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D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

washingtonian.com

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Re: D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

#231

Post by zbentley »

samatman wrote: post #137
slumpt_ wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such is the consequence of a housing crisis and the downstream homelessness, despair, and of course mental illness. Don't give someone a roof and a toilet and they may just find any old place to go!

It's a consequence of a political machine and culture which tolerates it. People who pretend that SF having drug addicts with open sores assaulting each other and the rest of the citizenry is a housing crisis disgust me. It's a policy which actively aids and abets human misery.

> actively aids and abets human misery

The implication being that without policies that are friendly to struggling/addicted/ill/homeless folks there would somehow be less of them?

Re: D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

#232

Post by deltasevennine »

wildrhythms wrote: post #219
Gareth321 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I do not support multiculturalism. This is contentious today for a number of reasons. Moreso because the research is so divided. There are plenty of studies which find in both directions. However, having lived in highly multicultural societies and more culturally homogenous societies, I firmly believe that it damages the social contract. When neighbours hold different and often incompatible values, not on…

Why have you chosen to inject 'multiculturalism' into a topic about conceptually 'winning' in society? Do you think maybe there is a common economic system underlying everything that enables the concept 'winning'?

Yeah, Money is the system. The more you have of it, the more you've won. It can be measured in terms of dollars or when you compare countries it's GDP or GDP per capita.

You can get all moral about it with his opinion or her opinion or whatever and I get that happiness != money and all that jazz. But in general the one quantitative metric closest to the concept of "winning" is money.

Re: D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

#233

Post by tjs8rj »

wildrhythms wrote: post #219
Gareth321 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I do not support multiculturalism. This is contentious today for a number of reasons. Moreso because the research is so divided. There are plenty of studies which find in both directions. However, having lived in highly multicultural societies and more culturally homogenous societies, I firmly believe that it damages the social contract. When neighbours hold different and often incompatible values, not on…

Why have you chosen to inject 'multiculturalism' into a topic about conceptually 'winning' in society? Do you think maybe there is a common economic system underlying everything that enables the concept 'winning'?

The economic system as the root doesn’t make sense. Why is the decay so sudden despite capitalism dominating western markets for nearly half a thousand years? Why are there so many capitalist economies like Japan or Norway without these issues (almost at all)?

Those 2 cannot be true if the blame is on capitalism.

Re: D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

#234

Post by giordano-bruno »

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #7
teddyh wrote: post #3

> User IDs are part of Throne’s accountability system: After you use a restroom, you’re asked to rate its cleanliness. Meanwhile, each user gets a “Throne score,” similar to Uber, and repeat offenders who abuse the restroom will be blocked. Weight sensors also track if someone’s been in the bathroom too long. “Very few people create issues in [public] bathrooms, don’t respect that amenity, and then ruin it for the ma…

Seriously though, accountability is the missing thing. If getting banned for consistently making a mess is what it takes to get public bathrooms back, then so be it. There's no excuse for the shit I've seen. I'm tired of being denied amenities because of other peoples' degenerate behaviour.

No post body was provided.

Re: D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

#235

Post by snapplebobapple »

zbentley wrote: post #231
samatman wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a consequence of a political machine and culture which tolerates it. People who pretend that SF having drug addicts with open sores assaulting each other and the rest of the citizenry is a housing crisis disgust me. It's a policy which actively aids and abets human misery.

> actively aids and abets human misery The implication being that without policies that are friendly to struggling/addicted/ill/homeless folks there would somehow be less of them?

No post body was provided.

Re: D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

#236

Post by snapplebobapple »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #141
BitwiseFool wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"but to improve society so that gatekeeping becomes unnecessary." I understand the sentiment but I ultimately find such a stance unhelpful and counterproductive because it is essentially saying the problems we face would go away if we only just created a utopia. Like, what's stopping us? Trying to create better public restrooms with a new system seems far more achievable than implementing a new socioeconomic system…

It doesn't need to be a utopia. Apartheid regimes or extreme poverty lead to gated compounds for the rich with depressing predictability. Toilets that exclude the poor are great for ensuring the rich have access to nice private toilets. Doesn't help those who can't afford the subscription fee.

You need a different metric for your thought processes than utopia/not utopia. Ask yourself how close to utopia you have to get for your idea to work instead. The answer in this case is pretty damn close to utopia because such a small percentage of people are needed to ruin it for everyone and it is expensive to run the cleaning regime necessary to cancel that out everywhere.

Re: D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

#237

Post by teddyh »

tomjen3 wrote: post #205
teddyh wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually a reasonable counter-argument, were it not for the fact that practically every such systems, no matter how lofty their goals or how fair their initial rules, all eventually evolve to be instead a tool for oppression.

It is a tool of oppression right from the beginning, and its goal is to oppress certain behaviours so we can have a functional society.

That is not the kind of oppression it will evolve into a tool for, though.

Re: D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

#238

Post by bparsons »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #15
bparsons wrote: post #5

Every six months, some startup guy invents public transit, or some other amenity that has existed for over a 100 years.

A lot of amenities "worked" before because of aggressive social norm enforcement. For example, people experiencing persistent mental health issues would literally be locked up "for the common good". I think what we are seeing is people trying to use technology to replace earlier (primarily social) technologies of control like shaming, religious instruction, tighter communities, aggressive policing etc. It's not the a…

Somehow, other OECD countries don't have these problems. They just properly fund public amenities and they magically function.

Re: D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

#239

Post by xyzzyz »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #220
Johnythree wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Socialism. Let the local people decide. If the offenders thought that the locals might punish them, they would behave better.

No. They would just go elsewhere to commit offenses. Retributive justice is not really effective when the offender’s world view internally justifies their actions. It’s a common theme that criminals are victims of circumstance to such a degree that the enforcing entity is seen as another arm of the system that caused their criminal behavior in the first place. Imagine being in a car crash, having difficult pains, get…

> No. They would just go elsewhere to commit offenses.

This is just denying the offenders all agency. If they literally cannot help but commit crime, the response from the society should then be to lock them up, as unfit to live in the society.

I do not in fact believe that to be the case. Criminals have agency, and, as can be readily observed, respond to incentives too.

Re: D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

#240

Post by jstarfish »

rightbyte wrote: post #171
Johnythree wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better still, make providing a public bathroom a condition of opening a business.

Atleast if they sell food. Dunno how e.g. a Subway restaurant can get away with having no bathroom.

Prospective users would have to traverse a food-prep area to access the bathroom, which is a no-go in many municipalities. And probably for the best.
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