These sorts of places aren't really that uncommon. This one goes to an extreme, but my town has a co-op garage where people can go and work on their own cars. There isn't a mechanic there, but it's helpful for people who know how to change their oil or put new brake pads on but are not allowed to work on cars where they live.

There is at least one similar shop for bicycle repair, that also does a parts exchange. If you're upgrading your bike, you can leave your old parts for someone else to use.

I'd bet that almost any town of more than 100,000 people, maybe even less, has places like this.

> There isn't a mechanic there, but it's helpful for people who know how to change their oil or put new brake pads on but are not allowed to work on cars where they live.

If you go at the right time, you can also often find someone who is willing to teach you these things, despite not being a professional mechanic.

Mutual Aid _means something_[0], and it's not just places where people share tools to work on their own stuff, but it is that too.

These sorts of places aren't uncommon because maybe, just maybe, that's how things have been for eons and naturally have been as an evolutionary adaptation to millennia of change. In this case, cars are the focus. But one could see the expansion of the concept.

The IQ thing is barely a side story. An attention grabber. People will focus on that, and some will use it to add to the pile of things to care more about the point. But I hope some will accidentally see it as, "hey, smart people do smart things so mutual aid is a smart thing."

[0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_aid_(organization_theor...)

Well said thank you!

> "hey, smart people do smart things so mutual aid is a smart thing."

Very happy to have searched "mutual aid" on hacker news today and come across this comment.

I've always been curious about this, how do you possibly handle the liability? Somewhere, some entity owns the property. Once one guy drops a brake rotor on his foot and breaks it, who covers the legal expenses?

The standard legal answer is pages and pages of documentation that discourage suing. This is rarely actually done in practice.

The reality is you keep it quiet and relatively secret, and you kick out people who smell like legal liability. This answer cannot be stated in public.

a) The people who use these places are generally not litigious.

b) they sign waivers

c) the shop has insurance

Agreed, but after the first insurance claim my understanding is the insurance rates become prohibitive or they just drop you.

I guess if the assets aren't lost they could be sold off or donated to a similar organization or something in that case however.

> I'd bet that almost any town of more than 100,000 people, maybe even less, has places like this.

I'd argue the reverse--these kinds of co-ops are more likely to be found in smaller, cheaper, more rural towns. The key to these kinds of places is "cheap real estate with few restrictions".

As soon as the town starts getting too prosperous, they force these kinds of businesses out of the area.

From the writers of The Expanse:

An earther, he looks at all this and thinks, MINE.

In the Belt: "The more you share, the more your bowl will be plentiful"

> This “problem” of managing decisions about abundance reminds me of a report that linguist Daniel Everett wrote as he was learning from a hunter-gatherer community in the Brazilian rainforest. A hunter had brought home a sizable kill, far too much to be eaten by his family. The researcher asked how he would store the excess. Smoking and drying technologies were well known; storing was possible. The hunter was puzzled by the question—store the meat? Why would he do that? Instead, he sent out an invitation to a feast, and soon the neighboring families were gathered around his fire, until every last morsel was consumed. This seemed like maladaptive behavior to the anthropologist, who asked again: given the uncertainty of meat in the forest, why didn’t he store the meat for himself, which is what the economic system of his home culture would predict.

> “Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother,” replied the hunter.

> I’m not sure what else humans should be doing, but this seems to encompass at least the ethos we should promote above all.

The problem is that these kinds of things rarely scale beyond a couple of people.

Once you get too many people, you eventually get a jerk who tries to freeride and take advantage of the situation.

Controversially, I think we wait too much opportunity for charity on avoiding free riders.

Not everyone is equally intelligent. Not everyone is equally athletic. Not everyone is equally financially apt. Not everyone is equally generous. Not everyone is equally capable. Not everyone has enough resources for themselves, never-mind enough to share.

Free riders should be considered part of charitable activities. We should give freely to all, not just those humble enough to reject it.

So kick out the freerider! Avoiding doing anything about a problem just because there's potential that some asshole is going to come around is not a good reason to avoid helping others. Some asshole is going to come around and disturb you anyway, might as well help out other people while you're at it.