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Comment by voidlogic | Hacker News Reader

At my college all the dorms had a kitchen for residents to use in the basement... is this not normal?

We had a kitchen and hundreds of people. Dorms are not designed for students to regularly cook, and even if they were, a shared kitchen seems even less sanitary than a meal hall

It's not uncommon, but it's also calibrated to the negligible number of residents who want to use the kitchen. If everyone in the dorms suddenly had to eat out of that kitchen, there'd be a several-day waiting list to use it.

Which means it's not a viable fallback.

US colleges earn money off the meal plan and tend to be liability shy so having a full kitchen is a non-starter. Heck, it was against the rules to have a microwave in dorms (even room not in actual dorms) where I went to college. It was a pain in the butt.

Pretty sure the ban on microwaves was an electrical fire risk, not them being predatory about students eating at the dining hall. Can you imagine if even every other room had an appliance pulling 1000W whenever the hell a student felt like warming up some soup?

The main problem with the provided dorm microwaves when I was in school was burned popcorn sending the entire dorm outside at 4am until the campus security could come and turn off the alarm.

> Can you imagine if even every other room had an appliance pulling 1000W whenever the hell a student felt like warming up some soup?

Imagine if every other room had a computer the student could just turn on whenever he felt like it.

In reality, the number of computers is of course more than one per room. No one is worried about the power supply.

>Can you imagine if even every other room had an appliance pulling 1000W whenever the hell a student felt like warming up some soup?

Can you imagine if even every other room had an appliance pulling 1000W whenever the hell a student felt like blowdrying their hair after their shower?

OK, I know the U.S. doesn't have a good public healthcare system. But please don't tell me you don't have decent electricity either?

It's fine; I have no idea what secstate was thinking.

yeah it's not correct. in fact the logic makes no sense at all...how would apartment complexes exist if it was true?

See, this is why there's so much single-family-housing-only zoning in the US. ;D

We have 1 kitchen in the basement, but that's shared among 500 people

Depends on the dorm, but in some older dormitories there might be maybe one full size kitchen for student use allotted to the entire building.

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