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people are just shitty
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People do this to the Little Free Libraries that dot our liberal neighborhoods. Especially when they proliferated during Covid. The solution was, for the tenacious, just to rebuild and restock it. Eventually they got left alone. But, a couple churches got old newspaper machines and filled them with food and hygiene supplies, left them around the neighborhood for the folks who have trouble stretching their budgets. Every morning, all the bags of cereal would be exploded across the street, the macaroni and dry goods would be scattered on sidewalks, canned food thrown against rock walls. Or it’d just all be taken at once, and the machine tipped over. They stopped doing those.
This is pretty much the solution. Just rebuild/restock.
I have a little library that also contained snacks. It was always used by the neighborhood kids. Camera attached too. The first few weeks, books all over the ground or all the snacks taken. And the cameras pointed to a few homeless people.
But after three years (and constant maintenance), I now even see the homeless be respectful and take only the snacks they need.
It doesn’t feel good to turn the other cheek those first few times, trust me. But now it’s a part of the neighborhood and other neighbors even come and add snacks.
That’s a really good story, instructive on how building social fabric takes time and patience
The solution is better parenting, the little miscreants these days have never been disciplined. It’s not roving marauders from outside these neighborhoods coming doing these things, it’s the morons from within the community.
Yeah people should parent those homeless people better.
Read before responding, guy.
Little free libraries are awesome. I love putting stuff in there and seeing it’s been taken & replaced. I put a lot of zine type stuff in them. The thought of people destroying them just for giggles or because they personally oppose them is sickening. It’s free books and food! You have to be a monster to oppose that.
When you are shit is easier to cope if everything around you is also shit than making an effort to be less shit.
Conservativism in a nutshell.
I’ve been wanting to set up one myself but they seem a little on the expensive side, and lord knows I don’t have the know how to build my own
I mean, my mom found a Golden Book version of Little Black Sambo which featured black face and racist illustrations and whatnot. She took it but left it up to me but even that I didn’t really want to burn it for the reason you said.
Buuuut it did disappear from our place at some point and I don’t know who may have thrown it out. But like, I get it in this case.
Yeah people put crazy shit in them. My buddy back in the day found smut about pirates in one, and we were young teenagers. I found a Dennis brown CD in one right outside of an elementary school a few blocks down from me a few weeks ago lol.
That’s more on people just trying to spread racist or weird shit not really any reflection on the free libraries themselves. Who says kids don’t like reggae
I’m so disappointed in people. It’s more than a few bad apples that spoil a bunch.
A few years ago my city installed a bunch of bike maintenance stands, comple with tools (attached to cables) and within a month all the cables had been cut and the tools were all gone. The tire pumps were destroyed and the signs were obscured with spray paint.
They tried to repair them a couple of times but the shitbirds just trashed them again.
It’s frustrating that this crap keeps happening
My city has a bunch of those free food boxes scattered around and I’ve never seen the vandalism like you’re talking about. I wonder if there’s a difference in environment that could be causing that. I bet if the churches kept stocking them and not giving up eventually the vandalism would stop just like it did with the little free libraries
I’m in one of the highest property crime cities in the US, as well as being located between two of the state’s largest homeless shelters, and the liquor stores and streets they sleep on. So it’s not uncommon to find pointless vandalism. Just last weekend my driver’s side window got cracked up because someone half-heartedly tried getting in, for loose change.
There’s like a dozen of the little free libraries within a half mile of my house and I love it
Same. I moved across the country and there’s a so, so many where I live.
Little Free Libraries were actual grassroots things, this is obviously a corporation trying to squeeze into a new market by offering the first one free (because the city is paying for it).
If I’m reading the side of this thing correctly, it requires an app to get the ball out which means using it opens someone up for potential legal/money issues if they get blamed for using the balls. It looks like a trap to me, and I’m not someone who already had to deal with stuff like being blamed for damage to those rental scooters or other app tracked things.
This is Canadian Tire Jumpstart so it’s likely operated by a charity foundation run by a major hardware retailer. The app system seems kind of stupid, but I don’t believe at first glance the aim was to profit out of this scheme.
Always disappointed, never surprised.
How does no one notice the ai watermark… come on guys 😭
Holy shit, I didn’t even notice 💀
Looks like the service itself is real: https://equip.sport/
But maybe someone just wanted to farm outrage using it?
Sounds like something 6ixBuzz would do, if they’re the one who posted the update.
For those unaware, 6ixBuzz is probably the most popular conservative social “news” network for Toronto and surrounding areas. Kind of like a local Fox News. The posts are bad enough but the comments, at least on Instagram, are awful.
(all links are an alternative frontend to Twitter for both privacy, and because they often block users who aren’t signed in from viewing posts)
I can’t find the original person that quote tweeted it with “update”, but I did find the original 6ixBuzz post, and in the comments you can see this guy saying "Here’s what they will look like 10 minutes later in that neighbourhood" and saying “of course it’s AI” in the comments to someone. Seems like he probably was the one to generate the image.
Other people are now AI generating videos of specifically black teenagers stealing from them, and claiming the image is an example of a "government plan gone awry". 🤦
Sometimes we NEED the red circle.
And the broken glass is completely different between pictures.
Of course 6Buzz is posting this, they’re basically a right wing disinformation vehicle.
That part makes sense. They’re different boxes in different locations.
Ah right, even the poles are different now that I look closer.
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Yep and the photos are otherwise the same just switched around
Also like it would ever be glass on those things… Let alone individual panels
I really don’t know what would posses them to use glass instead of a metal mesh to begin with but I guess that’s beside the point here. Those look more like display cases tbh
Dude can piss through mesh.
I sense a challenge coming on….
Happy cake day!
I don’t want my stuff to get pissed on, but I can at least still take it home and wash it.
These lockers were for public equipment, not your personal stuff.
Or glass with wire mesh in it - security glass
Why do we need to be able to see through it anyway? Seeing through to the inside just makes it more of a target.
So you can see what’s inside to rent it out, maybe the locker thingy just opens and closes without keeping inventory.
Hold up, is this for storage or for renting equipment? What kind of equipment would fit in those small lockers?
They’re for basketballs, soccer balls, and the like. You’re able to check them out for free to use for a certain amount of time
Ah, ‘kay! I had a hard time gauging their size from the picture.
They clearly dont even have a locking mechanism, they are literally just shelves.
It’s been pointed out but look in the bottom right hand corner there’s a Gemini watermark
Oh yea this too
Wikipedia literally tags their genre as misinformation don’t believe anything these people say
Report this. It’s misinformation. The broken glass image is AI generated by a right wing misinformation site
I looked it up and apparently this company installs these lockers that have different balls in them. So if you go to a park with a court and didn’t bring a ball you can still play if you get the app and check one out. It seems like people just stole the balls.
I could tell just by looking at the photo that this was done by someone without balls.
So it’s not free. You pay with your privacy and data.
It probably starts free. You create a market and then start selling it as rental equipment, or you market to cities. They are making money.
Jump start is Canadian tire’s charity for childrens sports. They are funded by donations at the till. Its a typical corporate tax dodge but it does infact go to kids sports.
I bet you could buy a shit load of random sports ball for the cost of those cabinets, app, cloud infra, and employees to run it all.
They should just put metal baskets out with balls and refill them a few times a year. It would be cheaper
I mean, they do. Look into the programs, this is probably the smallest program they do.
You pay with your data means it was never free, you were the product
Right. But it never stops at free data.
Yeah. I don’t think this is too hard to parse, nor is it likely to be some cogent political protest.
There could easily be an element of “fuck that app,” but the “reward” here is access to a basketball while at the park. I think Occam’s razor is an appropriate initial framework.
It also looks like the city was prudent and avoided a major investment of tax money.
Why do you have to use an app to unlock it? There doesn’t seem to be any functional reason for it
What else can be used?
Employing a lonely dude at the machine just so Timmy can rent a football?
Good luck with those fees.
My hands? Little free libraries don’t need apps
How about they just put a latch on the door. No energy, internet, compute, apps or data required. Just a $3 latch that anyone can open, and you can even have the local highschool woodshop bang out some replacement kiosks if they need to be replaced
It’s canadian tire, so data collection is the reason for the app
Can’t say I’d blame anyone for destroying them then. No doubt the app collects your data. There’s no reason I should have to pay for the locker once with my taxes, then again with my data. Net positive for the world, imo.
This country desperately needs a functional mental healthcare system.
World*
The city in question is in Canada, if you’re thinking that it’s the US (as you appear to be in the US).
Mike “the knife” Harris is the person you should thank for the state of ontarios mental health care system
This is why we can’t have nice things
Are they shitty or stuck into a corporate hellhole that only reward antisocial behaviours so they could get ahead for the 1$ per hour promotion ?
I saw a guy tell a girl who was kicking the perspex “glass” of a bus shelter to stop it and she genuinely didn’t seem to understand why. We had to explain to her that breaking things is not okay.
Perhaps the vandals are sending a message they’d prefer their tax dollars be spent more productively?
I can’t help but feel there’s a ton of missing context here.
Who makes that point with $16 a playground basketball?
No, this was surely someone stealing the equipment. If someone just wanted to send a message they wouldn’t take the equipment
Tbf that’s a decent use of tax money imo, and I’m the only one I know complaining about taxes being wasted.
I’m also an (ex) vandal, so I have some perspective I suppose. It’s likely that the tags on the side were done for normal tagging reasons, “I exist, everywhere you look in this city you’ll see my name, yadda yadda,” and they may have tagged the windows, but the real destruction of the windows was likely some very angsty teen who feels like they have no control of their life (and unlike the taggers) their anger makes them channel it into pure destruction rather than the “destruction” with the paint that creates art.
Personally, I love creative destruction, destroying something to create something new is always interesting to me, be it graffiti or an art installation made of old broken CRTs or something, but pure wanton destruction out of anger is a waste imo.
The “news”.
You had a mission. It was really time to stop browsing and put away the phone to recharge, but you said “No, I must investigate and share!”
Edit: This was meant to be a supportive joke commenting on the battery level in your screenshot
In my neighborhood the city just gives out a bunch of free balls to kids and there’s enough floating around that nobody feels the need to steal one. No maintenance cost, just the bulk price of basketballs once a year.
I haven’t ever seen vandalism of these types of things, but I imagine it might be drug addicts or mentally unwell. It’s easy to imagine angry teens or greedy people, but given many unhoused people having schizophrenia or drug abuse, delusions could definitely lead to destruction of these public spaces. Although I only ever saw that with a store front, not a free service thing.
Still infuriating though, people need treatment and society does its best to ignore that or even discourage it.
GenAI is mentally unwell
When people are suffering, violence becomes natural.
I’d just rebuild these, and not take it personally.
Context?
Edit:
BrrdShrrmp@lemmy.ca was kind enough to provide the context:
https://www.mississauga.ca/events-and-attractions/parks/borrow-sports-equipment-in-parks/
Also it requires an app, and it has the following text too:
This is just about as shitty a free service can be, strict limitations and harsh punishments. A ball can get lost, and if that happens, you’re out.
No wonder that shit was vandalized. IMO they were too soft on it.
https://www.mississauga.ca/events-and-attractions/parks/borrow-sports-equipment-in-parks/
Thanks. 👍
Big fail, no wonder that shit was sabotaged.
Be careful suggesting there’s missing context. You might summon the downvote brigade lol.
I finally got the context, and it’s no wonder that shit was vandalized. I don’t see a reality where it wouldn’t be.
Even here in Denmark that shit would probably not last long, and we are famous for NOT doing that.
If you want, see my post you responded to, I’ve included the details there.
I would guess that the City of Mississauga has installed public equipment lockers for people to store their things in, and within days, all of them had broken glass because someone has stolen the equipment stored inside by other people.
But I’m just guessing based on the picture. I wouldn’t expect the context to be much different, tbh.
Can’t imagine they would be personal-use lockers, especially not with doors that display the contents. Have to imagine that they were no-lock ‘lockers’ to hold common-use balls & gear out of the weather when not in use.
I suppose they could be rental/honor-box - insert quarter to get ball, please return when done, but I don’t think I’d call that a ‘locker.’
Oh, you are right. There seems to be some text on the outside. Might’ve been just some equipment to borrow.
Ok, it might need more context :D
Thanks, I was not aware that clicking the thumbnail revealed a lot more detail. 😳
But it seems to me this “system” is pissing some people off, because the vandalism is only on the “lockers without locks” whatever that is called. And not on the poles or the trashcan?
I might’ve been wrong, see other replies to my comment. It might’ve been some kind of honor equipment rental, where you can borrow sporting equipment, instead of it being a locker for people to store things in.
But the context of the post is basically the same. City did something nice, people vandalized it :D
Seems to me the city did something for show that doesn’t work, and might as well no be there.
As I sted before, the poles and trashcan are not vandalized, it seem like these “lockers” were clearly targeted, probably because it’s a shit system for the people it was supposed to benefit.
Hopefully after this, the city will stop wasting money on a system that doesn’t work anyway.
I don’t get it, why would such lockers be labeled “Jumpstart bon depart” and Equip at the bottom?
Looks more like some private thing, taking up public space.
IDK, I’m just trying to evaluate if this is just mindless vandalism, or if there could be a reason behind it.
The pole itself is not vandalized and seemingly neither is the trashcan behind.
Be careful suggesting there could be nuance. Lots of people in this thread just want to be angy
Apparently the “service” is only available for over 16 year olds.
This is so badly executed it’s no wonder people got pissed.
Well, some people. Not like the whole of humanity lined up there to trash it.
It’s sucks. I use them, very handy. I think they should replace the glass with a metal door and use LED to indicate whether the balls are there nor not.
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step 1: buy 3 cheap balls and a display case step 2: photoshoot in the park step 3: farm wholesomebait karma on socials step 4: smash case and remove balls step 5: 2nd photoshoot in the park step 6: farm rage karma on socials step 7: ??? step 8: profit!
Whhhyyyyyy… Did they think making the doors of glass was a good idea?
Glass that is brittle.
Glass that is see through.
A thief couldn’t have devised a better idiot honey pot.