How to spend money on your friends without it looking like bribery
In Capitalism, you are always encouraged to own instead of rent. The benefits of private ownership are extolled. Capitalists are shocked by “in 2030, you’ll own nothing and be happy.”<p>Ownership is an idea that allows companies that build things to sell excess capacity and luxury stuff. Like real estate in growing economies (China, or the American Dream in past decades of USA). Or like carmakers in the USA until recently.<p>Own that car! Then look how much unused metal is parked on the street most of the day, so carmakers can create more. When self-driving cars come along, our cities will become more beautiful again, with less parking lots and lanes. It’s also inefficient in more ways than one — a study in San Francisco found that 30% of all traffic is just circling looking for parking: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reinventingparking.org&#x2F;2013&#x2F;10&#x2F;is-30-of-traffic-actually-searching-for.html?m=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reinventingparking.org&#x2F;2013&#x2F;10&#x2F;is-30-of-traffic-...</a><p>Ownership is right to exclude all others from using a resource, even if you are not using it. So if I own a bike, no one else who needs it can use it, it just sits in the closet, thus more bikes are required to be sold to society. With CitiBike, or other bike sharing programs, bikes are rented on demand.<p>So one of the benefits is that you can project wealth and excess, and invite your friends to use the thing that no one could be using anyway.<p>The millennials and later generations are fine to rent on demand, even including clothes (“rent the runway”). They join clubs like SoHo club that let them use facilities on demand when they travel. It’s a different approach. And there, since it’s on-demand, there is less waste but also it becomes clear when someone is subsidizing someone else.<p>That said … now that there is so much capacity built (eg commercial and residential real estate) that SOMEONE has to own it, we may as well own it collectively (housing cooperatives) and schedule use of it (eg cooperative time shares) than the exploitative landlord model and airbnb model that raises rents sky-high.<p>Housing cooperatives. Taxi cooperatives. Credit unions. Eliminate the shareholder class, and let everyone own the network. Socialism online, without violence of the State. Someone should build that ;-)<p>PS: It just requires software to self-organize. And it is far better for the environment. Producing one electric car takes a lot of fossil fuels, and if they were shared we’d cut down on production and have more efficient consumption to recoup the costs after 70,000 miles.<p>PPS: Cooking at home is different from the above, because people typically buy food and consume food before it spoils. In fact, the post is wrong — going out to a restaurant is far more expensive than the supermarket food. Most societies until the 1990s did not afford to eat out all the time but they certainly invited people over quite often! House parties also gives a great reason to visit each other.