Always remember: the cruelty is the point
Where did all the public bathrooms go?
781–790 of 873 posts
Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?
#782Earlier quoted context omitted.
The vast majority of the homeless you see on the streets in the US are there no because of money trouble, but because of mental health or drug issues (or both). People with money issues can almost always lean on friends or family. It’s the people that no longer have any friends or family willing to put up with them that end up on the streets.
Then the question becomes why US has such a huge problem with mental health and drugs that most other countries don't have with this scale. Maybe it's easier to develop mental health and/or drug issues when there are no societal safety nets, like accessible healthcare, decent affordable housing, unemployment benefits, ...
I don't know why people seem to think the US has "no societal safety nets."
We have medicaid, unemployment benefits, how expensive our housing is completely depends on location just like other places (rural-ish areas are probably cheaper than almost all of Europe), etc.
Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?
#783Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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".
It is indeed old (1995 [0]) and that's not what the paper studied or concluded. First, the study did not gather data on the homeless population, but on mentally ill people already in the criminal justice system:
* "The authors analyzed data from ... records of 77 homeless defendants and 107 domiciled defendants referred for psychiatric examination by the criminal and supreme courts ..."
Second, the paper's goals were to gather needed data on homelessness among mentally ill people in the criminal justice system, and to examine the interactions between homelessness and crime among mentally ill people:
* "The study aimed to estimate the prevalence of homelessness among mentally disordered offenders entering the criminal justice andforensic mentalhealth systems, to compare base rates of arrest for violent and nonviolent criminal charges among homeless and domiciled persons with mental illness, and to examine patterns in the categories of victims chosen ..."
Third, the conclusion was that, among mentally ill people generally (not only those charged [1]) those homeless were ~35x more likely to be charged with crimes than those domiciled, and it was somwhat even more likely that those crimes would be violent or against strangers (there's more detail in the paper). The paper says nothing about crime among the homeless population generally.
> absurd
> crack the skull of a 70 year old nurse
Do pejoratives and outrage make it more persuasive or less? More importantly, do they make it more likely or less likely that you find and express truth?
I think much less likely, because it means 1) You are dismissing a lot of information, 2) You are not examining the matter thoughtfully (being outraged), and 3) You likely have little better argument.
That also makes it less persuasive to people who are thinking critically.
[0] When crime rates were much higher. The paper: Martell, D. A., Rosner, R., & Harmon, R. B. (1995). Base-rate estimates of criminal behavior by homeless mentally ill persons in New York City. Psychiatric Services, 46(6), 596–601. https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.46.6.596
[1] Note that they gathered data only on mentally ill people charged with crimes and not on the general population of mentally ill people. The latter group's data they took from the same author's prior research.
Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?
#784Earlier 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…
By definition, destroying public utilities is antisocial. Antisocial behavior is a huge problem in the US.
> Antisocial behavior is a huge problem in the US.
You'll have to back that up. It's said a lot by people who want to take away freedom from those they dislike, trying to justify it by creating some state of emergency.
Crime is the lowest it's been in the lifetime of most Americans. I do see high antisocial behavior among wealthy, powerful people - should we jail them? They cause a lot more harm than dirty bathrooms.
Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?
#785Earlier quoted context omitted.
> not all diabetics use injectable insulin and the ones that do are more likely to do so at home. I'd love to hear the citation for this one, as people using injectable insulin generally need to do in conjunction with eating, and I can't think of where you'd get the idea that T1 diabetics who use injectable insulin avoid eating outside the home as a general rule. Granted, nowadays plenty of people are using insulin p…
Novopens have existed for a long, long time (40 years). Syringe disposal units are not for the diabetics and they never were. Where I live, they are commonly found in public toilets with awful yellowish lights that make it really difficult to see blood vessels.
Sure they were! They're key safety infrastructure in response to a universal problem to keep needles out of the trash. People being harmed by needle stick injuries don't care if the needles are being improperly disposed of due to illegal drug use, or legal injections.
Where I live, needle disposal boxes are available in almost all institutional restrooms. I'm not sure why you think the yellow light is relevant.
Here's a history of the problem in San Francisco. My memories of the issue in Washington/Oregon around the same time are similar:
https://www.japha.org/article/S1086-5802(15)30128-5/abstract
Another article, again highlighting that the focus on needle disposal is keeping all needles out of the trash, as a broader occupational safety issue:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014572179402000...
Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?
#786Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it so infeasible for government to keep their facilities clean, while Buc-ee's can have sparkling clean facilities and still turn a profit?
Infeasible for a government would mean it is sufficiently expensive that it is not politically popular to spend that much money on public bathrooms. Also, Buc-ees does not offer free bathrooms in urban, dense areas with higher proportions of mentally ill and drug addicted populations, so that comparison makes no sense.
I used Buc-ee's as an example because they're famous for their clean bathrooms. But there certainly exist clean bathrooms in urban areas. I'd venture to say that those aren't all in high-end establishments that exclude any "riff-raff". It's possible to find clean toilets in urban McDonald's or Wal-Mart; maybe not all of them, but certainly not none either.
And regarding expense on public bathrooms:
* San Francisco spent $1.7M on a single toilet
* Seattle spend $5 installing 5 toilets.
* NYC's public restrooms routinely cost $2M-$4M
Now, those are building projects rather than ongoing operations. But it shows that governments are willing to spend absurd amounts on toilets.
I don't know exactly what the problem is, but there's something about government (mis)management in the issue.
Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?
#787This 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…
Sounds like you live in top 1% area in China. That's def not true that toilets are readily available in China. As non-chinese citizen, I veered off place I cannot go without the passport, I see crappy areas without toilets everywhere (though I was stopped by police from wondering around). You only see where you are allowed to see. Rest of those area has no toilet, and people crap/pee everywhere.
Where are these "places I cannot go without the passport"? My understanding is that there are almost none of those left, and its typically very high elevation areas that can be used to image nearby military installations.
Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?
#788Lack of bathrooms has been called tragedy of the commons in this thread, but it's not the "commons" that are the problem. The worst 10% of society determine what we can and can't have. The "commons" aren't having public sex, shooting up drugs, or destroying the bathrooms with lack of... etiquette. The commons are victimized when these things happen and then there's eventually no choice but to shut them down unless th…
You're right about who is causing the damage etc. but the 'commons' does not refer to the people; it refers to the shared resource. So a public park is the commons. And when it gets polluted with plastic rubbish etc. because externalities are not internalized that's a tragedy of the commons.
You are of course right about what the word "commons" refers to. Still, I want to quibble.
Maybe the definition covers both, but I still think it's worth distinguishing between incentives creating a bad equilibrium and simply antisocial behaviours. When I hear "tragedy of the commons", I think of the former.
Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?
#789Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please elaborate. Where does my comment leave the "right direction"?
how can a volunteer group only consist of one group of people? surely then they aren't volunteering, but rather being volunteered
Being volunteered to help clean the facilities they depend on and otherwise get for free?
Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?
#790Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Mali Empire peaked around 150 years before Christopher Columbus "discovers" the Americas, and it finally collapses in 1599, finished off by Morocco. The Transatlantic Slave Trade doesn't really kick into gear until the mid-17th centuries, after the Mali Empire is no longer around. If you wanted a better example, you might have picked, say, Benin. That you use Mali as an example of an empire screwed by Europeans i…
Weren't both the Benin and Mali empires based on conquest, exploitation, and slavery?
Benin is probably the most well known of the slaver kingdoms of the slave coast, although Benin was around for much longer than just the peak slaving period.
Mali Empire was primarily driven by its control of the trans-Saharan trade routes, at least the southern end of them, which allowed it to profit immensely from the gold and salt trades.