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Where did all the public bathrooms go?

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221–230 of 873 posts

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homelessness and the post-2008 wave of poverty ruined it. A few people who need to use a public bathroom everyday is fine, but when you have 100x of ppl who are desuetude, on drugs, mentally ill etc. emptying their medications and needles and so on it becomes a public health hazard, attracts crime, and overwhelms staff. Better to just shut it down altogether or limit to staff only. .

Good thing that stops the "destitute, on drugs, mentally ill etc" from doing this simply by removing the public toilets right?

Well it becomes someone else's problem, right? That kind of short-term thinking is in vogue at the moment.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#222
post #159

People don't want to “abuse” commons like public restrooms, parks, buses, and so on. They do so because they have no choice, having been displaced out of having a private place to do the things they're now forced to do in public places. This is all just an outcropping of the housing crisis, which is itself an outcropping of the billionaire crisis. End billionaires, and we have the resources to de-gild this age.

People have no choice but to smear feces on the wall and leave needles on the floor of public restrooms, or urinate inside a moving bus because housing is too expensive?

Housing and wealth inequality is an undeniable issue. So is anti-social behaviour. You can be poor and even homeless without throwing self-respect out of the window. People are either responsible for their actions, in which case criminal and civil charges are on the cards, or they are not (due to mental illness and/or substance abuse) and need to be institutionalized.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#223
post #94

This really hits home. As a person with IBS I basically cannot peacefully go outside in EU. I lived for many years in China and Thailand, and toilets are free, clean, and plentiful there, and you can easily ask any place to use their toilet - there's no stigma. I even had to run into a police station in rural China once. They were 100% chill about it, though they had to unlock a gate for me. Xi Jinping really will be…

> I lived for many years in China and Thailand, and toilets are free, clean, and plentiful there I don't know about China but this was the opposite of my experience in Thailand. The majority of public toilets I encountered had an attendant you had to pay for access. Shopping malls / hotels / other places were you were already paying to be there were the exception of course.

I am ok with paying for public toilets if they are being kept clean.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#224
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong about syringe disposal? A significant portion of population has diabetes. And even if a drug addict uses it, still better than throwing to the trash, similar to how cigarette disposals are mandatory in typical airplanes.

> What's wrong about syringe disposal? A significant portion of population has diabetes. Ask yourself if that's truly what motivated those being installed... > And even if a drug addict uses it, still better than throwing to the trash The problem is they still throw their needles all over the ground. As is typical, the intentions are noble, but what ends up happening is people who can't even be bothered to not shoot…

> The problem is they still throw their needles all over the ground

But it's better if at least some of them are in the trash and not scattered around, isn't it? I may be wrong but it seems to me that public opinion doesn't matter to these people anyway, so there's no point in getting rid of such garbage bins

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#225
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. A lot of people do not care about public facilities. They do not believe in leaving things better than they found them. You've seen these people around, you know who they are. These are the same people that don't rerack weights at the gym or don't put the cart back at the supermarket. That attitude has nothing to do with income, housing, race, or activity they are interested in. It's simply a result of na…

Sure, and thankfully there aren't nearly as many of them out and about abusing more things if they have a private place always available to spend their time. Conscientiousness is one of the handful of measurable personality traits, and there's a scale to it because some people have more of it than others. That's not going to change. What we can change is the degree to which less conscientious people are forced to lea…

I've personally never paid for a yacht or someone else's wedding, I'm not sure what you're talking about...

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#226
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I lived for many years in China and Thailand, and toilets are free, clean, and plentiful there I don't know about China but this was the opposite of my experience in Thailand. The majority of public toilets I encountered had an attendant you had to pay for access. Shopping malls / hotels / other places were you were already paying to be there were the exception of course.

In Japan, I've seen attendants looking for some payment to use bathrooms in hotels.

Where? 11 years living in Japan and I've never seen this once, and never heard it from friends or family.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#227
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> massive population of antisocial people 'Social' isn't 'nobody annoys me '; it's empathy for, caring about, and helping others, especially those you don't like - otherwise it means nothing. I'm in the West, and I support liberty - the defining feature of the West - uber alles; it's their right. I'm not threatening others' freedom so you can feel more at ease. (You are more of a problem for them - they can't have yo…

There has to be a line draw somewhere. Generally people who say this don't actually have regular interactions with aggressive, hostile, homeless. Or are you just really cool with going to a coffee shop and have someone screaming in a pile of their own feces 20 or so feet away?

The problem is that once you draw "the line", then what? Warehouse a bunch of helpless people in overcrowded prisons? Bus them to some other less-draconian municipality? Forcibly drug them into quasi-submission and then turn them loose again until the depot injection wears off? Or perhaps we should "just kill 'em", as Fox & Friends cohost Brian Kilmeade once suggested?

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#228
post #69
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a year ago in Nice for reference.

Oh I don't doubt you, I was just reflecting that I think that paid toilets have largely been made free in the last 10 years or so. But I'm sure there still exist quite a few, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were especially found in right-wing cities like Nice.

The modern toilet should let you pay with your personal info:

Toilet: "Sign up (learn more) or proceed with Google Account ..."

Google: "pissoir.fr wants access to your pissing history ...(Y/n)"

Toilet: By pissing here, you consent to the collection and analysis of urine samples ..

:)

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#229
post #94

This really hits home. As a person with IBS I basically cannot peacefully go outside in EU. I lived for many years in China and Thailand, and toilets are free, clean, and plentiful there, and you can easily ask any place to use their toilet - there's no stigma. I even had to run into a police station in rural China once. They were 100% chill about it, though they had to unlock a gate for me. Xi Jinping really will be…

I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them. It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that. Not the worst thing in the world, but I do find it frustrating often to not have a bathroom available nearby (small bladder) But, while the toilets aren’t the worst sacrifice, the cumulative sacrifices made on the alter of our huge antisocial populati…

Antisocial people who destroy the public facility don't just come out of nowhere. People get driven to this. Not to say that you can simply ignore them when they're already everywhere, though.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#230
post #94

This really hits home. As a person with IBS I basically cannot peacefully go outside in EU. I lived for many years in China and Thailand, and toilets are free, clean, and plentiful there, and you can easily ask any place to use their toilet - there's no stigma. I even had to run into a police station in rural China once. They were 100% chill about it, though they had to unlock a gate for me. Xi Jinping really will be…

I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them. It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that. Not the worst thing in the world, but I do find it frustrating often to not have a bathroom available nearby (small bladder) But, while the toilets aren’t the worst sacrifice, the cumulative sacrifices made on the alter of our huge antisocial populati…

I assume you're talking about software engineers, because in every office I've worked in the toilets have been absolutely filthy by mid-morning.

At my current place there are boot marks on top of the toilet seat that have been there for weeks, put there by one of the 10 people in the company.

I think we can just apply the broken windows theory here. If whoever's responsible for the toilet doesn't demonstrate that they care about its state of cleanliness and repair, the people using the toilet won't care about that either.

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