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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1121 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 27, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Summer pool season started a few weeks ago. I'm on the board for the local pool. It is probably one of my most time consuming volunteer activities.

On the upside the board is mostly fun people who have real lives, so the meetings are often productive with a minimal amount of political jockeying. We drink at board meetings, and one of the guys on the board runs a local wine shop and does a yearly wine and dine event for board members.

On the downside the type of people that join the board are still generally busybodies. The treasurer is very opinionated on people following the rules and has a strong desire to punish rule breakers. She had a very Political-Managerial-Class idea of how to enforce rules though. Her latest idea was a strongly worded email to all the members with enumerated punishments for not following particular rules. I had to point out that the people breaking rules were probably least likely to read any such email, and that we already had the authority to punish them we didn't need to warn them first.

I would generally suggest people get involved with their local community. There will absolutely be people that disagree with politically. But if you are serving a common cause then that political difference gets papered over as irrelevant more than you'd think. And it's a good way to have things bent in a direction you'd prefer.

I will maybe share more board stories in the future. Some stories might be heavily more culture war oriented, like the little trans kid on the swim team, or the twelve year old that pulled a knife out on another kid in the park across from the pool. These stories are kind of uninteresting in the way that we are generally trying to optimize for non-controversy. None of us want to be in a media segment about trans kids on a local swim team.

The actual controversial stuff that people argue over during the board meetings are financial things. Money is tight, and it's hard to know how to beat spend it to maintain a good experience for the pool members.

So how DO you punish rulebreakers?

And more to the point, if the rulebreakers just ignore the punishment what's the ultimately sanction/enforcement mechanism?

The usual progression for small organizations is:

  1. Some minor punishment
  2. Blacklist them, revoke their membership, ban them from the premises, etc.
  3. Commit to calling the cops if they return.

Any organization can (theoretically) do #2 on a whim and #3 if needed.

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