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Donating forks to the dining hall

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Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#71

Post by rob74 »

dexwiz wrote: post #60
marssaxman wrote: post #47

I love this spirit. In the office where I work, the main door locks whenever it closes, so the first person to arrive each morning props the door open for everyone else. Well, a new tenant moved in to one of the other units, and they started taking our doorstop. Morning after morning we had to go find it and retrieve it, for weeks! One day it occurred to me that I didn't have to complain to management, or get mainten…

Many doors have a toggle on the face plate below or above the latch that changes auto lock behavior. But auto lock is good for security. I once had a friend move out of a place in part because he would often get locked out. I showed him how to change this at his move out party.

> auto lock is good for security

Exactly... in the company where I work, propping open the door (maybe not so much the door to the building, but certainly the doors to our office) would be a sure way to get you into pretty serious trouble. Also, opening the door with your own access card for other people (although I occasionally do that for people I know).

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#72

Post by kqr »

marssaxman wrote: post #47

I love this spirit. In the office where I work, the main door locks whenever it closes, so the first person to arrive each morning props the door open for everyone else. Well, a new tenant moved in to one of the other units, and they started taking our doorstop. Morning after morning we had to go find it and retrieve it, for weeks! One day it occurred to me that I didn't have to complain to management, or get mainten…

Yup. Similarly, if staplers and scissors always disappear from office cabinets, it's often because people know they disappear so they hold onto them to have them available. It's a self-reinforcing system.

But if one buys a bunch of them, people start trusting that they will be available, and will hoard less!

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#73

Post by ThrustVectoring »

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.

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#74

Post by yareal »

rtpg wrote: post #66

There are so many problems that are solved by ones own money, and people not being jerks about it. I think a lot about how some bus stops will just have chairs that people leave there to offer seating when the city decided not to put any.

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 back for the chairs. Someone has excess, they shared it freely without expecting anything in return, and the community is better for it.

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#76

Post by eternauta3k »

kqr wrote: post #72
marssaxman wrote: post #47

I love this spirit. In the office where I work, the main door locks whenever it closes, so the first person to arrive each morning props the door open for everyone else. Well, a new tenant moved in to one of the other units, and they started taking our doorstop. Morning after morning we had to go find it and retrieve it, for weeks! One day it occurred to me that I didn't have to complain to management, or get mainten…

Yup. Similarly, if staplers and scissors always disappear from office cabinets, it's often because people know they disappear so they hold onto them to have them available. It's a self-reinforcing system. But if one buys a bunch of them, people start trusting that they will be available, and will hoard less!

I thought the solution to the tragedy of the commons was institutions: we need a 1000-year old socially-enforced tradition of shunning hoarders and assigning dishwasher duty.

Your solution sounds easier, though.

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#77

Post by eternauta3k »

ggm wrote: post #12
gravescale wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you care (which it sounds like, quite reasonably to me, you don't really), use pliers to bend over just the very end of the handle or put 180 twist in the handle. Very obvious and maybe unappealing to the sticky-fingered, without too much degradation to the immediate function of the object. And for teaspoons bought by the score, which i assume are stamped metal, the handle is probably thin enough to make it easy.…

Your idea is good. Marking them in a non-intrusive (to function) way would serve to make it clear this is communal property. But, in essence we don't care, and I also think its not always wonton theft, I know I've shed spoons into the waste bin being uncareful.

I'm not judging, but how exactly does that happen? Does the spoon fall into the trash while you're discarding something and you don't want to pick it up? Or do you throw out a container and miss that it had a spoon inside?

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#78

Post by eternauta3k »

yareal wrote: post #74
rtpg wrote: post #66

There are so many problems that are solved by ones own money, and people not being jerks about it. I think a lot about how some bus stops will just have chairs that people leave there to offer seating when the city decided not to put any.

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?

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#79

Post by fragmede »

seoulmetro wrote: post #68
fragmede wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This would be totally irrelevant if it weren't for social media status seeking. isn't being unnecessarily negative to you? It's a cute little story about dining hall forks, not a hot girl who just happens to be in a bikini shilling a business course or some crap on instagram for followers. It's on their personal blog, that I (unfortunately) will likely never read again, so the amount of "clout" they're receiving fr…

No? >Your comments starts off accusing them of faking the cute little story. No it didn't. I am saying that it reads like they might have thought up the idea as something to blog about before they executed the idea. For the sole purpose of appearing more interesting. Irrelevant here means just uninteresting enough that it wouldn't be brought up in conversation when people describe their life. >The fact that your comm…

> Their comment is unnecessarily negative.

Which comment are you referring to here? My read is that this is referring to my comment "Who hurt you?" but if that was not your intention then I misread, apologies.

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#80

Post by throwanem »

groggo wrote: post #43
pavel_lishin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (thanks ChatGPT for wording) Can this place please remain a bastion where people use their words, without having a robot generate them, or massage them into shape?

[flagged]

Wouldn't you rather have a voice of your own?
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