Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where did all the public bathrooms go?

daily.jstor.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

611–620 of 873 posts

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#611

Post by cindyllm »

ytoawwhra92 wrote: post #230
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 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…

[dead]

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#612

Post by gjm11 »

nailer wrote: post #448
xyzelement wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> > I'm actually in the UK > I think bottom quintile refers to the worst people not necessarily the poor or whatever. Yes. In the UK the rate of incest is increasing due to migration from Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan. An NHS Genomics Education Programme blog in Sept 2025 acknowledged the risk of birth defects doubling, but cited the benefits of 'stronger family support', 'economic advantages' and argued ag…

Here is the actual thing they published (and unpublished shortly after, after backlash stoked by the right-wing press): https://web.archive.org/web/20250929053102/https://www.genom...

Readers may judge for themselves how accurate the description above is.

A few further remarks.

--1-- Many many many things that are unwise and can increase pressure on communities' resources are not illegal.

You have the right to try to fix a broken tile on your roof by climbing out of your window without any sort of safety equipment, even though you might fall and need medical treatment, even in countries where the government will pay some or all of your hospital bills.

You have the right to eat too much or too little, or to drink a lot of alcohol or smoke a lot of cigarettes, even though in the long run these things will be bad for your health, which as well as possibly requiring expensive medical care will also make you a less economically productive member of society.

You have the right (in most places, including the UK and the US) to agitate for fascism or communism, even though if your agitation succeeds the resulting government will probably be very bad on net.

--2-- "Some guy working for the NHS wrote a blogpost saying that X should maybe not be made illegal" is quite a long way from "the NHS thinks [any particular thing]".

--3-- The article wasn't at all about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do". Indeed, the people who might need extra care as a result of first-cousin marriage are not the people who enter into those marriages, but some of their children.

If your preference is for such children not to receive NHS healthcare, you're punishing the children for the actions of their parents. I think this is generally considered bad policy.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#613

Post by gambiting »

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…

Over here where I live(UK) it's neither the homeless nor mentally ill people, it's groups of teenagers who have literally nothing else to do and they will destroy every single piece of public infrastructure that isn't solid metal and welded down. Even keep them out of children play parks is a challenge the local police can't manage effectively, I love finding that every single swing and seesaw has been ruined because of bored teenagers.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#614

Post by nasaeclipse »

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…

Clean toilets? In China?!

You must've been to a different China than me. I've been there several times and the toilets are always atrocious.

Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan always had the cleanest ones.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#615

Post by gattilorenz »

freehorse wrote: post #200
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…

"EU" is too broad of a term to describe cultural/social/political norms such as public toilets. There are places in the EU with fairly decent toilets, and others with almost none. In some you have to pay in many public toilets, in others they are free. The best bet in most places are public buildings such as libraries. And very often cafes etc allow you use a toilet, esp if you have health reasons and ask them nicely…

> "EU" is too broad of a term to describe cultural/social/political norms such as public toilets

This calls for Slavoj Žižek's reflections on toilets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzXPyCY7jbs

Although he's of course not talking about the room, but about the fixture.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#616

Post by throwaway314155 »

yboris wrote: post #246

They're all in Tokyo ;) My all-time-favorite film is Perfect Days depicting days in the life of a sanitation worker overseeing toilets around Tokyo. A must-watch film! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Days

> They're all in Tokyo ;)

Yeah and effectively any store outside urban America.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#617

Post by NalNezumi »

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…

EU(or US) can't have public toilets because it's gonna get vandalized. For fun.

One thing that perplexed me endlessly during my youth living in Sweden was seeing drunk teenagers go around vandalize things for... Fun. Breaking the glass at the buss station (designed to shatter in to million pieces so you don't hurt yourself), friends enjoying graffiti, littering, throwing beer bottles on the street for fun....

During public school lunch (I only heard my friends doing it) they had "meatball war" throwing meatball at each other for fun. Justification was that school lunch taste shit so it's ok to throw food. Mind you all this was in the district with highest median earning in the entire country, not a ghetto.

Same for toilet. Just why did you need to rip off that toilet lid?

Collective ownership and responsibility is taught. In most Asian countries kids are often tasked to clean their own classroom. If someone then just destroys things for fun everyone suffers. EU/US just think that's dumb thing to teach because "eww collectivism" and even the weird conservative people going on about rules usually don't even want that.

So you have a society where race to the bottom is inevitable when it comes to caring for public utilities. "privatized profit(fun) , socialized loss" teaching starts even before economics class

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#618

Post by alex43578 »

mmooss wrote: post #468
remarkEon wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most important part of incarceration is removing what is a quantifiable risk to the public from the public square. Everything else is secondary. The point of a state having police powers is to ensure for the common good, it is not to continually indulge those who wish to damage that common good. To the extent that the state is responsible for e.g. punishment and rehabilitation, these are ancillary responsibilitie…

Lacking a house isn't a threat to others. I've rarely seen an unhoused people do harm. Annoying you isn't harm. Making rich people uncomfortable isn't a crime. > common good A term used to justify taking away liberty from people you don't like - 'it might take away their rights, but it's good for people in 'common''. The point of government, as Jefferson eloquently put it in the document that birthed the US, is to pr…

"I've rarely seen an unhoused people do harm" is an absurd statement.

It's an old study, but Martell in Base-rate estimates of criminal behavior by homeless mentally ill persons in New York City found that "The rate of violent crimes was 40 times higher and the rate of nonviolent crimes 27 times higher in the homeless population".

Most people don't like mentally ill homeless people who commit violent crime at a rate 40 times higher than average. Remind me what right in the Constitution enshrines your ability to crack the skull of a 70 year old nurse on the ground, then wander off and go to sleep? https://abcnews.com/US/70-year-nurse-killed-random-assault-b...

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#619

Post by TonyStr »

jimnotgym wrote: post #519

I feel like HN should ban discussion of homelessness, due to the extreme ignorance and prejudice of the comments. A bunch of people who don't know the first thing about it jumping to conclusions. The quality of the comments here is so so poor.

You think this topic should be banned because you don't agree with the people discussing it? I actually think there's a good argument here that the topic is politics, which is off-topic and doesn't belong on HN. But wanting it banned because you disagree is just childish... You also added nothing of your own to the discussion, simply stating that everyone else is ignorant and prejudiced.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#620

Post by adwn »

mrngld wrote: post #603
slg wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> they just want volunteers for the hard-to-staff weekday shower-cleaning shift

This may sound like a loaded question, but I assure you, that's not my intention. If you want to provide for those "invisible" homeless, who aren't drug addicts or mentally ill, shouldn't the primary volunteer pool consist of exactly those invisible homeless people? Or in other words, once you have organizers, why do you need external volunteers for cleaning the showers?

Post reply on HN