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Where did all the public bathrooms go?

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Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#471

Post by hax0ron3 »

black6 wrote: post #201
slig wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ten percent is way too optimistic, I'd say 20% are destroying everything for the majority.

We are all at the mercy of the bottom quintile. The rules you follow (or are expected to follow) are based on the behavior of the bottom quintile, the taxes you pay are to support the bottom quintile, the greatest risks to your life and property come from the bottom quintile, the dearth of comfortable public spaces is because you have to allow the bottom quintile to be there, and our zoning laws (in the US) are devel…

Sometimes I wonder what fraction of America's economic dynamism is based simply on people's desperate desire to make enough money to not have to live around street violence and other kinds of in-your-face social unpleasantness.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#472

Post by nrr »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #449
nrr wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The honestly very poor black community around the area? they fucking hate us white people. like actively, all the time, no what no matter what you have or haven’t done they don’t like your ass one bit. Did you replace folks' smoke detector batteries for them? The way I found to get around this prejudice was to go to church most Sundays and walk around with a sling bag full of 9V batteries and knock on doors to offe…

Wait, so the smoke detector thing is real? I assumed it was just a racist stereotype.

It's something of a meme that's grounded in reality, but it's honestly less grounded in race and ethnicity than it is in socioeconomic status.

That said, there's a joke that the white people version of this is the little bug in the lower right corner of the Windows desktop background that tattles on you for not having activated.

Which, like, y'know, that's fair.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#473

Post by fragmede »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #422
vkou wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assure you, if they stopped spending that money tomorrow, things would get dramatically worse, as all the people that money keeps off the streets would be on them.

Do they spend $100,000 per homeless person in Europe and Asia? If not, why don't they have similar problems?

If they're spending money on, say, school lunches for poor kids and on substance abuse programs, they're not technically spending money on homeless people, but it's hard to see that the money that isn't being spent on the unhoused doesn't help people not become unhoused in the first place.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#474

Post by Gud »

ipaddr wrote: post #458
Gud wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I’m from, Sweden, typically it is the second and third generation immigrants who exhibit antisocial behaviour.

Its true im many places. First generation hard working. Second generation lives in the inprint of the first generation. Third generation has no connection to the original homeland and tries to find connection or it turns to antisocial behaviour.

The first generation could hardly be classified as “hard working”, the sad fact is many of them live on (generous) welfare.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#475

Post by CalRobert »

justin66 wrote: post #257
talon8635 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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. What a weird way of stating the problem. There is too large a population of homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts wandering the streets. We didn't surrender anything, at least not during the last half century in the United States. We did as littl…

I dunno, this could be it but living in rural Ireland showed how many obnoxious teenagers will completely destroy a playground just for kicks. I'm sure a public toilet would fall prey to the same impulse.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#476

Post by gottorf »

cortesoft wrote: post #408
mvdtnz wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We in the west have surrendered with weak punishments and lax enforcement for anti social behaviour. In many cases even abolishing laws or putting in place public policy that prevents the imprisonment of people who commit "low level" crimes. There's a certain segment of the population who will (largely unsuccessfully) try to shame you if you promote a tough on crime approach. In my country the entire justice system h…

The United States is certainly part of the west, and we incarcerate people at a higher rate than any other advanced nation, BY FAR. The idea that we are soft on crime is insane. Harsher punishments do not lead to lower crime.

> we incarcerate people at a higher rate than any other advanced nation, BY FAR

Crime is committed at a higher rate than in any other advanced nation, though some of the others are catching up.

> The idea that we are soft on crime is insane

Not even a little bit insane. There are a million criminal laws on the books that do not get enforced at all. For example, I live in a state that is stereotypically conservative and "tough on crime" and any marijuana-related products are strictly illegal, most often at the felony level; yet I constantly smell it while driving on the road, no less! People are smoking while driving all the time. This cannot be described as anything but soft on crime.

The US system was overall built by and for people who are largely self-governing. This philosophy gets in the way of a true hard-on-crime pivot.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#477

Post by mstaoru »

podocarp wrote: post #434
mstaoru wrote: 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…

Sorry I've been to China plenty and the toilets aren't clean. I mean it's better than nothing but some of them are nightmare fuel. But, the "privately" owned public toilets are decent, i.e. those in malls and hotels etc. Quite the same story for many Asian countries too. I was also shocked by the cost incurred if you get out of home diarrhoea in Europe. Might as well buy adult diapers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_Revolution_in_China

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#478

Post by mstaoru »

chrischen wrote: post #389
mstaoru wrote: 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…

China, clean?? Some of the worst toilets, public or private, I've encountered in China. Can't say how Europe compares but I'd rank China a distant last amongst Australia, Vietnam, Japan, America, Canada, and South Korea (there's more countries to fit in there but I'm not going to list them all).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_Revolution_in_China

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#479

Post by obelos »

SpecialistK wrote: post #238
obelos wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the social contract fails you, why pay any regard to it at all? It's not a matter of pure, exogenous choice to do those things. It's not some abstract preference that surviving in the margins has afforded the freedom to exercise. It's a way to make sense out of the world and to have some shred of a sense of agency in a world where a person otherwise has no power.

No, it's mostly severe drug addiction and mental illness.

Far and away the strongest predictor of homelessness is not mental illness or drug addiction, it's housing costs. Housing cost and the subsequent increase in homelessness is the precipitator that promotes addiction and exacerbates manageable mental health issues into mental health crises.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#480

Post by slg »

dgoldstein0 wrote: post #460
socalgal2 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We did as little as possible to deal with homelessness and mental illness SF would beg to differ. They have a budget of $100k per homeless person. They can't solve the problem because the problem is not money

SF - and probably much of the US homeless problem elsewhere - is largely cost of housing; rent and home prices are ridiculous enough that if you don't make big bucks, you are likely barely scraping by. Rents here are rising way faster than inflation, and it makes everything more expensive and means a lot more people are living that much closer to not being able to pay their rent. Way easier to end up homeless after l…

What you say is completely true, but part of the problem is that people have very different ideas of what they are talking about when they talk about homeless people.

People who tend to complain about the homeless are generally only complaining about the visibly homeless (i.e., the people living on the street). Meanwhile the people who advocate for helping the homeless are more likely to also care about the invisible homeless who tend to make up the majority of all homeless people. These are the folks who might have jobs, live in their car, have a gym membership to shower, etc. You could spend a lot of time with many of these people and have no idea they were homeless and as a result they aren't included in many people's perception of the problem of homelessness. Therefore, it's hard for people to believe that something as simple as lowering rent prices could actually solve homelessness for a majority of homeless people.

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