Ah, the last service voting rights person I talked to had it expanded to any public service

Not even Heinlein limited it to military service given some are physically unable to perform that

The service had to force someone to choose the greater good over themselves

It didn't need to be military

well its like some countries which have that, such as Finland i believe

i think the general idea of most places is that military service is the shortest route, but i haven't read Heinlein to know what he laid out

The entire purpose of National Service is to prove that you are willing to put the good of the people over yourself. It doesn't have to be military, but it does have to be physically and mentally grueling and be a struggle that you overcome.

The idea is that you do not value what is handed to you, only what you earn.

Citizenship is not given, according to Heinlein. It is- Yep.

i worked for a non-profit that ran off the philosophy

how did they apply it?

we took donated old bikes, and would ship them to 3rd world countries with transportation crisis. You know, where like 1 person in a whole village would own a car.

on the receiving side, they did not give away the bikes. for 1, it would increase the amount of money needed to be raised to ship the container, 2 the own believed that if you gave them away, people would not value them. Taking them for granted and using them in irresponsible ways, and also create a dependency

so instead we sold them for dirt cheap, but something that was still significant value to the locals

That is smart and something foreign aid rarely thinks of.

i sometimes don;t think foreign aid is meant to aid, so much as to make a dependency for leverage

federal funding for the states works that way

but anyway, so they would sell for something like 5 bucks, which is like a month's or a few month's wages

this had a bonus side effect: by making the locals care about their bikes, they wanted to maintain them, because its cheaper to replace most parts than whole bikes

so we'd also ship over bike parts, which started a bike repair industry

thats atleast better then invading a country right?

also since most of these countries have a culture of men working and women staying at home, we sent donated sewing machines so that the women would have an easier time making stuff at home that they could sell at the market once a week or a month, however often they could

Cottage industries, yay!

http://www.p4p.org/

very small operation

our "loading docking" was old shipping pallets with a layer of plywood

the bikes were stored in a "warehouse" which is just 8 old truck trailers

they would back up a shipping container on a truck trailer, and just leave it parked in the sun

all this is outside

had a fan for the summer that would blow into the container, didn't really keep anything cool

you'd pack the bikes side to side, literally slamming the last one on each row down between the bikes and the container wall, because no amount of damage done there, amount to that done when the bikes settled during shipping.

better to lose one bike at the end because it was messed up slamming it down, then a whole row of bikes that were allowed to bend over and get crushed by the bikes above

you'd do a row of adult bikes, put down 1 sheet of plywood that mostly made it across the whole thing, then you would do a second row of adult bikes

then, depending on the amount of kids bikes we had and they needed, we'd either do a full row of kids bikes, or take some adult bikes and lay them flat (boy did that suck, trying to lift an adult bike by the side of it, with your arms fully extended, and while already having to stand up straight

once you got to kids bikes, you';d just lay down some cardboard, then just throw them up there and jam them in as much as possible

often times laying on your back on the cardboard, and using your feet to slide a bike along the room up over all the packed bikes and into a whole

on a hot summer day, if you didn't wear some kind of hat or bandana, you could easily get a first or even second degree burn from the roof

i miss it, shit was fun. owner is a family friend

how many bikes did you move per crate you think?

probably 380-480, depending on if it was a 40ft or 45 ft

usually around 400-420