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Comment by automatic6131 | Hacker News Reader

>He would love this if the drill he were to borrow was (more or less) in as good of shape as his own is now. But why would that be so?

Exactly. I would also like the Neighbourhood Makita toolbox. But then, who has the incentives to make this work? Who tracks down the person that keeps it for two months? Who sources this stuff? Who sets the budget? What else is there? A community gym? Well, top quality stuff is thousands, and there are many kinds of gym - weightlifting, gymnastics, boxing... What other resources would you want?

There's no way any of this could happen and actually be good. It's just... thermodynamically going to end up crap. There are so many ways for a commons system to be shit, and only one way for it to be good.

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I'm a bit surprised at this sentiment.

I have the "Neighbourhood Makita toolbox" today: Max across the street is into woodworking and lends his tools freely & happily rents you his time for the price of a beer or two. David will let you pull your car into his garage for an oil change because he has a nice car lift. I'm less useful, but lift my share of heavy things & set my share of fence posts and am always around when their computers act up.

When I was younger I grew up in a rural area with decent poverty, and this went even deeper. Farmers knew they could each get a small mower that takes forever to clear their field, or could pool their cash and share one big PTO-driven Bush Hog that did the job better & faster. There wasn't any worry about "who keeps it nice": you washed it and sharpened the blades if needed when you were done because you know your neighbor washed it and sharpened the blades when he was.

Is the rub that Cory talks about "the library" being the source, giving a vision of some faceless Other going to a big building downtown and renting the drill in exchange for their library card, nothing else, with no incentive to keep it nice for the next person? Maybe that's it; I'd argue, however, that a 15-minute city implies more libraries serving fewer people, so the Other isn't faceless, it's Max or Dave.

Yeah, I'm also surprised that folks here seem so pessimistic about building a community that supports each other. It's not a political stance, to help your neighbor.

Maybe "the library" concept reeks too much of socialism for the average individualistic American.

But the tool library near me is a group of old guys who volunteer to run it out of a church basement. No faceless Other, just a community of people who want to work with others and put in the work to keep it going.

This is a weird train of thought that assumes the end and then builds to it. I'm a member of a tool library and it is and has been great. Even without that experience, these are trivial questions: the person/people that set up the tool library handles it, and they're incentivized to do so from their salary they get paid by the tool library, which it in turn gets from membership dues.

The one jackass last week who was caught trying to get into the engineer's cockpit of the train in the UK, so he could film a Tiktok video.

If not you, then some of us somewhere will be sharing the tools with him. He'll dump our community's tools in the quarry, or set them on fire with thermite. You know, so it will go viral.

He'll be ordered to do restitution, but that won't help me when it takes 12+ months to replace them (if indeed he ever does pay the restitution). Some communities will institute laws to prohibit such people from the tool libraries for life, but that will be struck down because now that no one can have their own tools, prohibiting him from the library leaves him tool-less and it violates his human rights. I mean, even I can't argue against that logic. It'd be true, my arguments would only amount to that it would still be just.

It's not a weird train of thought. It's the correct train of thought. It's how I do my work. I imagine the various things that can go wrong, and then I design solutions to prevent those.

Apparently you work in a completely different tech field where you just imagine scenarios where nothing ever goes wrong, and "poof" they appear in reality in a puff of smoke like magic.

> Some communities will institute laws to prohibit such people from the tool libraries for life, but that will be struck down because now that no one can have their own tools, prohibiting him from the library leaves him tool-less and it violates his human rights.

See, this is where you're just inventing an entire hypothetical oppressive regime to support your meandering train of thought. You've decided you don't like tool libraries. That's fine, you do you. I'll enjoy my tool library that continues to be great, despite your protests that reality can't be real.

Also, that's not correct thinking. Like, apolitically, I hope your work isn't paying you for that. Thinking of ways things can go wrong is great. Skipping the part where you weigh the odds of things going wrong and how to mitigate that and then declaring "there's no way this can possibly work" is not something you should be admitting to publicly.

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