rent all kinds of toys for a week, extend if needed, and return it when the kids got bored with it. Good times.

They also had LEGO, and every piece had to be accounted for on return.

They went out of business when people started buying their own GameBoys and PlayStations.

What the fuck is this rent-a-center propaganda?

How stupid are we?

It’s nice however let’s assume that it is the main consumer model. Then everything becomes possibly 20 times more expensive as companies need to keep same profit (shareholders) and now 20 people pool money to share the thing. It’s not a solution to capitalism, however it would work wonders for environment.

Yet it is us doing all the work for the environment while companies don’t lift a finger and get all the profit. Not a viable long term solution to a fundamental problem of wealth.

"You will own nothing and like it"

There is a “tool library” sort of service (for profit) operating in my area. The prices are absurd—people are charging like $20/day for a tool that would cost $100 new, or half that used on craigslist. My projects often span multiple days, especially if there’s an unforeseen delay—which there always is because I’m a good engineer but a shitty carpenter.

I don’t use the service. I’m all for communal ownership but it still has to make sense.

There's a company in Brentwood Tennessee and online that rents very expensive camera lenses.

So you can borrow a $3000 lens for say $200 for a week.

Not sure if dystopia

Renting stuff makes sense, but there are still lots of inherent problems with tool libraries and the like.

They're great for a carpet shampooer or chainsaw you need once a year, but if you actually want to fix and build stuff around the home then booking a tool, taking perfect measurements, hauling your stuff over to a tool library, building it, hauling everything back home to check it, is simply an infeasibly onerous process. The instant you make a mistake and need a different tool, or check a measurement, etc, you're wasting hours of time, which is most often the biggest limiter for home projects anyways.

You also don't get to learn on the same tool and build up instincts and understanding of how it behaves.

The one in Chicago is great. They also had a huge collection of free seeds this spring.