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Where did all the public bathrooms go?

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Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#601

Post by ericmay »

ajmurmann wrote: post #443
ericmay wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the keyword customers though? In other words you’ve got to spend money to use the toilet? In America I can walk in to a restaurant, even a nicer one and ask to use the bathroom and very likely would be shown strait to it. It’s not 100% of the time everywhere, especially places like Times Square, but I’d say that the norm is no spend required.

Huh. I encounter "customers only" signs quite frequently in the US, as well as bathrooms that require codes or keys.

They’re not uncommon but in my experience you tend to find them more in tourist areas with high foot traffic or if there are a lot of homeless people or something along those lines.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#602

Post by liveoneggs »

pessimizer wrote: post #258
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. Or a consistent race-based or immigrant underclass caste. A lot of countries have the blessing of not having a large population whom they can dismiss the condition of based on visual cues. They just moved from feudalism to universal humanism in one generation. Whatever bad things you can say ab…

China has a several-millions-big population of slaves today.

It is effectively a Han ethno-state, led by a de-facto king, with many novel forms of discrimination normalized into the culture.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#603

Post by mrngld »

slg wrote: post #480
dgoldstein0 wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the burden of proof is on your position. When activists in my area pick a fight with local government, it's never over that invisible group. Indeed, as far as I can tell, they don't give a rip about the veterans living in the forest over by the VA hospital. I've never seen them over there. They're too busy picking fights defending the ones pooping at the downtown parks (and not in the public toilet) or trying to get city funding and approval for safe drug use, etc.

Now, you're right that there are people that do care and put tremendous effort into that more invisible group. Churches and church-backed organizations do a lot of that. Difference is, except for fund-raising from like-minded folks (and a lot of them hate even asking for money), they go about their work quietly, without seeking attention or reward.

There'd be the possibility of joining forces, but not with the DSA-types that jump in the limelight and scream the loudest and advocate for free needles. The people doing the bulk of the hard work don't want to make a statement on Palestine, they just want volunteers for the hard-to-staff weekday shower-cleaning shift. They need men willing to be mentors, etc. They care about the actual people they're serving, not trying to bring about glorious revolution. The two groups aren't compatible at the moment.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#604

Post by DoneWithAllThat »

psadauskas wrote: post #157

We'll spend a trillion dollars bombing people halfway around the world that never meant us any harm, but paying a custodian to clean a public toilet (and providing help for those that might misuse it) is a bridge too far.

More correct; we’ll spend a trillion dollars giving free things to people too lazy, addicted or mentally unwell to support themselves, but paying for mental hospitals and police is a bridge too far.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#605

Post by mrngld »

latexr wrote: post #576
lotsofpulp wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cleaning up trash, wiping tables, mopping the floor is one thing. Cleaning up bodily fluids, which likely come from drug users, is a whole other thing.

> which likely come from drug users OK, come on, you don’t know that. I doubt we have any serious data that bodily fluids in public bathrooms are likely to come from drug users. And if you’re cleaning it up, presumably you have equipment and are not using your tongue, the residual drugs won’t jump on you. Don’t stigmatise hard drug users, many of them (maybe most) were given a rotten hand early on and now want help.…

I do know that. For a time I was GM for a convenience store. I started requiring people to come ask me or the manager on duty for a key to the bathroom, which I started having locked by default.

There was an immediate 90% reduction in bodily fluids outside the toilet bowl and 100% reduction in stolen plumbing (they were taking part of the p-trap for drug use) and in finding discarded paraphernalia. Correlation isn't causation, maybe all the crack heads were still using the bathroom but decided to be civilized, IDK, but keeping the bathroom under literal lock and key was a big benefit.

It was inconvenient for customers, that was true, and I didn't like that aspect, but it was hard getting staff (or even myself) that had the will to hose poop off a bathroom wall.

Which I can tell from your comment you've never done. "presumably you have equipment" Yeah, a hose. A mop and bucket. You're still in close proximity, you still step in it, it still splashes. And nothing prepares you for the smells. And you can never unsee it. I won't even describe the things I saw in the womens bathroom. Way less common for things to go down in there, but when it did... It's wretched work.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#606

Post by mrngld »

mym1990 wrote: post #178
lotsofpulp wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try hiring someone for a job where the job could sometimes be cleaning up bodily fluids and odors in a bathroom. Even the government deems it infeasible. Or, think about how much someone would have to pay you to do that job.

Yeah, I did this at 16 at a gas station and got paid 8.75 an hour, there are lots of people out there doing this type of work in the private sector. Its not glamorous thats for sure but supply/demand will dictate the labor market. The government doesn't deem it infeasible because hiring is difficult, its because they aren't willing to pay a reasonable wage for the work.

I won't do your homework for you but there's people that have done the work of reporting out the numbers it takes to operate a clean government bathroom. It's not just "reasonable wage" territory. It's "civilization can't afford this" level expensive, the type of problem you can't throw money at because it's so bad it's obvious that the real problem and solution exists elsewhere.

And it's only in the West that public restrooms are that expensive. Japans are less expensive because the locals use them like civilized people and they don't have enormous on-going cleaning and repair costs.

So, the problem isn't in paying the cleaners. It's upstream. No pun intended.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#607

Post by gjm11 »

xyzelement wrote: post #386
gjm11 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much all of that is false. The rules I'm expected to follow based on the bottom quintile are generally rules that are no trouble for me to follow. The taxes I pay support way more than just the bottom quintile. I'm actually in the UK but I guess you're in the US, so here's a rough breakdown based on this infographic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni... . Much the biggest chunk of US…

I think bottom quintile refers to the worst people not necessarily the poor or whatever.

My impression was that OP was using it rather fuzzily, conflating "poor" and "bad" and "unpleasant to be around" and whatever other notions of "bottom" might be floating in the air, in the service of a general air of contempt toward Those People. I took it to mean wealth when talking about taxes, to mean behaviour when talking about laws and risks to life and property, and to be deliberately ambiguous when talking about public spaces and zoning laws.

In any case, neither the factual veracity of the claims nor their support for whatever policies OP could plausibly have had in mind seem to improve on taking "bottom quintile" to mean specifically "worst-behaved quintile". Notably, "the taxes you pay are to support the bottom quintile" is even more false if it means "the worst people" rather than "the poorest people".

Incidentally, my comment above is currently sitting at -1. I vigorously endorse everyone's right to downvote things they think are bad, but if anyone reading this downvoted my comment because they thought it was wrong rather than because they disliked it politically or because they didn't want to see this sort of argument on HN, I would be interested to know what they think I was incorrect about. (The trouble with downvotes as a signal for improvement for authors is that it's often very unclear what specific problems they are trying to point at.)

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#608

Post by moffkalast »

mns wrote: post #535
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…

Is this some sort of psy-op here against EU, this isn't the first message like this where someone is praising China and accusing EU, as if it's a unitary entity, about being a "horror show". If only we would have some dictators or extremist parties back in power to break up the EU and take our countries back to the good old days. I'm finding it harder and harder to come back to Hn with all of this stuff.

If it's a psyop it's only on the side that China might be somehow better, cause frankly neither my home country nor any others I've visited throughout the EU (and by now that's over half of them) are particularly good in this aspect. Like gas stations now require you to scan your bill to access the toilet, and it's still a toss up if it'll be clean or not, it's practically normal for restaurants to have "toilets for guests only" signs. Like how far can we fucking sink in this regard, it does not cost an euro of water, paper and cleaning work per person visit to run a toilet, it's borderline extortion just because they know people have nowhere else to go.

The only thing propping it up is that unlike a hundred years ago, people generally now have the common decency to not piss everywhere, which I think would reverse this idiocy rather quickly.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#609

Post by cheonjc40 »

nradov wrote: post #322
ytoawwhra92 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

That seems hard to believe. I've been in many tech company offices around the US and they're usually fine. Where is your office located? What are the national origins of your co-workers?

> That seems hard to believe. I've been in many tech company offices around the US and they're usually fine.

> What are the national origins of your co-workers?

Probably Indian or South Asian.

Look at how dirty they behave in their own community (Sunnyvale, California)

Meanwhile bathrooms and in nearby Cupertino, Mountain View and even San Jose are much cleaner.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#610

Post by idiotsecant »

socalgal2 wrote: post #348
justin66 wrote: post #257

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. 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…

> 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

Because they're forced to burn dollars to solve a problem that was created upstream for the want of pennies.
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