Owning tools and equipment. I wish my neighborhood or town had a tool library.
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Google your city name and “maker space” to see if there’s any near you. Not only does my local library district have them, there’s another local option with a monthly membership fee. They have large equipment like laser engravers, CNCs, drill presses, etc. They usually also have small stuff like drills that you can check out and bring home. Also a great way to meet other makers in your community
I tried looking for something like this in the UK and it turns out the nearest one for me got shut down during COVID, the rest are all an hour or two away at least. It's a great idea but I guess it's unsustainable without some sort of external funding cause the local one was already running at a loss before 2020 according to their website.
I’ve seen those public bike repair racks with attached tools. I feel like that’s the closest thing to that we have
I always see those with the tools cut off. Feels bad :\
I use a chainsaw maybe two hours a year. Same with my neighbors, yet each of us owns a chainsaw.
Cooking. 5 people working together can cook for 100 people easier, cheaper, and less wastefully than 100 people can cook for themselves/their families.
Unfortunately the current restaurant system in the US is incredibly wasteful, expensive, and pays fuckall.
Verified: group cooking is the way.
I have friends and family who live in a cohousing building. About 50 people in 30 units. Each apartment is complete but the kitchens are slightly smaller than typical.
Cohousing is mutual ownership of the building. About 20% of the building is common areas, like widened hallways with couches and bookshelves, or a games nook, music room, workshop, laundry, etc. It's basically a tall village, and they are like roommates with privacy.
The giant kitchen and dining room is used six nights a week. One person is chef with a small crew, and dinner is for around 30 people. It costs $5 CDN per meal, though if you raid the leftovers later it's pay what you want, usually $2. The cooking volunteer roster is optional and organized by a Slack channel. Food is usually awesome and everyone wins.
If you want you hardly ever have to cook dinner for yourself.
I am from India and currently work in IT. Due to a lot of reasons I did not pursue cooking but my main motivation to pursue cooking was this aspect, and if you are interested check out community kitchens in India (Mega Kitchens docu series is a good place to start)
Amazing. May I ask what region of the world you're describing?
Vancouver BC
$5 a meal and $5000 a month for rent.
Other savings built into collective infrastructure:
- super cheap fast internet. They pay about $5/ month and when I am visiting I get 1ms ping to speedtest servers, amazing.
- tools, the workshop is set up for tool sharing as well
- laundry room, no coins
- car sharing is easy
- bulk buying groups naturally form
- event facilities, guest rooms just need booking (big deal in Vancouver eh)
- profit control: fewer middlemen to feed for maintenance and management
- dozens of tiny efficiencies that add up
- village settings are naturally designed for mutual aid, good cohousing is a microvillage
You are familiar with the concept of #cohousing, right? I don't think anyone is renting there, all owners. Land values have been fucked in Vancouver since capitalism arrived, and in fact when the group bought the three house lots they needed, they had to deal with one of them being shadow-flipped during the purchase.
Still, pooling resources did make it very possible for the group. The hard-to-swallow expensive part was actually building to passivhaus standards and dealing with bureaucracy, if I understand correctly.
You know this is a joke on how expensive rent is in Vancouver, right?
This makes me think of the Sikh community's charity/giving (can't remember the term) food giving that happens in most towns globally where there a Gurdwara.
There has to be a better way than waves hands everything, really.
They call it a langar
We should be using neighbourhood food co-ops to purchase and distribute food from farmers and wholesalers rather than from retailers.
A co-op has been in the works in my town for the last few years and it’s finally about to open. I can’t wait
Any necessity of life.
Any inelastic commodity.
Edit:
Upon rereading, I totally missed the spirit in which the question was asked. Whoops lol
Re: internet only available at the public library.
Hell no. That would really fuck over disabled people.
Plus, nobody needs to see the porn I watch.
Yes, but some of us do, so give us the goods already
Management and operations of any apartment buildings.
Make em all co ops.
I think towns might benefit if internet was free and freely accessible but only at the local library.
Are you saying that private access to internet should be illegal?
Or that your libraries don't offer internet access to its patrons?
If it's only available at one place, it's not freely accessible.
Logistically, how would that work? Libraries would have to be everywhere and they'd have to be massive. The IT infrastructure to support that would be immense. How would privacy work? Where could I go to have a private telehealth appointment, for example?
Grocery stores
They shouldn't be stores at all since that's putting prices on necessary food for living.
I work at one and am constantly appalled at the prices for basic food items like canned tuna or pasta (not even the "good" stuff, just the run of the mill "well, it's ____")
Energy, public transport, postal service We're never going to have progress if they have a stake in not doing that
Sex :(
Clothes being optional
Im not saying we should be nude all the time. Clothes have their purpose.I think we should have the option to be nude in public, without making it sexual
Nude beaches are nice places for exactly this reason. It's like everyone tacitly agrees not to give a shit.
You can walk past people with your balls waving in the breeze and nobody even blinks - and more importantly, someone can walk past you with their tits akimbo and you don't even blink. It's not sexual, it's not even interesting, it has no significance here. It's like seeing someone breastfeeding: yes, boobs are still great, but we're not doing that right now.
And that's just a really nice headspace to be in. All of the unconscious monkey-politics games just go away, you don't have to think of people in those terms, or concern yourself with where you stand relative to them, because we're just not doing that.
Oh no, you'll see unattractive naked people! Yep, most of them in fact. And honestly that's kind of awesome. 85yo woman pottering around living her best life stark naked and not giving one single shit: you go girl. Fuck yeah. You know how people say they look forward to being old enough to just not give a fuck any more? You can have that yourself right now, right here, for free.
It's funny, walking past clothed beaches afterwards, you realise just how sexualised many swimsuits really are. A bunch of naked people are honestly about as glamorous and exciting as a pile of dead sheep; fashion designers do one hell of a job creating drama and hype around it all.
Most places in the US legally allow nudity, with the main barrier being people calling the police and making a big deal out of doing something legal.
transportation, natch
This is very close to your mail example but can we please move on from delivering items directly to houses? Just give me a destribution center or box at a 10-15 min walking distance and I'll gladly pick up everything from there when it's actually convenient. We can still keep the other model for special cases.
"special cases" being everyone who doesn't live in a town? I'm lucky in that my village post office hasn't been shut down, but I'd still have to drive to collect my post every day. It's much more efficient that a single vehicle delivers post to hundreds of houses.
Maybe it makes sense in urban areas for able-bodied people. Still a drag to have to walk there every day when you don't even know if you've got post because something important might have arrived.
Sorry, I didn't mean to poop on your idea so much, it is a genuinely interesting idea, I just don't think it works with the way society is currently set up in my country