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Comment by ldoughty | Hacker News Reader

Yep, I certainly would prefer food get thrown away then for somebody to drive up to my property, harvest all of the fruit, and then go and sell it to other people.

However, that's less about deserving it, and more about the food being taken for someone's personal profit.

I also think most people would be happy for the food to go to those in need, but then for make reasons we have laws or business policies that forbid it... Starbucks doesn't want to pay 10 million dollars because an employee gave a homeless person food they we're allergic to... We do love lawsuits here..

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Yea, OP's point is that it's not about deserving it, it's that there's always someone who thinks anything available for free means that they can just take the whole lot for themselves, and/or profit from it.

I remember the last company I worked for that tried the whole "Free food if you stay a little late" thing. They'd buy a few boxes of pizzas and set them out int he break room with the expectation that you'd take a slice or two. Well, of course, eventually one or two people started taking entire boxes home for themselves and then that "perk" inevitably ended.

Price for a box of pizza? Vs price for a hour of overtime?

Yeah this sounds bad. If the company stops giving “free” pizza bc/ someone takes not 1/8 of a pizza but 1 pizza, then you know how much they value, or rather do not value your time.

Hard to see how a manager could be this inept.

Removing the perk was absolutely not about the cost of the pizza which was trivial, or the extra productivity, it was about the few jerks abusing it. Of course, they could have bought 5X more pizza, and then the jerks would have walked out with 5 pizza boxes instead of one.

Same mentality is why we can't leave a basket of unattended candy outside the house on Halloween, for Trick-Or-Treaters to share: Inevitably someone will just take the whole basket. It's not about the cost of the candy, it's about not enabling jerks.

You can think about the company spending too little on pizza or you can think about people being selfish jerks to each other.

When in your local park there are no benches to sit because half of them were dismantled and sold for scrap (true story) you can think how government spends too little on park maintenance or policing, or you can think how people are being selfish jerks to each other.

Is this abuse? Were people taking these boxes as soon as they were delivered, or were people taking home boxes of leftovers? I don't think I've ever been to an event of any sort which had ordered pizzas and saw someone just take a box before anyone could get to it. But most events I've been to which had pizzas had intentionally ordered extra boxes, and it's always encouraged for someone to take home extras in those cases.

> then for somebody to drive up to my property, harvest all of the fruit, and then go and sell it to other people.

You just described most AI companies.

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