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Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

Japan has the original umbrella sharing economy. All umbrellas look the same (black handle, white or transparent top), are very cheap (a few hundred yen = a few dollars at any convenience store) - as a result, people aren't attached to theirs. Leave yours at the door when you enter a store or some such, take one when you leave - it might be yours or not. If it's not raining anymore when you leave, just leave it there.

It's wonderful - I've had many nights leaving a bar late when it was pouring and hadn't brought an umbrella with me, and the empty bar had a half dozen available by the door.

Turns out that it's very rare that you arrive with one, need one when you leave, and can't find one.

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I hate it when people make it sound like it's ok in Japan to knowingly just grab someone else's umbrella. You're right, they're cheap. You're right, they all kinda look the same. And yes, if there's 10 of the exact kind you left behind you may just grab one. But if you just steal someone else's umbrella, you're still an asshole. Yeah there's plenty of those in Japan as well. This is the real reason for why people aren't particularly attached to their umbrellas. Not because they're cheap* and replaceable, but because they know an asshole will come along and steal it at any moment.

* Those 600 yen actually matter to a lot of people

I had bought one of the nicer ¥1500 umbrellas because I'm quite tall and the bigger size gives me more coverage, only to leave from lunch with coworkers and be completely umbrella-less because someone in the group that left before us grabbed my umbrella. That means some jerk showed up without an umbrella and decided to grab whatever was available because it started pouring.

I don't bother buying the nicer ones anymore because they'll just get stolen eventually.

Having never seen the umbrella pot at my local bar go below 5 umbrellas, I'm going to safely disregard your comment that goes against everything my Japanese friends have told me over the past 2 years since I first set foot there ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So one of the acceptable scenarios is also that you arrive at the bar and it begins to rain... then you take an umbrella even though you didn't deposit one? Is that right?

Yes. Most bars and restaurants have a big pile of umbrellas that people have left behind, and have no problem with that scenario. I've had business owners give me umbrellas on the street.

Most bars (in my experience) have a pretty good selection of sunglasses/hats/umbrellas that have been inadvertently left there in the past.

Precisely. A proper sharing economy means doing away with the pointless accounting that dominates an economy based on property rights. What we call the 'sharing economy' in the US isn't, it's a rental/service economy. The people who call it a sharing economy are essentially trying to redefine the word to mean something else. A five-year old could tell the difference, but many adults seem to have lost the ability.

OK, you're vulnerable to umbrella-horders in this example, but how many people are going to hoard umbrellas for no good reason? Probably a small number of people with mental illness issues.

A six-year old could tell the five-year old they're being naive, and that adults using buzzwords like "sharing economy" aren't worried about accuracy.

A seven-year old could tell the six-year old that buzzwords, and words in general for that matter, don't have a fixed definition. The English language is constantly evolving.

That's the problem, isn't it? Deep down, people dislike bullshit* and tolerating it as a normal mode of discourse is toxic to the health of a society.

* http://www.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_b...

I think that ship has sailed. Society as we know it is built on bullshit.

Evaluating its health by comparing against an imagined non-bullshit-based society seems unproductive. Why presuppose that this alternative society is feasible/possible let alone better on the whole?

The whole body of contract law stands in contradiction of your assertion. We also privilege facts and verifiable events in history and science, notwithstanding the existence of bullshit. I don't share your fatalistic view, not least because any undertaking whatsoever could theoretically be dismissed with the more-or-less similar argument of 'well we're all going to die, so what's the point?'

I agree with you that much of society is based on based on bullshit, but not that it's pointless to do anything about it. I used to smoke cigarettes but gave them up because they were making me feel bad. While I have most likely shorten my life by the time I did spend smoking and won't be able to recover that lost time, I still cared enough about the quality of life that was available to not want to shorten it further. Likewise, insofar as bullshit deems to be destructive of trust and social relations, I'm arguing that we would be better off with less of it.

I don't believe society is based on bullshit alone; there's just a lot of bullshit in the mix.

I suspect a society without bullshit is not as simple as it sounds. Seems we would have to somehow get by without a lot of things ranging from white lies to political and religious beliefs.

> doing away with the pointless accounting that dominates an economy based on property rights

Good luck with that. Owners of property will fight to protect the system that benefits them. Even those who don't own much will, like people regularly paying off a house loan from their wages hoping they can resell at a profit.

Edit: When I saw your comment was downvoted, I upvoted it so it was no longer gray. But by the time I'd typed in this, your comment had been downvoted again. I suspect many HN readers are downvoting comments based on whether they agree with the content rather than whether it fits in with HN etiquette.

The longest-lived advertisements I have seen on a regular basis are the logos printed on my Tyvek shopping bags.

But I don't use umbrellas much (full-brimmed hats FTW), so my umbrella canopies are equally long-lived, but they get fewer impressions.

"Probably a small number of people with mental illness issues."

A) Most of us have no notion of how many people have mental illness issues.

B) Mental illness issues widely go unreported, so you have know idea how many people have mental health issues.

The comparison you made undermines the legitimacy of your argument.

Thank you for that devastating critique of my one-line conjecture.

Well... it was a completely unrelated comparison. One that was mildly offensive and could not be defended. Your "one-line conjecture" deserves even harsher critique imo

It's the same strategy with micro-usb chargers that I've adopted.

At some point, there are so many of them that every place that is able to charge a phone (e.g. my car, friends houses, relatives, etc.) is saturated with them, so you never go without a charger.

It would seem to be balanced out by the opposite scenario:

>>Leave yours at the door when you enter a store...if it's not raining anymore when you leave, just leave it there.

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