A lot of the things we do on a daily or weekly basis have ways of doing them that can either be private or communal, some of these which we do not think to consider as having that characteristic.
For example, bathing in the Roman Empire used to be communal, but then Rome fell and citizens in the splinter countries began taking baths privately.
Receiving mail is another example. There are countries which don’t have mailboxes and everyone gets their mail at the post office in the PO boxes. It was the United States which pioneered the idea of the modern mail system, which is why we associate it as a private act.
There are activities as well which don’t have any history as jumping between one or the other that might benefit from it, for example I think towns might benefit if internet was free and freely accessible but only at the local library.
What’s a non-communal aspect of life you think should be communal?
Owning tools and equipment. I wish my neighborhood or town had a tool library.
Google your city name and “maker space” to see if there’s any near you. Not only does my local library district have them, there’s another local option with a monthly membership fee. They have large equipment like laser engravers, CNCs, drill presses, etc. They usually also have small stuff like drills that you can check out and bring home. Also a great way to meet other makers in your community
I tried looking for something like this in the UK and it turns out the nearest one for me got shut down during COVID, the rest are all an hour or two away at least. It’s a great idea but I guess it’s unsustainable without some sort of external funding cause the local one was already running at a loss before 2020 according to their website.
Sorry to hear that, TheWeirdestCunt
I’ve seen those public bike repair racks with attached tools. I feel like that’s the closest thing to that we have
I always see those with the tools cut off. Feels bad :\
I use a chainsaw maybe two hours a year. Same with my neighbors, yet each of us owns a chainsaw.
The public library has tools and such in a lot of places.
That’s a real thing, there’s one near me
Especially gardening tools.
Why does every fucking house in our neighborhood need its own lawnmower, weedwacker, and hedge trimmer? You only need it for an hour or two every month.
You’ve got a couple options here, depending on tools needed (though this is all mostly US based).
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Local libraries can have libraries of things where you can check out all kinds of stuff, as another user pointed out. Tools, fishing poles, cooking equipment, etc.
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Home Depot/Lowes/Ace Hardware will rent a lot of tools at decent rates, from hand tools to power tools to floor sanders and carpet cleaners and lawn and everything, haha.
But, auto parts stores like Auto Zone will also usually let you borrow tools for free after paying a returnable deposit. If you work on your car and say, want to raise/lower it, go to AutoZone, pay the $20 deposit for the proper spring clamps, use them, and return them and get your $20 back.
- Makerspaces. These are more often found in cities, but they’re places for people to go and, well, make stuff. You usually have to either pay for your time there, or get a membership, but they usually allow access to stuff other places won’t: CNC/laser engraving machines, welding/metalworking/blacksmithing equipment, glassblowing facilities, woodworking shops, sewing shops, etc. And some of them offer 24/7 access, so you can go use the facilities any time you’d like, as well as classes to learn how to safely use the equipment, or projects/techniques.
This option is great for folks who have disposable income, but not the space for the equipment they may want or need. I’d love a CNC machine, but I’m poor, and it would not fit in my 800sqft house 😭😂
- Honestly, call local small businesses/shops/etc. Some may let you rent time in their facility, or charge you to use some of their equipment. My boss lets people bring their wide slabs of wood in to be planed/sanded in our industrial equipment for pretty reasonable rates, they just have to call and ask first.
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If you are in the US, and maybe other places, check your local library. Ours has a library of things. It includes tools, board games, musical instruments, electronics, cooking gear, toys and tons of other stuff. Otherwise, the local home depot rents things like chainsaws at a reasonable price.
Cooking. 5 people working together can cook for 100 people easier, cheaper, and less wastefully than 100 people can cook for themselves/their families.
Unfortunately the current restaurant system in the US is incredibly wasteful, expensive, and pays fuckall.
Verified: group cooking is the way.
I have friends and family who live in a cohousing building. About 50 people in 30 units. Each apartment is complete but the kitchens are slightly smaller than typical.
Cohousing is mutual ownership of the building. About 20% of the building is common areas, like widened hallways with couches and bookshelves, or a games nook, music room, workshop, laundry, etc. It’s basically a tall village, and they are like roommates with privacy.
The giant kitchen and dining room is used six nights a week. One person is chef with a small crew, and dinner is for around 30 people. It costs $5 CDN per meal, though if you raid the leftovers later it’s pay what you want, usually $2. The cooking volunteer roster is optional and organized by a Slack channel. Food is usually awesome and everyone wins.
If you want you hardly ever have to cook dinner for yourself.
Amazing. May I ask what region of the world you’re describing?
Vancouver BC
$5 a meal and $5000 a month for rent.
Other savings built into collective infrastructure:
- super cheap fast internet. They pay about $5/ month and when I am visiting I get 1ms ping to speedtest servers, amazing.
- tools, the workshop is set up for tool sharing as well
- laundry room, no coins
- car sharing is easy
- bulk buying groups naturally form
- event facilities, guest rooms just need booking (big deal in Vancouver eh)
- profit control: fewer middlemen to feed for maintenance and management
- dozens of tiny efficiencies that add up
- village settings are naturally designed for mutual aid, good cohousing is a microvillage
You are familiar with the concept of #cohousing, right? I don’t think anyone is renting there, all owners. Land values have been fucked in Vancouver since capitalism arrived, and in fact when the group bought the three house lots they needed, they had to deal with one of them being shadow-flipped during the purchase.
Still, pooling resources did make it very possible for the group. The hard-to-swallow expensive part was actually building to passivhaus standards and dealing with bureaucracy, if I understand correctly.
You know this is a joke on how expensive rent is in Vancouver, right?
Yes and it would have been funny if any rent was involved.
Edit, oh wait you mean they are SAving 5k a month, whoosh missed that
I am from India and currently work in IT. Due to a lot of reasons I did not pursue cooking but my main motivation to pursue cooking was this aspect, and if you are interested check out community kitchens in India (Mega Kitchens docu series is a good place to start)
This sounds amazing tbh, I’m pretty jealous
Me too, most of us would be happier and richer living like that.
This makes me think of the Sikh community’s charity/giving (can’t remember the term) food giving that happens in most towns globally where there a Gurdwara.
There has to be a better way than waves hands everything, really.
They call it a langar
I sometimes think about automats, and what a modernized version, designed to both be healthy enough to eat as one’s primary meal source without ill effect and efficient enough to compete in price with home cooking, might be like. I suspect it would probably involve a lot of soup and chili and the like, just because that stuff is relatively simple to produce in large quantities, and uses cheap yet generally healthy ingredients
Taste differences make cooking specially messy to communalise. Not impossible though.
We should be using neighbourhood food co-ops to purchase and distribute food from farmers and wholesalers rather than from retailers.
A co-op has been in the works in my town for the last few years and it’s finally about to open. I can’t wait
What town is that?
Lombard, Illinois.
Re: internet only available at the public library.
Hell no. That would really fuck over disabled people.
Plus, nobody needs to see the porn I watch.
Yes, but some of us do, so give us the goods already
I mean, we could make that a communal activity too…
That would mainly be because they can’t easily get to the library, probably because your city is too low-density and car-dependant.
Once again, all problems are zoning problems in disguise.
Wait, it would? My local library’s biggest demographic is disabled people.
It would fuck me over.
I think they assume you want to make the internet only accessible at the library, instead of making it free at the library while still available elsewhere
BTW in Germany there is free internet in public buildings and transport
No they do want to make it accessible only at the library.
But does the transport cost money?
Management and operations of any apartment buildings.
Make em all co ops.
I think towns might benefit if internet was free and freely accessible but only at the local library.
Are you saying that private access to internet should be illegal?
Or that your libraries don’t offer internet access to its patrons?
If it’s only available at one place, it’s not freely accessible.
Logistically, how would that work? Libraries would have to be everywhere and they’d have to be massive. The IT infrastructure to support that would be immense. How would privacy work? Where could I go to have a private telehealth appointment, for example?
Freely accessible just means anyone can get to a library, no? I’m not saying that internet should ONLY be at the library. That’s OP, lol
Libraries where I live offer internet access to any patron (who must be a resident of the city). I can comfortably walk to 3 libraries, but only 1 is within a 15-minute walk. Not everyone in my city is so fortunate, but someone with limited internet needs has many options for free here.
Oh I understood. I agree with you.
I would argue that something that was once available at home that is then restricted to a single place that must be shared with lots of people isn’t freely accessible.
My local library is within walking distance, but it’s pretty small. The Internet is free but not awesome in terms of speed.
If I may ask, why do they require you to be a resident of your city? I work at a library and we allow universal access. We don’t even ask for library cards anymore.
Well, I haven’t checked in a while. They probably wouldn’t ban someone without ID from using the internet. But most library resources do require library cards to access. Well, anything aside from entering, sitting, and reading a book while you’re there. Or y’know. Washrooms and water fountains.
But I believe you usually need to book time to use the computers (and internet). I guess it’s probably to stop people from anonymously going on the computers and doing things they shouldn’t. From an IT security perspective, it makes sense, as does it from a “We know who tried to access CP yesterday and can confirm it wasn’t a staff member” perspective
In such a system, people would still have their own devices that can connect wirelessly to a library, even from outside the building (people who live immediately near the library I work at get free wireless internet, at least from 10 to 8), it’s only the signal that would come mainly from the library.
Another factor that comes to mind that I forgot to mention in my other replies is that the internet comes from undersea cables that are long enough to wrap around the Earth 180 times, which then enters into servers which then enters into cable lines which then reaches peoples’ houses, and these are all an absolute hassle to maintain, both because of wildlife attacking them (yeah, a single fish can take out a country’s internet) as well as bad actors, and on the cable side, bad weather can take them out. The service strain would be a lot less if we didn’t try to put too much on our plates, allowing more maintenance to be maintained.
The first one. Or perhaps it shouldn’t be illegal but rather discouraged in some way.
Gonna be honest there are few things I would like less than the criminalizing of my main way of keeping in contact with people. I genuinely think doing that would cause a spike in suicide rates because there are so many people who would just suddenly be completely isolated from having any community
You do realize a significant portion of the internet is porn, right? There is no world in which everyone has to go to a communal public building for their pornography consumption that I’d be happy with.
You do realize adult content can be printed or watched on TV, right?
When I was younger, I used my radio.
I wish it was illegal but only for you so I don’t have to read nonsense like this again.
What possible argument could you have for that? That’s just absolutely ridiculous.
So my reasoning is for a few reasons. The internet is the largest source of knowledge. People use it for things such as research, homework, chatting, entertainment, expression, art, debate, and uploading content. We currently exist in a world where there are as many personal devices with internet as there are devices with clocks. For many, the internet is a form of escapism, and there’s a lot of escaping going on. That I think would be a good idea to channel so, one, its usage isn’t willy-nilly, two, misinformation and conflict doesn’t run amuck in the digital sphere, three, it would give social incentive, and four, it would give value to knowing things (as in, before the internet, you were considered learned if you knew something, but nowadays, it’s impossible for someone to know something everyone else already has the potential to know, since the knowledge is at everyone’s fingertips, which isn’t a bad thing on its own but takes away from any individual advantage of knowing things not easily learnable). There are places out there that want to ban the internet entirely, mostly authoritarian countries as well as some cults, and this I absolutely disagree with, especially as a librarian, and I also figure it might be a good middle ground to pacify urges to outright ban the internet, especially as society is getting numb, knowledge is taken for granted, and people are getting too carried away. It’s no different from proposing something such as us all living in communal housing.
Out of curiosity, why?
So my reasoning is for a few reasons. The internet is the largest source of knowledge. People use it for things such as research, homework, chatting, entertainment, expression, art, debate, and uploading content. We currently exist in a world where there are as many personal devices with internet as there are devices with clocks. For many, the internet is a form of escapism, and there’s a lot of escaping going on. That I think would be a good idea to channel so, one, its usage isn’t willy-nilly, two, misinformation and conflict doesn’t run amuck in the digital sphere, three, it would give social incentive, and four, it would give value to knowing things (as in, before the internet, you were considered learned if you knew something, but nowadays, it’s impossible for someone to know something everyone else already has the potential to know, since the knowledge is at everyone’s fingertips, which isn’t a bad thing on its own but takes away from any individual advantage of knowing things not easily learnable). There are places out there that want to ban the internet entirely, mostly authoritarian countries as well as some cults, and this I absolutely disagree with, especially as a librarian, and I also figure it might be a good middle ground to pacify urges to outright ban the internet, especially as society is getting numb, knowledge is taken for granted, and people are getting too carried away. It’s no different from proposing something such as us all living in communal housing.
Oh interesting! I see where you’re coming from now. Thanks for the writeup, it’s very informative.
I’m also curious as to why! (And I didn’t downvote you)
Please let me know if you share in another comment!
Thanks for not downvoting then.
So my reasoning is for a few reasons. The internet is the largest source of knowledge. People use it for things such as research, homework, chatting, entertainment, expression, art, debate, and uploading content. We currently exist in a world where there are as many personal devices with internet as there are devices with clocks. For many, the internet is a form of escapism, and there’s a lot of escaping going on. That I think would be a good idea to channel so, one, its usage isn’t willy-nilly, two, misinformation and conflict doesn’t run amuck in the digital sphere, three, it would give social incentive, and four, it would give value to knowing things (as in, before the internet, you were considered learned if you knew something, but nowadays, it’s impossible for someone to know something everyone else already has the potential to know, since the knowledge is at everyone’s fingertips, which isn’t a bad thing on its own but takes away from any individual advantage of knowing things not easily learnable). There are places out there that want to ban the internet entirely, mostly authoritarian countries as well as some cults, and this I absolutely disagree with, especially as a librarian, and I also figure it might be a good middle ground to pacify urges to outright ban the internet, especially as society is getting numb, knowledge is taken for granted, and people are getting too carried away. It’s no different from proposing something such as us all living in communal housing.
I don’t think “pacifying over-controlling authorities” and “gatekeeping knowledge” are good reasons to restrict internet access to public libraries. Forgive me for oversimplifying a couple of your points; that’s just how I interpreted them, haha
I can understand some of your motivations, but I think the harm would be greater than the good if one were to restrict internet access like that.
Isn’t that already true? Internet is available for free at the library. The discouragement part is that you have to pay for it at home or on your phone
That much is true, but if it’s done strictly like that, it would ruin the point.
Clothes being optional
Im not saying we should be nude all the time. Clothes have their purpose.I think we should have the option to be nude in public, without making it sexual
Nude beaches are nice places for exactly this reason. It’s like everyone tacitly agrees not to give a shit.
You can walk past people with your balls waving in the breeze and nobody even blinks - and more importantly, someone can walk past you with their tits akimbo and you don’t even blink. It’s not sexual, it’s not even interesting, it has no significance here. It’s like seeing someone breastfeeding: yes, boobs are still great, but we’re not doing that right now.
And that’s just a really nice headspace to be in. All of the unconscious monkey-politics games just go away, you don’t have to think of people in those terms, or concern yourself with where you stand relative to them, because we’re just not doing that.
Oh no, you’ll see unattractive naked people! Yep, most of them in fact. And honestly that’s kind of awesome. 85yo woman pottering around living her best life stark naked and not giving one single shit: you go girl. Fuck yeah. You know how people say they look forward to being old enough to just not give a fuck any more? You can have that yourself right now, right here, for free.
It’s funny, walking past clothed beaches afterwards, you realise just how sexualised many swimsuits really are. A bunch of naked people are honestly about as glamorous and exciting as a pile of dead sheep; fashion designers do one hell of a job creating drama and hype around it all.
Most places in the US legally allow nudity, with the main barrier being people calling the police and making a big deal out of doing something legal.
In my area, you can be nude on private property as long as a neighbor has to make an effort to see you. My back yard allows it.
What? I don’t think this is true.
Many places allow toplessness but very few allow full nudity.
It isn’t about allowing. It is about not prohibiting.
Most places haven’t prohibited nudity because most people don’t choose to be nude.
It’s often covered under obscenity and sex offender laws, though.
Nudity is legal in those places, like how driving a car with a license is legal. That is why places can have naked runs and bike rides.
Sexualized nudity is illegal like drunk driving is illegal. It isn’t the nudity itself that is illegal, but the combination of actions.
I never feel inconvenienced by having to wear clothing. I suppose part of that is because as a man, I can go shirtless without getting stares and I wouldn’t want to be without underwear (for support) even if I were on a deserted island. I wonder what the circumstances you have in mind are in which you would like to have the option of being nude in public.
Edit: Now that I think about it, there have been a few times when I wanted to go swimming and just swimming in my underwear wasn’t an option because I would have to walk while wearing it later and that would be uncomfortable.
In addition to your example, I’ll think of a few of my own:
- Washing your car (wash yourself while you’re at it)
- The weather is comfortable enough to not wear clothes (instead of having 1 layer, go down to 0)
- Don’t want to do laundry (in fact, you save money by not dirtying up clothes as often)
- You do not have to change outfits (swimming to exercise to sleep, etc.)
- You get more vitamin D
- No tan lines
- Allows your skin to breathe and take in the weather: rain, sun, wind
But where does the communal part come in? Are people sharing their clothes?
They’re sharing their birthday suit
transportation, natch
Production
REproduction
Once upon a time, I took a Communist Manifesto out of my local library, which I later discovered was a fake, and one of the tenets called for communal hooking-up.
Did it explain what that was supposed to look like? Just “free love” or was it trying to systematize it in some way?
Yeah, just free love.
I’m with it
This is very close to your mail example but can we please move on from delivering items directly to houses? Just give me a destribution center or box at a 10-15 min walking distance and I’ll gladly pick up everything from there when it’s actually convenient. We can still keep the other model for special cases.
“special cases” being everyone who doesn’t live in a town? I’m lucky in that my village post office hasn’t been shut down, but I’d still have to drive to collect my post every day. It’s much more efficient that a single vehicle delivers post to hundreds of houses.
Maybe it makes sense in urban areas for able-bodied people. Still a drag to have to walk there every day when you don’t even know if you’ve got post because something important might have arrived.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to poop on your idea so much, it is a genuinely interesting idea, I just don’t think it works with the way society is currently set up in my country
Or disabled.
Sorry yes this assumes you live in a place where you can walk to something like a post office or a supermarket. Rural US may not have this but that’s already kind of a problem. You don’t have to go every day though. You can just get a notification when your delivery is actually there. This is already done in some places by companies but in a smaller scale where the available boxes are very limited and only for smaller items. With special cases I meant people who have trouble leaving the house for whatever reason.
Honestly If I could just get the part when they notify me when there’s something to pick up and make junk mail illegal that would be great. As it is I hate checking my mail box every day just to dump literally all of it directly into the trash. I would love to just be notified when there is actually something I need to pay attention to.
Usps has "informed delivery ", where they send you pictures of all of your mail before you get it, so you do know if you are getting something important.
FYI for those reading this, it is just an image of the unopened mail. They don’t open it for you. You see who it’s from and when it is supposed to arrive.
Rural Japan here. It would take me more than an hour each way to get to the post office (75-80mins). Ain’t no way when I generally get time-sensitive documents at least a few weeks each year. Also, especially rural but even suburban and urban Japan is generally elderly and has less mobility.
We do have to go to a post box to drop our outgoing mail, though, and I think that’s much easier (that’s a 10-15 minute walk) especially since that’s generally a rarer action.
So why not have an ingoing box next to the outgoing box? My initial comment was for packages but it works for mail too.
So they just need to build a post office closer to you
What if we work backwards on this?
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Introduce community boxes at junction points where USPS already delivers, and/or next to a parks so you can say hi to your neighbors and stuff. Ensure any box is within a tolerable walking distance for the average community member served. (Best figure five minutes here folks.)
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Allow residents with mail being delivered to their physical addresses to opt in to delivery at their associated neighborhood box.
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Market the boxes as happy medium between visiting a staffed post office at the center of a city and risky doorstep delivery. Locked boxes large enough to accommodate everyday parcels basically nix those pesky pilfering porch pirates.
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Continue regularly scheduled deliveries to individual addresses because the route will continue to exist at some level of specificity anyway no matter how many or how few community boxes materialize. Carriers essentially keep the same routes but get to drop mad loads of
malemail into a bunch of ready and willing local slots near you, driving efficiency up and logistics strategists wild. -
Promote additional box patronage by offering a slight discount whenever postage/shipping is purchased for a specific physical address utilizing delivery to a community box. Immediate and total coverage of community boxes across America is neither expected nor necessary, but hell, reward those who lighten that load for others.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk!
sincerely, louise dajoy
Edit: got high while writing and it took a turn for the weird
But doesn’t this already exist? For most packages I get, I can choose to either have them delivered to my door or to a package station, where I put my delivery number in and it unlocks the compartment my package is in. Same for sending packages.
Here’s an example:
.I’m in Europe though, not sure if it’s a thing in the US.
We’re seeing mixed use of it in the US. Amazon has these in certain places, like at 7-11 locations. Newer apartment complexes also have lockers near the mailboxes but they’re only for tenants.
I got used to using the latter when I did deliveries for Amazon and they’re great when the complex owner has them set up properly with every tenant listed and enough lockers to accommodate how much people are ordering online nowadays.
That’s pretty much the idea, you put it in much better words than me. Let’s make community boxes the default and if you want home delivery you can have that.
Side comment, I don’t get how the US deals with porch pirates. Here someone needs to be at home and sign to receive the delivery because literally leave a brick outside and it will have been picked up by someone within the next couple of hours.
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I could see delivery drivers really appreciating this. They deserve a break.
are there actually places where the public library doesn’t already offer free internet access?
Grocery stores
They shouldn’t be stores at all since that’s putting prices on necessary food for living.
I work at one and am constantly appalled at the prices for basic food items like canned tuna or pasta (not even the “good” stuff, just the run of the mill “well, it’s ____”)
… Why should private internet be banned or discouraged? What benefits would that being?
It’s a bit of a cop out, but maybe talking about and dealing with feelings. At best people usually only talk privately with a professional for money. Normalise just having regular group therapy for everyone that they can just drop in and out of.
Or if we want to really push boundaries: Orgies and kink parties. Sex is a natural part of life, no need to keep it secret.
I’m not sure that something like a public orgy would be a good idea, not because of “morals” (I tend to think modern society is far too repressed about sexual stuff), but because of the health implications that would come of encouraging sexual contact between large groups of strangers. That sounds like a recipe for STI spread unless you were very strict and thorough with testing, vetting participants, and enforcing protective measures, which inevitably not every instance would be.
However, if talking and partaking in sexual acts is less stigmatised, people will hopefully feel a lot more comfortable about getting tested and talking about it.
And honestly, if it does turn out to be that big a problem, vetting and requiring regular testing seems a reasonable thing to require before people are allowed in.
A few reasons.
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The internet is taken for granted and this would be like a social cap. In theory, something could take its place in limited form in private settings.
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The internet travels around the world through undersea cables (long enough to encircle the Earth 180 times) which then go into servers which then go into cables which then reach your residence, and that’s a lot of service strain we add onto by putting the internet wherever we can.
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Knowledgeability isn’t as appreciated as it used to be, and having a hub for it would un-devalue it.
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It would help maintain the right flow of interaction and information and combat things like misinformation.
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So that people don’t pose a hassle to administration.
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To bring people together.
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Some countries want to ban it entirely, and it would serve as a good middle ground to pacify the urge to do this without eliminating the internet.
It’s no different in my opinion from proposing something such as us all living in communal housing.
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Energy, public transport, postal service We’re never going to have progress if they have a stake in not doing that
Sex :(
