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Donating forks to the dining hall

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Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#121

Post by SamBam »

uyzstvqs wrote: post #106
cjs_ac wrote: post #97

My first teaching job was at an old, prestigious boys' boarding school in Australia. (When I say old , it was old for Australia.) Every boy, whether a boarder or day-boy, and every staff member received a hot lunch in the dining halls each day. There were two dining halls: most of the boys at in the less ornate one, but the oldest boys and the staff ate in the more formal dining hall. Portraits of all the previous he…

You call it old, but this sounds like quality secondary education far above almost everything available today, at least here across Western Europe, which is 99.9% read book, then do test. The fact that you teached ecology using actual plants and the outside amazes me, even though it shouldn't and should just be the norm.

I'm confused by the apparent contradiction being suggested between "old" and "can do ecology with plants."

GP didn't say it was a bad school.

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#122

Post by schiem »

fuzzy_biscuit wrote: post #120
xattt wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And get your money back by selling for scrap! Fun fact: replacing copper pipes with PEX during a renovation will often pay for tools and supplies needed for the replacement when the copper is taken for scrap.

Is that fun fact legitimate? I know that you can get a premium for copper (see: tweakers who rip out pipes in open buildings and sell it), but the ratio here seems improbable, at least.

According to copper.orgs fact page, the "average" single family home (whatever that means) has 151 pounds of copper pipe. The current scrap price for #1 copper where I live is $2.88. That comes out to around $446.

That would maybe cover the cost of the pex itself, OR the cost of fittings and tools, but probably not both.

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#123

Post by maicro »

pjc50 wrote: post #107
TeMPOraL wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a closed system, you could grow the commons until there's no scarcity anymore, and thus no tragedy either. This stops working once some "entrepreneur" figures your commons is their arbitrage opportunity, and opens the system to the outside world.

Ooh, you could start "forkr.com", a just-in-time peer-to-peer fork leasing service!

See, I like the peer-to-peer idea, but if you're going to be centralized anyway (via the service), why not have your own sourcing resources as well? Team up with waymo or whatever self-driving taxi services are around, rent out a small chunk of the trunk to store a good selection of cutlery and consumables (teabags, salt and pepper, sriracha packets, etc. etc.).

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#124

Post by bell-cot »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #73
baggy_trough wrote: post #54

A "flood the zone" strategy similar to this works well for cheap items that continually vanish, such as pens, socks, charging cables, etc.

Did that for pens while employed as a pizza delivery driver nearly two decades ago. Customers would regularly sign for a credit card receipt with my pen, hand back the signed receipt, receive pizza, and somewhere in the object-management process wind up still holding the pen. The cheapest pens were like 8 cents each at Costco, so it literally wasn't worth my time to try to make sure my pen made it back to me.

[Salesmen for a thousand sellers of cheap custom-printed pens suddenly take notice]

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#125

Post by dmje »

dmje wrote: post #62
martyvis wrote: post #57

This could have been a follow-up to "The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1322240/

Superb

[flagged]

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#126

Post by yareal »

probably_wrong wrote: post #108
yareal wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is called mutual aid, and is one of the fundamental underpinnings to anarchist theory. People will help each other, generally, if doing so is not too much of a burden on themselves. Systematizing that behavior into genuine community support for one another would (hypothetically) lead to outcomes of increased wellbeing for all. In your example, the person who left out the chairs isn't worried about being paid bac…

I recognize I'm completely ignorant about this topic so I have to ask: how does the theory fit within the story in the post? If I understand you correctly, mutual aid theory explains the author buying cheap forks just to do something good. At the same time, in the absence of penalties people will steal forks until barely any remains. So why should one believe that the balance will favor the fork buyers more than the…

The basic theory is that when something is abundant and everyone has what they need, the incentive for theft doesn't really exist. If you set out a barrel of forks and say, "take what you need" then at some point everyone has taken as many forks as they need. If we assume this is also happening for other bulk items, and everyone can just have as much as they need, there's nothing to trade those forks for, so taking a bunch doesn't benefit you at all.

Ask yourself, why would you take more than you need? Not some hypothetical other person, but you, personally. Do you think other people are in general likely to behave like you? (Put another way, do you think you are fairly typical when presented with a "take what's fair" scenario?)

It's like the candy bowl at an office or someone's house, or the "take a penny" cup at a store. I'm sure occasionally someone takes everything from it, but by and large people take what they'll personally use.

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#127

Post by beefok »

pavi2410 wrote: post #38

Reading the title seemed like it was related to the Dining Philosophers problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dining_philosophers_problem

I was going to post the same thing. "What does this have to do with concurrent processes?!" :)

It's a good problem to think about, and I hope most people consider it in their work.

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#128

Post by yareal »

eternauta3k wrote: post #78
yareal wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is called mutual aid, and is one of the fundamental underpinnings to anarchist theory. People will help each other, generally, if doing so is not too much of a burden on themselves. Systematizing that behavior into genuine community support for one another would (hypothetically) lead to outcomes of increased wellbeing for all. In your example, the person who left out the chairs isn't worried about being paid bac…

Couldn't we do slightly better with communication though? Instead of altruistically clearing the dishwasher in the office every time, we can have a rotating dishwasher duty. Is this opposed to anarchism? What about not having an explicit dishwasher duty, but just a socially-enforced expectation to contribute?

Sort of, anarchy does not mean individualism. It absolutely can be built around syndicalism and federation. If a group of people says, "we believe it's best to take turns doing this labor" then they can do that.

Typically there's a cultural expectation of "wellbeing for all", which becomes a significant social expectation. If it's the cultural standard, it changes the relationship to chores significantly - I can contribute to them knowing that the general person out there is also doing chores with my wellbeing in mind.

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#129

Post by scioto »

What he should have done was to create a foundation for supplying forks, making him and his roommate the officers of the foundation. They could have then solicited funds, including matching from other organizations. From those funds, they could have paid themselves handsome salaries for managing the foundation. Then with the mere pittance left over, they would then purchase forks. I'm sure that there would be other tax breaks in there somewhere to totally live a lavish lifestyle.

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#130

Post by chiffre01 »

schiem wrote: post #122
fuzzy_biscuit wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that fun fact legitimate? I know that you can get a premium for copper (see: tweakers who rip out pipes in open buildings and sell it), but the ratio here seems improbable, at least.

According to copper.orgs fact page, the "average" single family home (whatever that means) has 151 pounds of copper pipe. The current scrap price for #1 copper where I live is $2.88. That comes out to around $446. That would maybe cover the cost of the pex itself, OR the cost of fittings and tools, but probably not both.

I'd argue keep the copper in place as much as possible. PEX is plastic. I'm sure it contributes to all the microplastics/PFAS we see all over the place.
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