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Where did all the public bathrooms go?

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Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#851
post #848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You gave an anecdote that "I've rarely seen an unhoused people do harm". I'm saying do you have any evidence beyond your assertion from personal experience that homeless people are safe? You're making a claim that homeless people are safe, a claim that flies in the face of most people's experience and common sense. It also flies in the face of the data: "In 2022 the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office reporte…

The contempt seems like a pattern - toward homeless people, toward me, toward facts and anything and everyone else that don't fit what you want. It's not persuasive or interesting, and contempt seems pretty strongly correlated with not knowing, learning (essential to knowing), or caring about the actual facts or anyone else. It's also not respectful and incompatible with freedom - that other people can validly do and…

[deleted]

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#852

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What book is this from? I would like to read it.

The one that might get written if I ever figure out what it's about. (I truly appreciate the inadvertent encouragement.) I can pass along some of the inspiration, at least: https://playlists.at/youtube/embed/?playlist=FdW1CjbCNxw%2CS...

I wanted to add I searched online for the text to see where I could find/read the rest :) So yes, keep it up.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#853

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you suggest the solution is?

[flagged]

Please don't post like this on HN. Multiple guidelines ask us to avoid this kind of thing, in particular:

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Eschew flamebait.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#854
post #850
post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The blogpost in question seems pretty sensible to me Why do you think allowing incest and increasing birth defects among children is sensible? I personally imagine it is things like widespread organised rape that was ignored by the police for many years, and a steady increase in Islamic terrorist attacks, that has led to people not disliking the immigration system that allowed the rape and terrorism. But perhaps yo…

> Why do you think allowing incest and increasing birth defects among children is sensible? Well, first of all, that isn't in fact what I said. I'll come back to that later. Anyway: As I said in an earlier comment, not everything bad should be illegal. First-cousin marriage is (or at least seems to me) a bad idea; it seems very unlikely to me that its benefits outweigh its costs. But in something that's trying to be…

> Well, first of all, that isn't in fact what I said

Yes it was. You said a blog post the advocated incest being illegal was sensible. It was the only actual point you made, amid a long rant about:

- how the law doesn’t define cousin incest as incest (this has no bearing on whether cousin incest should be illegal)

- that cousin incest is legal right now (which has no bearing on whether it should be illegal in the future)

- that it was the political right that pointed out the horrifying article (which is apparently a complaint for some unstated reason and also has no bearing on whether cousin incest should be illegal)

I even quoted where you did it.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#855
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governor Rick Perry of Texas openly bragged about bussing the state's homeless to California for years. Abbot does the same thing; he simply doesn't brag about it anymore. The LAT did a series of articles (back in 2018, and sporadically since then) in which Steve Lopez tried to humanize the homeless in Hollywood. It took him over 2 days to find someone who has actually a local. The vast majority of the homeless came…

The last census I saw of the Los Angeles homeless population found that the percentage of homeless people in LA that were never housed in LA was higher than either the percentage of homeless people who had a severe mental illness or substance abuse issue.

Right, that was my point. Most of LA's homeless aren't from LA. They're not our homeless.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#856

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course understanding is a good first step. However the onus is I think on the antisocial one to explain themselves. Of course I did ask exactly what you suggested, and they didn't reply. So maybe just stopping them without understanding would be ok in this case.

I think the onus is on the one who wants to enact change, but I'm curious how you came to prefer sorting it by sociability.

"the one who wants to enact change" is not really meaningful. They want to change the working bus stop into a smashed bus stop. I want to change the people who smash bus stops into people who don't smash bus stops. I don't think the abstract framing is helping you to think about it (or helping me to understand you).

My feeling about this is very simple. I think the position "I want to smash up public infrastructure to impress my sexual partners" is destructive and immoral. I don't see any reason we should allow it to happen. If someone wants to do that, I think we should punish them. I am not sympathetic to that position at all. Why do you think I should be? That's all I'm asking.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#857
post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What worries you about the boot marks specifically?

Exactly. People are asses. Don’t assume you know everybody’s history. Maybe the guy is one legged and has to jump on the toilet seat to keep his balance.

More likely it's someone from India (or much less likely China) refusing to use the facilities as intended.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn’t what the tragedy of the commons is. It isn’t about something inherent in having a shared resource that dooms it. It is about the idea that when there is a limited, shared public resource, individuals making rational self-interested decisions will often lead to a situation which no individual would choose. That doesn’t mean it always has to end in tragedy, though. It just means you can’t just go fully “lais…

More specifically, tragedy of the commons is inevitable in a purely capitalist society. It's a pro-regulation argument.

I've usually encountered it as an argument for privatization.

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#859
post #752
post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re suggesting imprisoning over 160 million people. That’s orders of magnitude higher than even the largest Holocaust estimates. It’s more than the population of Russia.

HN is getting insane. One person is suggesting “removing from society” 2% of people, the other is outright explicitly calling for their deaths, and the comment on the insanity and scale of it all is the one getting downvoted.

Removing people with whom the group with the power of the sword is exactly what happens. Religion A does not like Religion B which eventually leads to laws, wars, genocide.

Most of these inside thoughts are not well accepted in a diverse, multicultural, professional setting so they go unspoken.

I would also argue that the desire to remove 'them' is universal because of safety or desire. I think we disagree on the criteria which is really where the factions start their battle. Do we use criteria based upon belief, genetics, or agency?

Re: Where did all the public bathrooms go?

#860
post #854
post #850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you think allowing incest and increasing birth defects among children is sensible? Well, first of all, that isn't in fact what I said. I'll come back to that later. Anyway: As I said in an earlier comment, not everything bad should be illegal. First-cousin marriage is (or at least seems to me) a bad idea; it seems very unlikely to me that its benefits outweigh its costs. But in something that's trying to be…

> Well, first of all, that isn't in fact what I said Yes it was. You said a blog post the advocated incest being illegal was sensible. It was the only actual point you made, amid a long rant about: - how the law doesn’t define cousin incest as incest (this has no bearing on whether cousin incest should be illegal) - that cousin incest is legal right now (which has no bearing on whether it should be illegal in the fut…

I explained in some detail why "I think the blogpost is sensible" is not the same thing as "I think this particular thing that the blogpost argues might be a good idea is a sensible thing".

Your response is to ignore all of that and just reiterate "you said the blogpost was sensible, therefore you think this particular thing is sensible". The very thing I had just been explaining that I think is an error.

I am not sure whether you're not reading what I write, or unable to understand what I write (presumably, if so, not out of sheer mental incapacity but because politics makes idiots of us all), or deliberately misrepresenting what I write, but whether it's any of those or some other thing I haven't thought of it's making it seem increasingly unlikely that any actual fruitful discussion is possible.

> It was the only actual point you made

Of course this is utterly false, not least because your description of my "long rant" (a characterization that obviously I dispute, but no matter) you mention several other points I made. I assume you mean something like "the only point you made that I consider relevant", in which case we have different views of what is relevant.

> how the law doesn't define cousin incest as incest (this has no bearing on whether cousin incest should be illegal)

It has bearing on whether or not it is reasonable to do as you have been doing and simply call it "incest" on every occasion, thus turning "I think a blogpost arguing that first-cousin marriage should not necessarily be made illegal was, on the whole quite sensible" into "you think allowing incest is sensible".

> that cousin incest is legal right now (which has no bearing on whether it should be illegal in the future)

It has bearing on whether or not it is reasonable to do as you have been doing and write about suggestions that the thing not be made illegal as if they were suggesting that the thing be made legal. Those are quite different things: just as we don't try to make every bad thing illegal because making things illegal has costs, we also don't try to reverse every bad law because changing the law has costs.

> that it was the political right that pointed out the horrifying article

Oh, come on. I mentioned that the article was retracted soon after it was published (which is obviously relevant since you were trying to cite it as somehow representative of official attitudes in the UK). It seemed relevant why it was retracted, so I gave an eight-word summary of why. And now you purport to list the topics of my "long rant", and one of the three things you mention is the fact that that incidental eight-word summary included the words "right-wing".

If you don't like it that my comments are devoting space to complaining about your dishonest rhetoric, then perhaps you should use less dishonest rhetoric. If instead of "the NHS Genomic Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal" you had written "a post on the NHS Genomic Education Programme's blog exploring arguments for and against making first-cousin marriage illegal, and evidently leaning toward not making it illegal" -- which is the nearest not-actively-misleading thing I can come up with to what you wrote -- then I wouldn't have had to say any of those things you complained about.

Of course, if you'd written the honest version rather than the dishonest version then it would have been obvious that it didn't give much support for your attempt to represent immigrants in the UK as "the worst people", so I guess that was never really an option.

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