The theory is simple: instead of buying a household item or a piece of clothing or some equipment you might use once or twice, you take it out and return it.
Always check your public library. The ones in m area have these which cost you nothing to use because they are supported as public services.
Always support public libraries.
Yep, our library has a 3D printer and they’ll make anything you want for a very low cost, like a couple dollars. I’ve never tried but I want to. What should I ask them to make? Any suggestions?
A 3D printer
you joke but i think you can 3d print nearly everything in a 3d printer
The Prusa brand printers are printed by their own printer models and sold that way.
To wit: RepRap
Having built a number of Repraps, “nearly everything” is highly exaggerated. I have seen 3D printers with an almost entirely printed frame, but using off the shelf T slot rails is a lot more time and cost effective.
It is currently not possible to print the control board, wiring, sensors, hot end, motors, heaters, bearings, slides and rails necessary for a 3D printer. Some of the mechanical parts and a lot of the bracketry that holds the frame together can be 3D printed.
A car
You wouldn’t download a car.
Only people of a certain age will get this lol
That’s all of us here 😂
It’s not a big 🚛, it’s a series of tubes
funnily enough, that’s the part of his speech he got right. like what the fuck even is a truck
What kind of car? Is there a specific car model that has a render ready for printing?
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:476016
I know it’s just an STL of a scale model, but actually printing a real car wouldn’t be cheap in the slightest.
You can make nice little self watering pots with a 3d printer and the right filament.
Those extending swords are really fun.
There are also 3d puzzles you can make.
You can also print models you’d like to paint as minis. You just need the model, sandpaper, primer and some paint.
These are great ideas! Maybe I’ll do a set of Chess pieces 🤔
Take a look at your hobbies and go on Etsy to find accessories for them. High chance is someone is making and selling a 3D printed item.
For example, an Apple Air tag case/holder for your bike.
Ultra specific storage cubbies for your favorite 5 tools. Label tags. Cabinet door knobs. Print in place toy cars with rolling wheels and doors that open. Compliant mechanisms. A coin sorting device. If they can print flexible things, phone cases.
Do not expect anything 3d printed to be food safe.
Go to printables.com or thingiverse.com (I personally prefer printables) search for whatever your hobby is. And print something for that.
You can search through here and make something that looks interesting to you
It helped me to know that checking out items helps the library.
I always thought of it as being a consumer of library resources, but the fact that the books/movies/library of things items are being checked out helps them prove that their services are useful to the community.
Always support your public libraries, and watch out for companies that want to take this over:
https://fair.org/home/a-for-profit-company-is-trying-to-privatize-as-many-public-libraries-as-they-can/
With the size of housing units they build in condo buildings these days, who the fuck has any room to store appliances?
Plus, we live in an era where we produce too much shit anyway and it’s damaging the environment. So by sharing stuff like this, it means we need to produce less.
Indeed, also it’s much nicer to use a shared high quality tool than to buy an el-cheapo disposable tool.
Even something simple like a crowbar. I once borrowed a (shorter) professional crowbar after struggling with a (larger) cheap one. The thing I was trying to pry came out like butter.
Even though physics dictates that a shorter lever should be inferior, it just had a much better design and grip.
Better for our wallet, sanity and environment.
This is an outstanding idea for an apartment community. It addresses space issues, cost concerns, and largely prevents abuse from the get-go because you know where all your borrowers live.
In great Montreal area it’s more and more enormous, condo 1000sqft+, thousands of them, that people cannot buy because they are too expensive, I don’t understand the system
Yeah they built these big ass luxury condo towers downtown and most of them are empty. I know because I can see in them from my office building.
Some argue this allows richer people to move out of smaller units therefore freeing them for others. But instead you have international investors coming in to buy them up as a real tax haven. Or the rich will simply buy them but keep the old ones and rent them at a premium. It doesn’t help at all.
*cough* Maestria *cough*
This sounds neat until it’s run for profit.
There is a business in my town. There’s probably one like it in your town. They rent power equipment. Anything from pressure washers to bobcats to bouncy castles. And as a man who has needed to drill precisely 8 holes into a concrete slab in 37 years, there is a genuine value proposition in renting a hammer drill for an afternoon compared to buying one.
This week’s rental for me:
- hammer chisel, 24h, about $70 canadian.
- E20 excavator, 8h runtime but over the weekend, around $500 with delivery and fuel
Not going to buy those things or pay someone to operate them. It’s a good deal.
We’ve got this & a local option!
Rentals seem extremely expensive in my area. $100/day for a shitty 4" wood chipper, $300/day for 6" chipper. For some tools, it’s often about the same price or cheaper to buy a tool from Harbor Freight than to rent.
How would that ruin it?
Modest profit isn’t an issue, but most businesses of more than a certain size accumulate MBAs like some kind of parasitic fungus. They then proceed to wring out as much money as possible in the short term while destroying the business in the long term.
If it’s just a local guy making 5% or so a year off his one rental shop, that’s no problem.
Yeah pretty much. There are behaviors that are profitable but not good for the community.
There’s a local store that rents outdoors gear (climbing stuff, camping supplies etc), it’s for profit and it’s great. Would be way cooler if it were a library, but the local business is totally affordable and easy.
I’ve used it several times. My friends and I plan an outing and plan supply pickup/dropoff as part of the outing.
So, the key is to run your business for loss. Wait, that’s called a charity, not a business. How is this thing supposed to work?
Libraries don’t make a profit, AFAIK. Non-profits and co-ops are things too.
That’s true. If something doesn’t directly make money, it can still exist because of taxes or another arrangement like that.
Wait is this trying to suggest just renting is the same thing as a library?
The benifit of a library is you share the cost as a group and get some fractional use of it. Like books that you only really need access to for small amount of time.
Its not the same as say Amazon owning the book rental space and choosing, without any choice on your point, on what books are there or who could get access to them.
Tool libraries are libraries, not rentals.
So no, they aren’t saying renting is the same thing as a library. They are saying libraries offering more services are a great way for you to save money by not buying a tool you only need once or for a day here and there over the years.
I’ve rented things like carpet cleaners, floor polishers, chainsaws, splitters for the chainsawed wood, generators, a bunch of weird things from a rental place down the street that seems to have at least one of anything I could ever need. It’s awesome! Not having to maintain a bunch of shitty two stroke engines is phenomenal.
Not having to maintain a bunch of shitty two stroke engines is phenomenal.
Kinda off topic, but this reminded me of the lawn mower I bought a few summers ago. It was on sale for like 200, it was an electric Li-Ion battery though.
It was my first Li-Ion mower, but not the first electric and the first electric was just…shitty…pros definitely did not put weigh the cons so I was hesitant, but bit the bullet anyways because that first electric had to have been like 15+ years ago so things must have improved
So glad I did, this MF is so damn quiet, I don’t even need hearing protection AND I can mow at like 9PM because it’s so quiet that the barking neighbor dogs are louder AND I don’t have to fuck with gas and oil. I even picked up the same thing but the trimmer and weed whacker version at a thrift store. So now I don’t have to fuck with has and oil and MIXING them just right for 2 strokes.
Even with the big battery they’re still lighter than the equivalent 2 stroke.
Tl;Dr FUCK 2/4 stroke engine equipment, I’m never going back lmao
I’m hoping to have bought my last engine. maybe there will be another ICE car or motorcycle in my future, I don’t think I’ll ever own another airplane and I’m 100% done with gas powered lawn tools. I’ve got a set of electric lawn tools that do a fantastic job and they don’t pack their sinuses with their own shit all winter so they work when it’s time.
And my father has fought me tooth and nail the entire way. “You sure you don’t want the gas one? It’s slightly bigger! Let’s get the gas one.” Dad, why are we here for the second year in a row buying a string trimmer? “We can’t get the old one to start.” Wrong. We’re buying a new one because we can’t get the almost brand new one we bought last year to start. Now what chemical did you consume in the 60’s that makes you think a nearly identical one we buy this year will be any different? “Ohh come on.” This one works almost exactly like a power drill. When’s the last time you put a battery in the power drill and spent an hour failing to get it to start drilling? “Sigh I guess.”
It’s lighter, quieter, runs on a battery system we’re already very invested in, starts every time, requires less maintenance and fueling is a lot more convenient. Every electric lawn tool we’ve bought bar none works great.
Yeah I love my 40v job too!! I can crush the lawn in record time on a single charge and its whisper quiet.
Dude, I’ve had my 40V mower for almost 8 years and it’s still kicking. So incredibly easy to use. One of my batteries crapped out after about 6 years, but the other still holds a great charge, and I’ve collected a couple others over the years as I’ve added the trimmer, blower, and chainsaw from the same brand. In retrospect, my life was terrible in the before-times.
Torque from a high voltage electric battery lawnmower motor just can’t be beat in my experience. Just chews up things that would make a similarly priced gas engine stall.
My mid life birthday gift was an electric zero turn mower. Already had all electric yard tools. Will buy Tesla or best option in couple years. Never going to a gas station again!
So indeed, fuck gas
A friend of mine who lived in Berkeley in the early aughts was a member of her local tool library. I thought it was a brilliant idea. You just had to be live in the community and getting your library card was free.
At one point my roommate needed a drill to complete some home improvement, so I got the drill, committing to be the drill guy the buddy that had a borrow-able power drill.
Curiously, when I moved, I needed to reduce my stuff drastically, so my roommate inherited the drill.
Yeah I borrowed a bunch of hand and power tools from the Oakland public library when I lived there in the 2010s. They also had a shit ton of video games
Hopefully opportunity attracted you elsewhere, re: leaving Oakland?
Housing was too expensive and we wanted to move back east closer to family. Most of our Oakland friends took a similar path between ‘18 and ‘22
Growing up, there was an association in my area for common ownership of different types of machinery and other equipment for its members. You paid something like $10 a year, and for that you got to borrow all kinds of things you might need as a home owner, like a wood chopper/splitter, high pressure washer, trailers, leaf blowers, cement mixer, scaffolding etc.
I always thought that was brilliant.
Obligatory Library Socialism Link: https://librarysocialism.org/
In the simplest terms, the right of usufruct means you can use things, but you cannot deny them to others when you’re not using them, and you do not have the right to destroy them to prevent others from using them. So, for example, the farmer is welcome to grow crops on a given plot of land - but if they choose not to, somebody else can use the land.
Given this, it’s easy to see that this principle already exists in public libraries. You can borrow a book to help you start a business, but you can’t prevent others from reading it after you - or threaten to destroy the book unless you receive the profits of the next reader’s business. You can hold the book exclusively (of other library patrons), but only temporarily.
“You will own nothing and like it”
I’m so down for this for items that I don’t need indefinitely. It reduces waste.
It also allows people to use much higher quality products. She’s pulling a power tool out in the picture and goddamn, there’s some garbage tools out there, even from quality brands. Renting a $1000 tool sounds better than buying a $100 tool and encouraging the race to the bottom.
Yeah, that’s how libraries work.
Libraries don’t cost.
My library has a power tools wing. Also a seasonal seeds section. They have gotten very fancy.
Wait for real? Free seeds? That’s rad!
Definitely. A couple of the librarians have been like family friends for I don’t know how long anymore, and they keep adding new programs. I keep hearing from them how things are not great at our library (things aren’t great at libraries anywhere I hear), but then they keep spearheading projects like the tool and seed libraries, getting them added, and I can’t help but think our local library is one of the better ones. We don’t have 3d printing but I hope we will soon.
Taxes are a cost.
Well that’s just not true…
It’s interesting how individualism and socialism interact with each other, and how a degree of the latter can promote the former.
There’s a company in Brentwood Tennessee and online that rents very expensive camera lenses.
So you can borrow a $3000 lens for say $200 for a week.
Renting stuff makes sense, but there are still lots of inherent problems with tool libraries and the like.
They’re great for a carpet shampooer or chainsaw you need once a year, but if you actually want to fix and build stuff around the home then booking a tool, taking perfect measurements, hauling your stuff over to a tool library, building it, hauling everything back home to check it, is simply an infeasibly onerous process. The instant you make a mistake and need a different tool, or check a measurement, etc, you’re wasting hours of time, which is most often the biggest limiter for home projects anyways.
You also don’t get to learn on the same tool and build up instincts and understanding of how it behaves.
I think you ahve a fundamental misunderstanding on how the tool libraries and stuff work…
I’m conflating a tool library and a maker space but the same issues apply to both. Either way, for home projects you end up with a whole lot of extra transportation.
None of this was about a maker space either
Cool beans bro, learn how to read a full comment and you’d see the part where it doesn’t matter since theyre basically the same and have the same drawbacks.
I don’t see how going to the library is such a big hurdle? The closest library to me is less than ten minutes drive, and on the way to a lot of stuff. I don’t know this seems like a kind of insane objection. If you’re poor, it’s not like you’re just gonna spend $200 on a new tool anyway because you can’t. In my experience I’m more likely to just try to make do with the crappy alternative I have available.
This take just seems really privileged. The biggest barrier for a lot of people isn’t the time - it’s affording the tools in the first place.
I mean if you’re trying to learn to be a competent handyman or build a bookcase maybe yeah, but I just need a screwdriver set for like 30 minutes to put something together.
Now a multi screwdriver is something you can buy.
You had it, then you lost it. It’s for those things you need only once a year or two years or never again.
Libraries of things should be state run and free at point of use. They should also be integrated into communities in a way that makes them easy to access. Instead of everyone having a lawn mower, you check out an electric mower once a week, on a date that you’ve reserved it, and the entire community uses it, or if in a large community, your immediate neighbors use it, and then it’s returned for the next people to use it.
Libraries of things should not only be for things you use once a year. They should be for just about everything that you don’t use every day.
Usafruct >>>>>> UsusFructisAbusus.
Not sure if dystopia
It’s dystopic if most can only afford to rent what they always need. IMO being able to rent something you rarely need is a good thing.
I’d much rather have my car for day to day driving and rent something with more space the few times I need to move something that won’t fit in my car. Even better would be to have ride share programs to use for medium loads and reliable mass transit for trips where I don’t have much to move.
it’s not dystopic in the sense that companies are selling tools to people who don’t need tools for an extremely prolonged time.
That would be fucking dystopic, being forced to buy tools you don’t need, because it’s the only option to get them.
Even better would be that Arcimoto MUV thing. Sadly it appears they went bankrupt
Cool
These things always fail because ultimately it’s just a motorcycle with extra garbage.
Quite the contrary: it reduces wasteful consumption and reducing consumption is a requirement for Ecological recovery.
I would say that buying for very infrequent use or for a temporary need something which can be used with no problems for much more than that, is wasteful consumption at a systemic level - there should be alternatives.
Sure, owning your own personal high powered professional drill satisfies the greedy animal inside, but it’s not exactly wise of justified for most of us even just at a personal level. Ditto for quite a lot of other things.
The drive to own lots of shit isn’t healthy, both in a personal sense and in a systemic sense (including but not limited to Ecological), though it sure makes a ton of money for those who own most Productive Assets and all the ones is supporting areas such as Money Lenders, that most humans act as Consumers only limited by the maximum indebtness they can get into with their income.
Even if people can afford to own tons of things they barelly use, it would actually be better for everybody if that wasn’t common.
The only dystopia element of this is that in Late Stage Neoliberal Capitalism people are being pushed to rent because of the miniscule and worsening share of the wealth produced that workers get - or in other words, shit salaries whilst investment income has never been this good - as they can’t afford to own anymore, rather than because of a shift in the way people thing and them actually wanting to rent rather than own.
i thought this was called having neighbors? Nonetheless, i’m not complaining. Less waste is better waste.
The issue with renting is, of course, just like apartments (or flats if you will), the producers of the items will see the opportunity to inflate the retail costs of the items, the more they see their sales dip due to renting, which will make the price of renting the equipment greater … and so it goes
A lot of these are non-profit or literally extensions of a public library. My public library has a “Library of Things” that costs as much as it does to check out a book. Free, with late fees if you return it late. It doesn’t go as far as expensive power tools, but it has some basic stuff folks might need from time to time, like a basic toolkit.
Yes, private, profit-oriented ones will increase prices to increase profits, but thankfully not all of these are rooted in that.
There are pros and cons to both. Sometimes you should rent, others buy. If you use it every day then buying is often best. If you need it once a decade then rent.
Yes there are pros and cons to both, but that does not mean they are the same or equal.
Renting inherently adds an extra middleman to the process, (someone still has to buy it), who is incentivized to rent-seek and drain everyone from as much of their money as possible.
Renting really only works in scenarios where you have a bunch of different rental companies to drive down costs, but now you’re starting to get back to the original problem of duplicating everything.
This is an interesting thought angle, thanks for sharing! Given the conditions you’ve stated, why haven’t books inflated in price given the abundance of libraries in developed worlds?
Libraries are non profits, everyone who works there just gets paid a wage, no one makes more money if libraries make more money.
Or from a systemic standpoint, the library system is effectively separate from the capitalist system we use for distributing everything else. In capitalism if you have no competition you raise prices so you get richer, so functioning capitalism requires multiple copies of everything and a lot of redundancy all actively competing. The library being non-profit sidesteps that effect.
Only if there is a monoboly in place. If there is a market then when they raise rents you just go elsewhere. Since these are items rented by the day it isn’t hard to go elslwhere in the city.
Not exactly. The type of rental discussed in the article is short term, not long term like an apartment.
Also, there will probably be a response in the industry, but it could end up being better overall. For instance, an appliance may end up being designed more for repair and have a longer design lifespan as there are fewer, but more educated, consumers of the appliances. I would expect a steam cleaner that has to run two times a week to be more expensive than one that has to run two times a year.
Also, there will probably be a response in the industry,
I dunno. There have been tool rental places with pro level tools for a very long time, and the tool manufacturers don’t seem to have reacted to stop it.
I didn’t say tool makers would stop it.
But there is a difference in design philosophy between pro tools and amateur tools. I would expect that, if the market shifts to more kinds of tools, the design of those tools will shift as well.
I don’t really see a problem with a model of companies creating fewer, more durable/expensive items that everyone can share.
Better for the environment anyway.
It’s nice however let’s assume that it is the main consumer model. Then everything becomes possibly 20 times more expensive as companies need to keep same profit (shareholders) and now 20 people pool money to share the thing. It’s not a solution to capitalism, however it would work wonders for environment.
Yet it is us doing all the work for the environment while companies don’t lift a finger and get all the profit. Not a viable long term solution to a fundamental problem of wealth.
The companies who have 20x the mark up necessary to survive will quickly see new businesses occupy the space to undercut them.
Hmmm I wouldn’t be so sure… It depends on their position in the market and how well they lobby the government
Yeah, this is the one piece a lot of people miss: in any decently competitive market, individual firms have effectively zero power to set prices; they must instead accept the prices determined by the market.
Knowing that, the solution to that sort of corporate BS, then, is to ensure markets are competitive by busting monopolies, lowering barriers to entry, and getting money out of politics to reduce the effect of lobbying.
deleted by creator
It’s not a solution by itself, but a library economy can form part of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOYa3YzVtyk
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=NOYa3YzVtyk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=NOYa3YzVtyk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
