[marssaxman]

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 maintenance to deal with it, I could just buy a bunch of doorstops. The hallway is now liberally strewn with them, more doorstops than there are doors, and we haven't had to retrieve ours since.

[kqr]

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!

[eternauta3k]

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.

[TeMPOraL]

In a closed system, you could grow the commons until there's no scarcity anymore, and thus no tragedy either. This stops working once some "entrepreneur" figures your commons is their arbitrage opportunity, and opens the system to the outside world.

[pjc50]

Ooh, you could start "forkr.com", a just-in-time peer-to-peer fork leasing service!

[buildsjets]

I'm taking this disgusting train to it's logical conclusion. Seeking VC to start my "mouthsharing" company, where you can hire someone to pre-chew your food up for you, like a baby bird.

[mrguyorama]

You're forgetting an NFT for all my finance bro friends to pump and dump

[maicro]

See, I like the peer-to-peer idea, but if you're going to be centralized anyway (via the service), why not have your own sourcing resources as well? Team up with waymo or whatever self-driving taxi services are around, rent out a small chunk of the trunk to store a good selection of cutlery and consumables (teabags, salt and pepper, sriracha packets, etc. etc.).

[michaelt]

> In a closed system, you could grow the commons until there's no scarcity anymore

I don't know what your definition of "closed system" is, but I can assure you the only way the dining hall gets more forks is if they enter the system from outside. Unless it's a dining hall at a fork factory :)

[s1artibartfast]

It works if you can afford it, and avoid a runaway moral hazard. Pretty soon you will have tractor trailers filling up with staplers

[dexwiz]

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.

[rob74]

> 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).

[TeMPOraL]

Well, yes. Security tends to be opposed to everything that's good and nice about life. Sometimes it's worth it.

[pavel_lishin]

Sometimes that opposition is the reason there's good and nice things at all, though.

[marssaxman]

I would not normally expect to get away with it, but our security folks don't care; you can't get onto our floor without a badge or PIN, and we are a young enough startup that everyone still recognizes each other. The managers of the coworking space do not care what we do with the office suite we rent from them, and building security does not care what the coworking space does with its interior doors so long as the fire doors stay shut. The security folks at the head office of the coworking chain might care, as they're the ones operating the PIN lock we are bypassing, but they're not here to express an opinion.

Meanwhile, the phone rooms, bathrooms, printer, and most of the conference rooms are located outside our suite in the coworking space, so we'd all be punching in our eight-digit PINs half a dozen times a day getting back into our office if we didn't prop its door open.

[mikequinlan]

>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.

If it is a fire door then it can also be a fire code violation.

[seabass-labrax]

Many new doors in Britain have self-closing mechanisms - for instance, you can see photographs on the government guidance[1] for the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022. The door naturally closes shut with a spring-loaded lever (figure 4) or chain (figure 5), but can be kept open with an electromagnet (figure 6). In case of fire, the power to all electromagnets in the building is cut so that the doors can close of their own accord.

Hopefully we can see more widespread use of these in domestic properties, where fires are still horrifically common[2] - well over 3/4 of all fire-related fatalities are in the home.

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fire-safety-engla...

[2]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/fire-and-rescue-inc...

[actionfromafar]

How thoughtful of you.

[dexwiz]

Haha, I would have told him ahead of time, but only learned of the reason at the party, after he had packed up his apartment and signed a new lease.

[LegitShady]

I lived in a building where after a security event all the electromagnetic door holders for some reason were disabled and all the doors defaulted to closed. One of the other people who lived there decided that opening the doors (not locked, by the way, just closed) was too annoying and cut up a 2x4 into a bunch of doorstops.

I had to remove the door stops that kept being put into the secure entrance ways as well as actual fire doors required (normally open but magnetically released when fire alarm goes off) to keep to fire code. The guy making doorstops was angry with me (I didn't hide my removing the doorstops) until I explained that we'd had multiple cases of people wandering off the streets stealing mail and one guy actually took a fire extinguisher and sprayed the lobby, damaging cars in the parking level, and that keeping a fire door propped open and unable to close in the case of fire could potentially kill someone as well as open him up to liability.

If he wanted to keep the doors open as they were previously he needed to take it up with the building and get the electromagnetic door holders reset.

[chickenpotpie]

It sounds like they're taking the door stop because they want the security features of the building to actually function and the other tenants are actively conprimising them

[paulmd]

I do this all the time just for common tools around the house. The easy solution to never being able to find a screwdriver is... going to harbor freight and buying a half-dozen screwdrivers and staging them in areas where you commonly use them. Then you just try not to drag them around the house too much.

I do this with utility knives, flashlights, screwdrivers, etc. The $10 of "waste" from buying a couple extra screwdrivers is hugely outweighed by the convenience of "saturation".

[rkuykendall-com]

We live near an amazing restaurant with a huge sand pit. The only downside is the toys are always broken. So my aunt just goes to the dollar store and buys a bag of similar beach toys and leaves them there. They cost practically nothing!

[megablast]

I don't understand, they would take it into their office?

[marssaxman]

Yes, exactly. Presumably they still do, but we no longer care.

[albedoa]

I know this is beside the point, but did you try asking them to stop doing that?

[shermantanktop]

I think it is not beside the point, but opposite to the point.

In a zero-sum game, it must be all against all. But sometimes it takes only one player to change the nature of the game. And sometimes driving that change is less effort than fighting under the old rules.

[yard2010]

Imagine how nice it would be the other way around

When management realizes they don't need to complain that the work doesn't get done, they just do the work themselves

[buildsjets]

Please tell me you did not work at Uvalde Elementary School.

[buildsjets]

For the record, I think this comment was fucking excellent!