Reminds of of the replacement of "threeks" at the UW-Madison campus in the 1980s. At the time, it was common for satirical parties to win student elections and do odd things like cover the campus with plastic flamingos. One of the satirical parties was upset that the UW-Madison cafeteria didn't have true forks (with four tines) but only "threeks" (forks with three tines). So they decided to work with friends at Northwestern university outside Chicago to trade their cafeteria's forks for UW's threeks. They were successful, but obviously both UW's and Northwestern's administration weren't pleased and the trade was reversed.
Did my homework:
“Old English forca, force (denoting a farm implement), based on Latin furca ‘pitchfork, forked stick’; reinforced in Middle English by Anglo-Norman French furke (also from Latin furca ).”
When I went there in 2012, there was a fee each semester for dining hall silverware that goes missing. They assumed that you'd take $60 worth of silverware and plates.
There's a common pattern in population dynamics that I've observed, which probably has a formal name: A given system with (to simplify) two types of behavior: good and bad will tolerate and self correct up to certain percentage of bad actors (call this the jerk threshold, JT) after which all participants switch to the bad behavior. Examples are line formation for a service, cutting people off in traffic, stealing from common areas, hoarding office supplies, etc.
Anecdata: When I travel back to the country I've grown up I resort back to being a jerk in traffic and cutting in lines because you have to.
I've always wondered what the JT for different situations is, before the system breaks down, e.g. what percentage of people in a line have to cut in before everybody abandons the concept of forming the line.
They've actually had to try to make people more of a jerk in the midwest, and instruct them on why the "zipper merge" is NOT bad: https://www.dot.state.mn.us/zippermerge/
Otherwise if there's a sign that says "Left Lane Closed 10 Miles Ahead" everyone will get in the right lane for ten miles.
The thing that really bothers me about this is that the Jerk Threshold pushes the Overton window on Jerkiness - now if you're not participating in Jerk behavior you're disrupting "The way things work" which on its own might be jerk behavior.
I grew up and live in Oregon. I've generally thought of our drivers as relatively non-aggressive. But I've seen Californians† who are aggressively merging and weaving (And if you've ever driven down in LA, you know the lay of the land). Then the Oregonians who follow suit, and then everyone is doing it.
†Oregonians have been complaining about Californians since time immemorial. It's just pure tribalism. We blame any negative change on our state as "Californians moving in". My apologies to Californians for unfairly dished blame.
Speaking of population dynamics, I enjoyed the "Parable of the Polygons"[1]. It shows with simple simulations an example of individual biases being different from collective biases. This difference leads to different collective behavior depending on environmental conditions. Similar to your example of individuals having a certain "jerk"ness, but the collective can pass a "jerk" threshold, which leads to an increase in jerk behavior.
> after which all participants switch to the bad behavior
This is how it has become with job applications. So many people started lying on resumes that the job reqs starting raising the requirements for a position, which causes more people to need to lie. If you don't lie, you just don't get a job and starve/die.
The opposite can happen too. Scott Alexander's old post "In favour of niceness, community and civilisation" quotes an Atlantic article [1] for an example of a model where all of a country's officials can flip from mostly-corrupt to honest at short notice, once corruption falls below a threshold. A lot of other threshold situations like the one you described feature in that article too - including, sadly, a "Rwanda" model for how when inter-group animosity crosses a threshold you can end up with genocide.
As far as I can tell, the formal name is "population dynamics".
Though this concept isn't as pat and reliable as in its most-simplistic formulations – you can't fix all crime with aesthetic enforcement – it captures real human tendencies to 'flock' in the space of norms-of-behavior, using visible cues of what will or won't be tolerated. And, it has applicability outside of just literal 'policing'.
Keeping spaces/communities far from any chaotic boundary where people start to wonder - "what can I get away with? does anyone confront/correct problems?" - can save a lot on overall defection/enforcement losses in the long run.
You can think of the Jerk Threshold problem as one of a prisoner's dilemma with a (sufficiently large) extra term, which you can think of as some combination of personal guilt, societal punishment, and whatever positive prosocial instincts humans have.
In the classic prisoner's dilemma, your payoff is +3 if you defect and the other prisoner doesn't, +2 if neither of you defects, +1 if both of you defect, and 0 if you don't defect and they do. There's no Jerk Threshold in this problem - regardless of your opponent's behavior, in isolation, you are always better off defecting.
But let's add the extra Antijerk Term - call it A - that you pay to defect. This could be you feeling bad about defecting, or it could represent the chance that you face retaliation for defecting later, whatever - there's some slight cost to being a jerk. We can see how the Jerk Threshold changes.
Your payoff matrix is now [[2, 3-A], [0, 1-A]]. If your opponent has a probability p of defecting, you can compute:
E[cooperate] = p * 0 + (1-p) * 2 = 2 - 2p, with the former term corresponding to you getting screwed and the latter corresponding to cooperation.
E[defect] = p * (1-A) + (1-p) * (3-A) = 3 - 2p - A, with the former term corresponding to the defect-defect state and the latter one being you screwing them.
For A < 1, 2 - 2p < 3 - 2p - A, so you're still in a prisoner's dilemma. But for A > 1, the problem abruptly shifts into a cooperation game, because 2 - 2p > 3 - 2p - A for A > 1.
-----
In this case, the Jerk Threshold abruptly shifts from 0 to 1 (that is, nothing could make you cooperate -> nothing could make you defect). But in the real world, the A term varies depending on context. The A term with a friend is very high, because you have a lot of opportunity for retaliation and they'll feel especially bad screwing you over. The A term with a stranger you're somewhat hostile to is low (maybe even negative). And A varies from actor to actor - some of us have stronger consciences than others. So you end up with bubbles where there's a stable local equilibrium (because the A values are high internally and that maintains stable cooperate-cooperate equilibria) despite differences with the outside world.
Properly modeling this probably looks something like the Ising model [1] on some complicated social graph. Which explains why we see these kinds of phase transitions - most real graphs are dense enough to have them. The bubbles we just described correspond to magnetic domains, and the incentives not to cooperate while in contact with a defect-bubble (or vice-versa) correspond to the high potential energy of domain walls.
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.
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!
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.
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
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".
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!
This could have been a follow-up to "The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute"
My first teaching job was at an old, prestigious boys' boarding school in Australia. (When I say old, it was old for Australia.) Every boy, whether a boarder or day-boy, and every staff member received a hot lunch in the dining halls each day. There were two dining halls: most of the boys at in the less ornate one, but the oldest boys and the staff ate in the more formal dining hall. Portraits of all the previous headmasters gazed down on us as we ate, except for the headmaster who had been sacked after less than a year for having affairs with a few too many boys' mothers.
I was teaching a topic on ecology, which required taking the class out into the school grounds to count the number and diversity of species in an ecosystem. The school grounds were extensive; there were about two dozen playing fields, a small farm for teaching Agriculture (which is an actual, examined subject in some Australian secondary schools), and a lot of bushland.
In search of a suitable spot for the lesson, I headed off down one of the paths through the bush that went to the various boarding houses, and soon found a peculiar tree. It had few branches, and few leaves, but an enormous trunk: it was old and close to death. What made it peculiar, however, was the hundreds of knives sticking out of it - clearly pilfered from the dining halls and thrown by bored schoolboys.
When I returned to the science department, I told my colleagues what I had discovered. One of them was an old boy of the school, and another lived in one of the boarding houses, and yet none of them had any idea about the knife tree.
You call it old, but this sounds like quality secondary education far above almost everything available today, at least here across Western Europe, which is 99.9% read book, then do test. The fact that you teached ecology using actual plants and the outside amazes me, even though it shouldn't and should just be the norm.
My partner and I donated cutlery to our Apt complex multipurpose media room. It's where people who live there can watch movies on a projector or have meetings or birthdays.
We bought over 50 teaspoons. I think we're down to 5. We got 10-15 each of knives forks and spoons and they were predated, but not as much.
The body corporate tut-tutted and said they wouldn't do it, I think it's ok to accept some people just wind up pilfering these things, and you deal with it. If you need flatware that badly, I don't mind.
Its 4-5 years in, we probably need to recommit. I don't know I'd go to the bother of etching or stamping anything.
My sister and I fought over who got the NAAFI (british army PX) fork with a hole in the handle. The hole was for a chain, which clearly somebody broke, to steal the fork, which wound up in our cutlery drawer at home in the 50s/60s.
If you care (which it sounds like, quite reasonably to me, you don't really), use pliers to bend over just the very end of the handle or put 180 twist in the handle. Very obvious and maybe unappealing to the sticky-fingered, without too much degradation to the immediate function of the object. And for teaspoons bought by the score, which i assume are stamped metal, the handle is probably thin enough to make it easy.
Though at attrition rates of under 10 per year, it could also be partly careless disposal leading to spoons in the bin rather than only deliberate pocketings of 30p teaspoons!
Is there a chance these are being accidentally thrown away, rather than stolen?
I'm sure I've thrown a non-reusable utensil in the garbage more than once in my life by accident. While I of course would feel bad, I'm also not going to dig it out of a 50gal trash can in nice clothes.
Surely that happens many times over 5 years when you have dozens or hundreds of employees.
For the next set, buy something noticeable (i.e. bight yellow handles). I'd bet accidental theft will go down and folks will take time to return if they do accidentally take.
There are so many problems that are solved by ones own money, and people not being jerks about it. I think a lot about how some bus stops will just have chairs that people leave there to offer seating when the city decided not to put any.
This is called mutual aid, and is one of the fundamental underpinnings to anarchist theory. People will help each other, generally, if doing so is not too much of a burden on themselves. Systematizing that behavior into genuine community support for one another would (hypothetically) lead to outcomes of increased wellbeing for all.
In your example, the person who left out the chairs isn't worried about being paid back for the chairs. Someone has excess, they shared it freely without expecting anything in return, and the community is better for it.
I'm doing the opposite. I've been amassing small disposable plastic spoons when I order food for my supplements from various establishments for my supplements, looking for ideal sizes. I like to use the one from coffee shops, the best ones were from the airport. Disposable wood chopsticks can be surprisingly durable as well as long as it's not basilica wood.
What counts as an ideal size/shape/material for your cutlery? I no longer use any metal because I once chipped my tooth on one, and often bang it against my teeth.
I love this story, despite it being the sort of thing I can imagine ending up on LinkedIn.
Anyway, one question I did have which made me a little suspicious of the neat ending: why is the fork in the last picture obviously of a different type to that shown in the engraving picture? The order was 180 forks all of the same type.
You, at your new job, is like a cafeteria with not enough forks. You have to go out, spend your own resources in filling in what is required at your company. That makes a successful company, and a successful you!
Did that for pens while employed as a pizza delivery driver nearly two decades ago. Customers would regularly sign for a credit card receipt with my pen, hand back the signed receipt, receive pizza, and somewhere in the object-management process wind up still holding the pen. The cheapest pens were like 8 cents each at Costco, so it literally wasn't worth my time to try to make sure my pen made it back to me.
I do that for myself because it drives me crazy when I get held up from what I'm doing by not having what I need, cables, adapters, etc.
I have also been quite generous with friends, trying to teach them the way. However, I've found that I'm just enabling bad habits in careless people, and before you know it I've run out of anything popular. So now, I still flood my zone, in secret, and let others fend for themselves.
Makes me wonder if one were to take a 'college town', introduce tagged forks into the local dining facility at the beginning of the academic year, then beginning at midterms, start checking local thrift stores to see if they start "floating up". Increase these checks after the end of the academic year, to continue to chart when or if they appear.
From this, we can perhaps extrapolate a "fork drift" factor that the school could then use to determine future fork ordering? ;)
Fun post! Although is it saying they are using the previous apartment tenant's silverware? I feel like I've had to bring my own silverware to the apartments I lived in.
It’s pretty common for student housing for houseware to be handed down from previous tenants when they left. It’s often cheaper to “pay it forward” to the next group of students than it is to store cheap houseware.
You can always identify cheap stainless steel cutlery from the sharp edges that cut into your skin while eating. Presumably the decent ones have extra manufacturing steps to polish off the burrs after stamping.
I did a similar thing at a startup where I was working as a consultant. We would constantly run out of coffee cups so I started smuggling in more cups each day, some 50 in total. Luckily they were using cheap IKEA mugs so the total cost was roughly 100 €.
The problem could have been solved in many ways but it was a nice hobby for me. I ended up switching to work there as an employee and have been for ten years. I still use the mugs so it worked out OK.
What he should have done was to create a foundation for supplying forks, making him and his roommate the officers of the foundation. They could have then solicited funds, including matching from other organizations. From those funds, they could have paid themselves handsome salaries for managing the foundation. Then with the mere pittance left over, they would then purchase forks. I'm sure that there would be other tax breaks in there somewhere to totally live a lavish lifestyle.
This was a very charming post! I clicked through and found myself reading another 8 blog posts from this person, and I concluded that this is the kind of person I think I'd like and like to work with. They appear to be an intern currently and probably will be looking for full-time work soon. (open hint to anyone looking to hire, this seems like a person I'd personally want to work with but alas am not in a hiring manager/recruiter position).
And, for what it's worth, I personally think Silicon Valley just gives a microphone to egomaniacs, which is different from turning charming tech people into egomaniacs. Zuck didn't need fame/money to produce Hot or Not. The quirky people I knew in college doing cool things are still doing quirky, cool things.
I hate how "fake-seeking" is the new form of doing something for attention, like publicizing someone's supposed fabrications in the comments with 0 evidence that anything was manufactured in the first place just so you could feel the reward of delivering truth or something
It's tongue in cheek, it's fun, it's a nice experiment, everybody wins.
I don't like it how people suggest altruism should always amount to zero (or even negative!) benefit to the person doing all the giving of value. It's not how altruism should work.
Are you only a true altruist if you go to help some poor kids in some poor country and hate every second of it? If so, I'm against altruism, it's something for sociopaths then.
The cafeteria manager likely had no idea they were running out of forks. A simple email or phone call to the cafeteria department would have probably solved the problem, since managers are likely looking for ideas of things to buy, especially if they've been recommended by customers (students).
jhbadger|1 year ago
wjnc|1 year ago
Did my homework: “Old English forca, force (denoting a farm implement), based on Latin furca ‘pitchfork, forked stick’; reinforced in Middle English by Anglo-Norman French furke (also from Latin furca ).”
Four in Latin is quattuor. Scared me there.
hintoftime|1 year ago
FireInsight|1 year ago
Jun8|1 year ago
Anecdata: When I travel back to the country I've grown up I resort back to being a jerk in traffic and cutting in lines because you have to.
I've always wondered what the JT for different situations is, before the system breaks down, e.g. what percentage of people in a line have to cut in before everybody abandons the concept of forming the line.
bombcar|1 year ago
Otherwise if there's a sign that says "Left Lane Closed 10 Miles Ahead" everyone will get in the right lane for ten miles.
sircastor|1 year ago
I grew up and live in Oregon. I've generally thought of our drivers as relatively non-aggressive. But I've seen Californians† who are aggressively merging and weaving (And if you've ever driven down in LA, you know the lay of the land). Then the Oregonians who follow suit, and then everyone is doing it.
†Oregonians have been complaining about Californians since time immemorial. It's just pure tribalism. We blame any negative change on our state as "Californians moving in". My apologies to Californians for unfairly dished blame.
Lanzaa|1 year ago
[1]: https://ncase.me/polygons/
olah_1|1 year ago
This is how it has become with job applications. So many people started lying on resumes that the job reqs starting raising the requirements for a position, which causes more people to need to lie. If you don't lie, you just don't get a job and starve/die.
red_admiral|1 year ago
As far as I can tell, the formal name is "population dynamics".
[1] https://archive.is/BXq66
gojomo|1 year ago
Though this concept isn't as pat and reliable as in its most-simplistic formulations – you can't fix all crime with aesthetic enforcement – it captures real human tendencies to 'flock' in the space of norms-of-behavior, using visible cues of what will or won't be tolerated. And, it has applicability outside of just literal 'policing'.
Keeping spaces/communities far from any chaotic boundary where people start to wonder - "what can I get away with? does anyone confront/correct problems?" - can save a lot on overall defection/enforcement losses in the long run.
michaelcampbell|1 year ago
m463|1 year ago
rachofsunshine|1 year ago
In the classic prisoner's dilemma, your payoff is +3 if you defect and the other prisoner doesn't, +2 if neither of you defects, +1 if both of you defect, and 0 if you don't defect and they do. There's no Jerk Threshold in this problem - regardless of your opponent's behavior, in isolation, you are always better off defecting.
But let's add the extra Antijerk Term - call it A - that you pay to defect. This could be you feeling bad about defecting, or it could represent the chance that you face retaliation for defecting later, whatever - there's some slight cost to being a jerk. We can see how the Jerk Threshold changes.
Your payoff matrix is now [[2, 3-A], [0, 1-A]]. If your opponent has a probability p of defecting, you can compute:
E[cooperate] = p * 0 + (1-p) * 2 = 2 - 2p, with the former term corresponding to you getting screwed and the latter corresponding to cooperation.
E[defect] = p * (1-A) + (1-p) * (3-A) = 3 - 2p - A, with the former term corresponding to the defect-defect state and the latter one being you screwing them.
For A < 1, 2 - 2p < 3 - 2p - A, so you're still in a prisoner's dilemma. But for A > 1, the problem abruptly shifts into a cooperation game, because 2 - 2p > 3 - 2p - A for A > 1.
-----
In this case, the Jerk Threshold abruptly shifts from 0 to 1 (that is, nothing could make you cooperate -> nothing could make you defect). But in the real world, the A term varies depending on context. The A term with a friend is very high, because you have a lot of opportunity for retaliation and they'll feel especially bad screwing you over. The A term with a stranger you're somewhat hostile to is low (maybe even negative). And A varies from actor to actor - some of us have stronger consciences than others. So you end up with bubbles where there's a stable local equilibrium (because the A values are high internally and that maintains stable cooperate-cooperate equilibria) despite differences with the outside world.
Properly modeling this probably looks something like the Ising model [1] on some complicated social graph. Which explains why we see these kinds of phase transitions - most real graphs are dense enough to have them. The bubbles we just described correspond to magnetic domains, and the incentives not to cooperate while in contact with a defect-bubble (or vice-versa) correspond to the high potential energy of domain walls.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ising_model
marssaxman|1 year ago
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|1 year ago
But if one buys a bunch of them, people start trusting that they will be available, and will hoard less!
dexwiz|1 year ago
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.
LegitShady|1 year ago
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|1 year ago
paulmd|1 year ago
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|1 year ago
megablast|1 year ago
yard2010|1 year ago
When management realizes they don't need to complain that the work doesn't get done, they just do the work themselves
buildsjets|1 year ago
martyvis|1 year ago
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1322240/
majkinetor|1 year ago
arittr|1 year ago
dmje|1 year ago
cjs_ac|1 year ago
I was teaching a topic on ecology, which required taking the class out into the school grounds to count the number and diversity of species in an ecosystem. The school grounds were extensive; there were about two dozen playing fields, a small farm for teaching Agriculture (which is an actual, examined subject in some Australian secondary schools), and a lot of bushland.
In search of a suitable spot for the lesson, I headed off down one of the paths through the bush that went to the various boarding houses, and soon found a peculiar tree. It had few branches, and few leaves, but an enormous trunk: it was old and close to death. What made it peculiar, however, was the hundreds of knives sticking out of it - clearly pilfered from the dining halls and thrown by bored schoolboys.
When I returned to the science department, I told my colleagues what I had discovered. One of them was an old boy of the school, and another lived in one of the boarding houses, and yet none of them had any idea about the knife tree.
uyzstvqs|1 year ago
isoprophlex|1 year ago
CrispyKerosene|1 year ago
aembleton|1 year ago
ggm|1 year ago
We bought over 50 teaspoons. I think we're down to 5. We got 10-15 each of knives forks and spoons and they were predated, but not as much.
The body corporate tut-tutted and said they wouldn't do it, I think it's ok to accept some people just wind up pilfering these things, and you deal with it. If you need flatware that badly, I don't mind.
Its 4-5 years in, we probably need to recommit. I don't know I'd go to the bother of etching or stamping anything.
My sister and I fought over who got the NAAFI (british army PX) fork with a hole in the handle. The hole was for a chain, which clearly somebody broke, to steal the fork, which wound up in our cutlery drawer at home in the 50s/60s.
gravescale|1 year ago
Though at attrition rates of under 10 per year, it could also be partly careless disposal leading to spoons in the bin rather than only deliberate pocketings of 30p teaspoons!
tjbiddle|1 year ago
I'm sure I've thrown a non-reusable utensil in the garbage more than once in my life by accident. While I of course would feel bad, I'm also not going to dig it out of a 50gal trash can in nice clothes.
Surely that happens many times over 5 years when you have dozens or hundreds of employees.
JoshTko|1 year ago
rtpg|1 year ago
yareal|1 year ago
In your example, the person who left out the chairs isn't worried about being paid back for the chairs. Someone has excess, they shared it freely without expecting anything in return, and the community is better for it.
graphe|1 year ago
What counts as an ideal size/shape/material for your cutlery? I no longer use any metal because I once chipped my tooth on one, and often bang it against my teeth.
edgineer|1 year ago
bashtoni|1 year ago
Anyway, one question I did have which made me a little suspicious of the neat ending: why is the fork in the last picture obviously of a different type to that shown in the engraving picture? The order was 180 forks all of the same type.
Maybe Henry bought his own forks to donate?
frizzlebox|1 year ago
I think that last bit is tongue-in-cheek. That’s my read, anyway.
megablast|1 year ago
baggy_trough|1 year ago
ThrustVectoring|1 year ago
fsckboy|1 year ago
I have also been quite generous with friends, trying to teach them the way. However, I've found that I'm just enabling bad habits in careless people, and before you know it I've run out of anything popular. So now, I still flood my zone, in secret, and let others fend for themselves.
ants_everywhere|1 year ago
kotaKat|1 year ago
From this, we can perhaps extrapolate a "fork drift" factor that the school could then use to determine future fork ordering? ;)
owlninja|1 year ago
paulgb|1 year ago
tempestn|1 year ago
dreamcompiler|1 year ago
afandian|1 year ago
https://www.nthmonkey.com/spoonday/
pavi2410|1 year ago
beefok|1 year ago
It's a good problem to think about, and I hope most people consider it in their work.
CSMastermind|1 year ago
p1mrx|1 year ago
neilv|1 year ago
That might explain the appeal to me of spoons that have the very noticeably rounded edges, more rounded than they need to be. :)
oe|1 year ago
The problem could have been solved in many ways but it was a nice hobby for me. I ended up switching to work there as an employee and have been for ten years. I still use the mugs so it worked out OK.
scioto|1 year ago
relaxing|1 year ago
timerol|1 year ago
nikolay|1 year ago
santoshalper|1 year ago
hn_user82179|1 year ago
And, for what it's worth, I personally think Silicon Valley just gives a microphone to egomaniacs, which is different from turning charming tech people into egomaniacs. Zuck didn't need fame/money to produce Hot or Not. The quirky people I knew in college doing cool things are still doing quirky, cool things.
NoMoreNicksLeft|1 year ago
I think I've found the explanation for the original shortage.
tekknolagi|1 year ago
space_oddity|1 year ago
IndianScamOps|1 year ago
[deleted]
I_o_IllI__o_I|1 year ago
seoulmetro|1 year ago
[deleted]
Kerb_|1 year ago
yareal|1 year ago
It's ok to tell stories where good things happen because you got involved.
fragmede|1 year ago
[deleted]
roydivision|1 year ago
That's not how altruism works.
teekert|1 year ago
I don't like it how people suggest altruism should always amount to zero (or even negative!) benefit to the person doing all the giving of value. It's not how altruism should work.
Are you only a true altruist if you go to help some poor kids in some poor country and hate every second of it? If so, I'm against altruism, it's something for sociopaths then.
tgtaptarget|1 year ago
Kids shouldn't go to college
vortico|1 year ago
charlieyu1|1 year ago