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.
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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 😂
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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.
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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.
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.
Yeah but was it any good for killing head crabs?
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
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.
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.
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
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
Yeah I love my 40v job too!! I can crush the lawn in record time on a single charge and its whisper quiet.
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.
“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’s interesting how individualism and socialism interact with each other, and how a degree of the latter can promote the former.
Yeah, that’s how libraries work.
Libraries don’t cost.
You pay for them through taxes.
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.
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.
Better for the environment anyway.
For anyone in Germany: https://connect.oclc.org/bib-der-dinge
Sehr stark!
As a Dutchman, do other countries not have rental places everywhere? Over here every diy store has a rental department, I’d guess this is universal?
In North America you don’t see many home improvement stores downtown where people are most likely to rent.
Most Lowe’s, Home Depots, etc do have tool rental options, but they’re located out in the burbs where land is cheap and everyone has space to store tools.
There always have been some around. Not all diy stores have one but there is always one near from what I’ve seen. People keep discovering them and thinking they are new.
That makes more sense to me, thanks.
What would you search for to find one in your area?
drive the retail areas of town and look for the rental signs. yellow pages. They want to be found by locals so look in the places locals might. hardware stores either rent stuff or will tell you if you ask.
Home improvement stores and autoparts stores will rent out tools for home projects or automotive projects. Looking at my library they also offer kitchen stuff, arts and crafts, 3d printing, board games and a ton more. I have no idea where you’d rent that kind of stuff here in the US.
We do have rentals, but they’re more for large things that you’d use once and never again. Paint sprayers, giant floor sanders, etc.
They don’t rent things like table saws, thickness planers, etc, which would fall into weekend warrior kind of tools. They want you to buy those.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Warm coats, swimming costumes, sleepsuits, sandals – all can be borrowed for a monthly subscription from any number of services such as Bundlee, Lullaloop and thelittleloop, amongst others.
Clothes rental for children is one of the latest chapters in how “libraries of things” are becoming an increasingly common way to save money, space and waste.
“In summer we see a lot more garden items being used: strimmers, hedge trimmers, lawn mowers, tents for adventuring, ice cream makers and gazebos for barbecues,” says Trevalyan.
“Our data shows we’re increasingly opting to shop second-hand, or rent items for a short period of time, rather than buying outright.
Not that I would have ever spent that much - the clothes I borrow from brands such as Bobo Choses and Tinycottons are much pricier than I’d ever be able to justify, which is part of the service’s appeal.
Meanwhile, companies such as Baboodle let you hire bulky equipment - for example, travel cots, bouncers, buggies and high chairs - so that after a few months of use, you won’t need to buy a semi-detached home with a garage to store it all.
The original article contains 873 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is a terrible summary, it feels like you just summarized the first 3 paragraphs.
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What the fuck is this rent-a-center propaganda?
How stupid are we?
Pretty dumb. I thought this would be about lending libraries -_-
Tf are both you talking about. The article talks about Tool Libraries and The Library of Thing at length. It name drops a few subscription services for reused baby clothes and kids toys but those are still temporary items people need.
Rent-a-centers core business model consists of predatory loans for household appliances that you need continuously. This article talks about rentals for things you only need for a short period of time.
Subscriptions are just as predatory. I won’t applaud them.
There is a tool library near me and it is $45/yr. It’s amazing. These are really good services and this comment section has no idea what it’s talking about.
Hmm. It sounds to me you just don’t want to acknowledge when you’re being taken for a ride.
But hey, to each their own.
Businesses want a lifeline to our wallets, which is why subscriptions and renting are pushed on useful idiots.
“We can share books if you pay me to maintain the book sharing system via a non optional tax.” Universally loved system.
“We can share tools if you pay me to maintain those tools via a non optional tax.” A niche program most libraries have.
“We can share tools if you pay me to maintain those tools via an subscription where I have a profit incentive.” Literally 1984 and late stage capitalism.
Yep.
I feel like digital software subscriptions have stigmatized subscriptions in general. Subscriptions are great for things that require constant investment to be meaningful. One subscribes to news and receive constant reporting on the latest news; one subscribes to a tool library and get access to nearly every tool one can need. Plus a large part of the article is about non-profit libraries anyway.
The problem is that you’re renting access to something you’re not actually consuming.
Once you stop paying, you lose access and have nothing to show for it. They still have your money, though.
This is different than, say, paying for electricity which is consumed and no longer available for either party after consumption.
Sorry bud, you’re defending being scammed.
Plus a large part of the article is about non-profit libraries anyway.
Nice talking point just to cover your bum from shilling.
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.
Even better would be that Arcimoto MUV thing. Sadly it appears they went bankrupt
Cool
Looks a lot like a BMW prototype I saw almost 20 years ago. I kept hoping they’d bring it to market, but I guess it’s safe to give up on it by now!
