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Comment by colanderman | Hacker News Reader

Yes stuff breaks, but more often inconsiderate people tend to break stuff they don't own or care about. As another commenter pointed out, I have certain close family members I don't even lend things to, because the items are likely to come back broken or missing. Even with an explanation, it still means I have to pay to replace it.

I hate to be so negative about this, because I would love to just be able to share things with neighbors/friends.

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Good friends pay, or help pay, for things they break.

I imagine the people you're talking about don't. Have you asked directly, though? Making it clear that you expect them to pay - and will ask - may help them avoid asking to borrow something and breaking it next time.

What if they can't afford it?

If one can't afford an item, and is irresponsible to the point of breaking things every time, then they shouldn't be borrowing the item.

How would you react if your child broke the things you are remembering? Could you apply that strategy with these people?

If not are there other parenting strategies that are more appropriate to use with adults?

Now expand that to 200 "children" who coexist in a makerspace...? Doesn't work.

Sure it does. Schools are great at managing 200 children.

What won't work is an organization full of adults who think they are never children. You need at least a couple of adults who realize we're all children sometimes for things to run smoothly.

Sure, if you have a 20:1 student-teacher ratio.

Children are not spending all day with access to tens of thousands of dollars in sensitive equipment while unsupervised.

The school/makerspace comparison sucks.

If I had children, I would not lend them expensive/delicate items. At least not until they have demonstrated a level of care and responsibility with items of lesser value, which is a process of trust-building that literally takes years. Which is exactly the point: these friends/family members have demonstrated the opposite.

Relevant aside: in Boston, there is a community boating organization. They own the boats, and members (who pay a fixed monthly fee) can take out any boat at any time… IF they have passed the requisite training courses and exams, both of which are administered by knowledgable staff. Again, this is a process which literally takes years, to work up to the more expensive/dangerous boats.

Same assertions hold true for libraries, and yet most people return books and in good condition.

Libraries make you pay for damaging or losing books usually. I am generally of the privatized camp, where when you pay for something and it's yours you take good care of it, and if you do something to it you bear the full consequences. If you borrow, then it should be with the explicit agreement to return in original form. In fact put it in writing and have a contract made, take a picture of it. As now you are in the lending business... even if the price you are charing is $0. And if it comes back damaged and they are not willing to pay for it, or if they lose it, then don't lend to them anymore and remind them if they ever ask you as to why. Maybe you will lose friends, but then you should probably not be mixing business with pleasure.

People in the lending business usually place a hold on your credit card for the full value of the item being rented until it is returned undamaged. The charge never actually hits the card unless something goes wrong.

I can't put a hold on someone's credit card for the full replacement value of a chainsaw, let alone an excavator or a truck.

When I worked at a hire company, we put a hold on the card for a fixed value for some smaller items - hand tools, things like lawnmowers that we were doing a deal on, or an extra days rent for larger items.

I worked at a company that rented out boats and jet skis. That's how they did it. If your card didn't have enough credit, tough luck.

Although actually, the confidence I'm displaying above may be unwarranted. Maybe the hold value was actually a fraction of the full value and then a portion of the rental price went towards insurance. Not sure.

Yeah, it was probably a smaller amount. I would think most people's credit limit is less than the cost of a boat.

I think you were thinking of something like a county library in the United States, which deal primarily with mass-market paperbacks. That's not a great analogy. When you're talking about breaking expensive equipment (as in a maker space), the median user doesn't matter. The worst user matters. Books (at least mass-market books) are several orders of magnitude cheaper than expensive hardware.

Also the last interaction I had with a college library was being charged $200 to replace a textbook that had a cup of coffee dumped on it, so in my experience libraries aren't really model replacement-cost internalizers.

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