Where did all the public bathrooms go?(daily.jstor.org) |
Where did all the public bathrooms go?(daily.jstor.org) |
Housing and wealth inequality is an undeniable issue. So is anti-social behaviour. You can be poor and even homeless without throwing self-respect out of the window. People are either responsible for their actions, in which case criminal and civil charges are on the cards, or they are not (due to mental illness and/or substance abuse) and need to be institutionalized.
It's such a shame that somewhat objective, proven improvements to the general quality of life in an urban area are so quickly dismissed by selfish entitled idiots and used as political leverage by politicians because it's "Big Government".
Here in the US, where I am all public restrooms were gone by the late 80s.
1.) restrooms for paying customers only
2.) defecating/urinating in public illegal
How can both be true at the same time?
I really hate how adversarial our society has become.
[1] is apparently how society converges on an assumption you're engaged in business as a customer, employee, or entrepreneur, then everything is accessible to you.
[2] is the check to make sure people excluded in [1] are punished for using the commons instead of a sanitary location.
They're not the only issue.
In France, toilets on highways are often disgusting. French highways have stupid-high tolls, so these toilets are used by people who have access to a car, and can spare a few tens of € to get to their destination faster. Not your typical drug-using homeless person. I'd say it's more that some people don't care to clean after themselves, and once the toilet is dirty, no one will touch it if they add up to the mess.
For real. I once saw one totally covered in blood, like a horrible murder scene. It was one of the more rural ones, at a rest stop / park. And I just kind of rolled my eyes as I wasn't even surprised
Just 2 weeks ago, saw people pissing/shitting at a pull-over in Iceland. Laws explicitly forbid that... But when you gotta go, you go.
And Iceland also hits people with NO public restrooms at all, and pay restrooms to boot. I saw upwards of $1.50 for bathroom usage.
And in the USA, bathrooms are free, but almost always exclusively corporate funded, and usually "customers only". And in my local city, there's a few real city public restrooms. They naturally lock themselves after 11pm. Yeah, it's anti-homeless shit.
Some places let their old stuff decay and get vandalized. Others tear down their old stuff and don't replace it.
But some cities - not all - tear down their ugly old stuff then - gasp - rebuild something else there. If they make that a habit, it's just expected. In such cities you look around and everything is either too beautiful to tear down, or too new to be run down.
Come to Sydney some time, it's beautiful :)
That may be a valid defence when stealing a loaf of bread to feed your family. Doesn't apply to trashing public bathrooms.
Wouldn't poo-cassos be better framed in an institution cell away from the other 90% of society? That way they can get the mental support they need and rebuild their agency. If you don't have agency, you need conservators to help you address it. For children, those are parents. For adults, that's the state.
Otherwise we're admitting participation in a society is pure benefit without any responsibilities.
Australian public toilets: https://toiletmap.gov.au/
Creative commons dataset: https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/national-public-toilet-map
Well-meaning activists lobbied to make toilets free, but they didn't build a base to support the continued use and maintenance of those now-free toilets.
No public washrooms -> societal decay.
this complicates public bathrooms quite a bit, and ADA requirements do too... once you've got a place to sit and doors on rooms you've got the vagrancy and drug use problem
though China does ok with the model of a big room with holes in the ground and almost no dividers or affordances at all (everyone brings their own toilet paper, old people bring their own chairs)... they have public workers to hose them out
Have been re-reading At Home by Bill Bryson [0] and just started the chapter on the bathroom. He mentions that home bathrooms often smelled b/c the "u bend" [1] hadn't yet been invented. Couldn't a public urinal be designed with a water flush function + u bend to avoid the smell?
PS Highly recommend the book if you are into the history of technology both from "what series of inventions got us to here" but also "what was life like before those inventions and how were they adopted"
1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/l40fso/e...
If that were the story, why was there a lobby in the 1970s to remove pay toilets?
The Committee to End Pay Toilets in America, or CEPTIA, was a 1970s grass-roots political organization which was one of the main forces behind the elimination of pay toilets in many American cities and states.
According to The Wall Street Journal, there were, in 1974, at least 50,000 pay toilets in America, mostly made by the Nik-O-Lok Company. Despite this flourishing commerce, CEPTIA was successful over the next few years in obtaining bans in New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, California, Florida, and Ohio.
They are definitely not thought for women.
What you can't do is neglect the other 75%.
It's such a disrespect to basic humanity.
Was the takeaway supposed to be "public bathroom" meant either public urinal (ruined by stigma for gay sex and blackmail) or saloon (ruined by temperance)?
We're missing like 100 years of the story chronicling psychiatric over-optimism, deinstitutionalization, gentrification of barely livable housing, rent-seeking, and all the rest of the factors.
I think it's a maintenance story. It's unglamorous, invisible maintenance. There's no such thing as a perpetually clean bathroom because it is exclusively used by tidy people-- messes happen everywhere but they are ignored more in some places and that compounds and invites abuse.
Oh, there are places to pee, if you're brave. My last venture into a NYC public restroom was the one at Sun Yat-sen Plaza, which is under a beautiful pavilion. There was a man hanging around the urinals without apparent purpose other than staring at me because of course there was. There was only 1 working stall of 3, over the entire surface of which someone had managed to squirt at least a quart of liquid poo.
I am not sure of the real-world risk, but to hear Internet commenters, if you are a man and you urinate in public, you may be on a fast path to being a registered sex-offender for no other reason. That is an obviously sad consequence that no homeless guy wants to be burdened with.
The first time I needed to go and I was out on the streets, I veered into the nearest resort hotel downtown, figuring I'd just be lost in the crowd of tourists there. It was night but not particularly late. As soon as I got inside the men's room and in front of a urinal, a security guard was on my case. He said restrooms were for hotel guests only. I was very apologetic, but at least he let me finish and let me get away peacefully.
For all y'all complaining how the public libraries and other facilities are infested with smelly homeless, those are the ones who try to live honestly and stay near sanitation facilities. The libraries saved my bacon when I was on the streets. They were a quiet refuge during the day. I didn't make trouble; I just needed to stay in the A/C and stay clean and have a bathroom nearby.
People complain about poo in the streets of major cities, but the reality is, if a person cannot afford a restaurant, a coffeehouse, a motel, or whatever else, they will not have access to restroom facilities, and we all poop sometime. So the lack of those public restroom facilities in urban centers is just one more inhumane, hostile environment that tells us to pay up or GTFO of polite society.
As a tourist I imagine its hard to find a toilet if you need one right now. If you lived here for a while you know where to go, and that it's either shared with junkies or costs CHF 2. Or in rare occasions nether of both
What are they eluding to?
Homosexuality was legalized in France in 1791, so what other trysts are these that involve men?
It's interesting that this subject is awash with euphemisms. At least pissoir is properly descriptive.
I had some trash in my car I needed to get rid of: McDonalds? None outside, Tacobell? none outside, CVS? none outside OR inside, The entire rest of that shopping center? nope.
Luckily gas stations still have them but its sad to see these community service type things disappear.
It's ridiculous that a "world class" city has very few public bathrooms.
You can get a £2 pint of cider or ~£1.80 half-decent coffee while you're there too
Also why didn't you use shelter facilities, were they too crowded, unsafe, or had onerous rules?
Yes, thank you for asking!
Before arriving in the Phoenix area, I had been homeless in San Diego. Most of that time I lived in Father Joe's Villages. That was a very well-run, clean and strict shelter. They had wraparound services, with a cafeteria, job-search space, etc. They did turn us out on the streets during the daylight hours. I must say that I almost enjoyed my stay there, and in fact I made friends, and I felt very safe under their roof.
Contrast with Tempe, Arizona: Tempe, in 2000, did not allow any homeless shelters within the city limits. They also prohibited "soup kitchens" or any church or facility from feeding hungry people. However, Tempe has a larger population of drifters and street people, due to the college-town, party atmosphere, especially downtown.
In contrast, Phoenix has a very large St. Vincent de Paul facility, which doles out supplies and serves meals, and which is several miles south of downtown, in an industrial zone. The main homeless shelter campus provides a SVdP cafeteria, job services, and all that, but when I arrived there in 2000, it was very scary, bad neighborhood, very bad experience, and I basically could not stay there in good conscience. I did not feel safe inside, nor walking around the environs.
Therefore I split the difference, and stayed on the streets of Tempe. It was libraries during the day, and 24-hour diners at night, as much as possible. I napped on benches that were not in parks. (The city park facilities closed at midnight at the latest; they had Park Rangers serious about sweeping them out; the sprinklers would drench you if you were anywhere near the grass parts!)
Being that I was in "The System" and confidently on a waiting list for housing, it was not difficult to slip through the shadows for a couple of years until that housing promise became reality.
Most of the homeless have significant issues and are not going to get off the street. In better cases a messy divorce is at fault and they could hold a job but they refuse because it would not help their life.
There's also one rich person in my city who chooses to live in a tent year round. When you have a ton of money, being homeless is actually freedom because you can afford a nice warm sleeping bag and a nice tent. It makes a huge difference. This is one person out of, I don't know how many, but hundreds at least. Mostly I bring this man up because it messes up everyone's expectation of how you should deal with the homeless.
When I see lone overflowing garbage cans in big cities I think about this.
If you notice how courtesy services disappeared, and many facilities were closed, because of a lack of staff or funds to clean them and maintain them.
It has actually been difficult to get into a restroom at certain restaurants, even now; sometimes I will find a handwritten sign there like “Employees Only” which is against health codes.
I rode a scooter to a “Drive-In” burger restaurant last month. Not a drive-thru, mind you, but a place where folks pulled up in cars and carhops served them, and they ate while parked. And this place had picnic tables, so I ordered a burger combo and tried to wash my hands.
There was no restroom available, and I contacted the order-taker guy and asked to confirm, and then I asked to cancel my order. He said “Your order is ready!” and I said hell naw, if you don’t have a restroom then you’re not serving anyone, so I got my refund...
100% just drop it behind you as you exit the tram. Way better metal container for blasting.
"Counter-terrorism" just means nobody thought about it more than 2 seconds or else they'd have a more specific reason.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SAN-FRANCISCO-Trash-c...
That article is from 20 years ago by the way
Bring it home and use your own trash can? I don’t really understand why you need to immediately get rid of it.
That is not the situation in most of the city, whether it be "nice" parts or "nasty" parts. Restaurant districts tend to have more trash cans than anywhere else, but the presence of a restaurant district is no guarantee of good trash can coverage. Source: I've walked around so much of San Francisco in my ~fifteen years here.
In the places I frequent that have reasonable trash can coverage, I've found that trash cans are very slowly disappearing and never coming back. Maybe they get fucked up beyond usefulness and don't get replaced? I really have no idea.
Weirdly, bins were never removed from train stations in Northern Ireland. Bin bombs were never really a thing there, it was generally easier to shut down the railway by setting something on fire at a level crossing (often a hijacked police landrover)...
While I'm not intimate with the difference between British English and American English, I'm pretty confident "Truck Bomb" does not mean a bomb inside a rubbish bin.
But yes, vehicles are a great vector for terrorism and I'm honestly surprised at how few instances there are of people just running other over. But it's also one of the reasons in the US basically every government building has large concrete planters around them (can't ram a truck through it).
So move up the management ladder, if you will, until a party that is responsible for making this kind of decision is reached. That's the class of party of which I was speaking, and where I suggested that irrational decisions are being made.
Someone -- at some point -- did make a decision to eliminate outdoor trash cans at these establishments. They used to be present and no longer are, and they didn't disappear on their own.
There even might be a disincentive to have garbage cans if they can't be maintained. People who don't litter will either take the extra step of going indoors, or they might leave it in their own car to throw out later. Whereas people who do litter will do so regardless of when there are trash cans. By removing outdoor trash cans, you've "saved" the staff the time to monitor and clear out those trash cans.
No matter what, big or small, it's always a Republican's fault, huh.
Let's move forward.
What incentivized them to provide the trash cans to begin with, might you suppose? They aren't cheap to buy, or to maintain, or to keep emptied daily (or as they fill up, or whatever). But yet: They were things that existed, and their existence was definitely deliberate.
What motivates companies that still provide outdoor trash cans to continue to do so?
But owners are always looking for ways to save money. If the garbage can works fine, it gets maintained. But if it gets hit by a car, or the wind blows it away, it might not be at the top of the list of things to fix. The remnants of the garbage can are removed. The expense gets put off for another month. And slowly the lack of garbage cans becomes normal, and staff can remove another responsibility from their list.
Now the situation becomes, who wants to spend a bunch of money to put in garbage cans, and also add onto the staff's workload? It's not like customers are asking for the manager to install garbage cans.
I feel like I'm chatting with ChatGPT 3, as I was years ago when it would just articulately weasel its way around everything I asked with a profundity of deflective nonsense in response to any query.
Or at least: That's what it did when it wasn't confidently introducing hallucinations as rote facts.
> It's probably part of the initial franchise standards, required and signed off by the fast food corporation.
Why were they required? What motivated this requirement?
Someone, somewhere, at some point: They decided that there shall be trash cans. This is a thing that happened. What compelled them to make this decision, might you suppose?
(If you don't have an answer, then that's fine by me. It's a rhetorical question at this point. I've already internally rejected your reasoning for the trash cans becoming gone while outwardly accepting that your opinion is simply inflexibly the way that it is. It is unlikely that I can be further swayed by a lack of an opinion for why the trash cans originated to begin with.)
We seem to be just talking past each other, so maybe we should just agree to stop wasting each other's time.
Xi Jinping really will be remembered as the Toilet King, he did issue a few decrees early on, and now in every Tier-88 rural Chinese village road you can find a modern toilet (yes, squat), clean, with water. Paper is hit and miss still though. Cross to Hong Kong and it's the same, but paper is reliable. Hong Kong is definitely richer.
Then take any shopping mall in Bangkok, that's an absolutely next level experience, clean, smells good, relaxing music. Mmm...
And EU is a freaking horror show. In many public toilets there's a used syringe compartment as well. Truly a 5-star service.
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
In the US in slow motion we could see a world in which you could go to a big chain pharmacy and retrieve your own toothpaste and shampoo. Now it's considered entirely normal to put these behind plexiglass, and to hire a security guard to stand by the door, but the guard isn't legally allowed to stop anyone or engage in any physical altercation. Because homelessness, because mental illness, because drug addiction, etc are not to be 'criminalized.'
In NYC a decree stopped the police from issuing summonses for not paying the subway fare. Because it was said to be racist. Today, tons of people, especially normal professionals - happily do not pay the fare, while the system is said to be in financial deficit.
Yet here we're discussing comparisons with Asian cultures and how they are more respectful of public space.
So, my friends, is it a cultural difference, a legal enforcement difference, or an inevitable consequence of injustice? I'm dying to understand because it's at the crux of the political divide, and I'm seeing cities getting worse in front of my eyes.
"back in my time" in what used to be yugoslavia, it was perfectly acceptable for an adult to slap/hit a kid who caused problem or was destroying stuff, if a dad had to come to school because the kid did something bad, that was a horrible punishment, plus no leaving the room after, no toys, no bike, no outside play, no nothing for some time.
Now? Parents protect their idiot vandal kids, threathen the school with lawyers, even if cops bring home a kid selling like weed and vomiting red wine, the parents will blame everything else except their little sunshine.
Even academically, kids can't read anymore, and we just push them on, no repeating and losing years, no nothing, here's a "2" (passing grade), go to next year, and after a few more pushes, you'll be someone elses problem, illiterate or not.
In 1994 my public HS had ONE boys bathroom with no stall doors across from the lunchroom where a public school guard sat and watched. The girls had one on every floor. Had to take a dump? pray no one was in one of three stalls and put your book bag on your lap. My brother went to Brooklyn Tech and had the same missing stall door issue though had more bathrooms.
Finally Vandalism is the worst part of it, but mind you it's named after the Vandals a German tribe after they sacked and looted Rome their oppressors captial.
They say young animals learn survival through playful fights. Maybe western youth learns about freedom through throwing meatballs.
I really don't know but would love to read more about this topic.
you answer your own perplexity by yourself in the same sentence; they do it for fun. I know this because I was a shithead vandal teenager, and I did it for two reasons , 1) fun at the moment and 2) to impress my peers and sex partners.
I think the frustrations of youth are undersold here, and I think the expectation of "You're born, now conform to being a cog in this machine that you had nothing to do with or necessarily any interest in." is also somewhat fundamentally flawed, even if the kids have nice bathrooms due to their own efforts to shit in.
a society that repairs itself and allows a certain level of vandalism is better, I think. It allows for the rebellious youth to get through these psychological phases without much possibility of a misstep that allows them to throw themselves into incarceration for life, it offers leeway for personal growth, and it doesn't pin them into programs that they hate and wouldn't integrate into, anyway.
Tell me, how does the whole 'kids take care of their own bathrooms' thing work out for bullies?
answer: they love it. They don't have to work. Asia hasn't solved the bullying thing yet even with their perceived perfect unitary social one-ness.
While I'm sure The Youth as a group were never terribly respectful in these countries, social media clout (and the influencer's rise as the only apparently secure profession and for teens the only symbol of a social leadership caste) totally changed the equation regarding motivations. This culminated in the 2021-2022 school year "Devious Licks Challenge", a bathroom destruction tiktok trend which is straight out of Bruce Sterling's Zeitgeist.
It's interesting to me to call out conservatives here as they are typically the ones touting community responsibilities through social norms. Despite the socialism (non-derogotarily) lean of the left, I would still consider them more individualistic, socially.
The two groups differ in their enforcement of collectivism (socially or legally) not their aversion/inclination to it. We are a social species, after all.
I think you'd find less graffiti in a rural bathroom than a large city bathroom.
Kids vandalize shit in the US for the hell of it.
You'll even see graffiti in really hard to reach places where forget the danger of it, it's hard to even understand how they hell they got up there and could still make something legible (like really tall bridges with nothing to stand on underneath).
But, while the toilets aren’t the worst sacrifice, the cumulative sacrifices made on the alter of our huge antisocial populations are profound
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 little as possible to deal with homelessness and mental illness and discovered there's good money to be made incarcerating drug addicts.
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 they care about its state of cleanliness and repair, the people using the toilet won't care about that either.
I live in a city that is a dumping ground where Red States have bussed the homeless populations -- out of sight out of mind -- and even before this, homelessness was a growing due to skyrocketing rents, medical costs, and simply falling behind the treadmill. And now gave crazy new drugs, crazy new inflation, and even more unchecked greed, there's really no stopping this so called "antisocial" behavior.
Why care about a society when it doesn't give a fuck about you>?
Then again, when I was in college in the mid-80s, Freshman year a bunch of young white engineering boys in my dorm were laughing about how they smeared shit all over the bathroom walls of a McDonalds. So, it's been going on forever, but now the scale is massive. I include "white" because a lot of people think this is a non-white, non-rich, non-christian problem.
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 about China or Taiwan, they both think slavery is wrong and kings are childish. Somehow the west never caught up. Still having that debate, still trying to justify why their great-grandpas killed those people. China left Mao behind; and the US is still praying to slaveholders and mocking slaves' children, while eating their inheritance.
> It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that.
The west were slavers. They literally auctioned off women to have sex with (the "fancy trade") and put children (sometimes their own) into the fields for life. When some got the morality to be disgusted by that, it resulted in bloody wars (I would even include the wars Germany really started because it lost the colony race.) Their civil society was rife with sundown towns, and in Europe actual death factories were designed to murder civilians.
The west is run by degenerates and venerates degenerates. Until it faces that properly, it will never be safe. China did that.
> the cumulative sacrifices made on the alter of our huge antisocial populations
It's "altar," and the cliché usually refers to wasted efforts to preserve something (generally an abstract ideal.) Nobody is trying to preserve "antisocial populations." They're usually trying to dispose of the old ones after using them up, and to get new ones in who still can't vote. Ironically, the "antisocial populations" are also the ones who clean the toilets.
'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 you locked up.)
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.
> toilets are... clean
Okay I'm going to have to say that this _really_ depends on where you are. Sometimes, yes, especially newer buildings, but man I have seen some horrors there in the past few years when it comes to bathrooms in terms of cleanliness and smell (the frequent smoking in a lot of bathrooms doesn't help). This is coming from someone primarily experiencing Canadian and American bathrooms, for reference, and a lot of those are pretty nasty. I think it's getting better at least...
Just to be clear though I agree generally, at least from my experience with East Asia. Hong Kong often has really good bathrooms now IMO (I feel like it improved a lot between 2018 to 2023?). Japan is also really good from my experience (fancy-ass bidets). Taiwan was fine too from my recollection.
That kinda applies to anywhere in the world. On the average, I've seen much cleaner toilets in first-tier China cities than first-tier US cities.
And much more accessible as well. Free public toilets literally everywhere. All over the city, in every shopping center, in every coffee shop. And you don't need to buy a coffee and trash it to use them.
That was such an awesome trip circa 2005.
If a place has tornado drills and tornado shelters, it's a safe bet that tornados are at least somewhat likely.
Some safety and security measures have the effect of making a place feel unsafe and insecure, for this reason.
Ask yourself if that's truly what motivated those being installed...
> And even if a drug addict uses it, still better than throwing to the trash
The problem is they still throw their needles all over the ground. As is typical, the intentions are noble, but what ends up happening is people who can't even be bothered to not shoot up their gutter heroin in public are given society's tacit approval to do what they're doing, thus accelerating the societal rot.
I lived 12 years in China and now 1.5 in EU. Traveled both fairly extensively. The above is just my experience.
We left China in big part due to authoritarian politics. But if what's happening in EU (and US? never been there tho) is "democracy" then maybe we need to rethink.
I like many things in EU, and I dislike many things as well. At least here I'm not worried for my safety when I discuss it online, aside from some people calling it a psy-op or whatever.
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.
No, commonly here on HN it is American commentators who've visited like Italy or Greece or France once, then they extrapolate their experience in a tourist-heavy city, looking/behaving as an American, over the entire continent. Happens almost every day here.
Any comment mentioning EU/Europe here has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. Usually it turns out they've visited some countries and the experience is unique for where they visit.
To be fair, the same happens towards the US too, someone visits Montana then assumes a bunch about the entire country. I guess "American visiting country in Europe" is just more common here, given the US bias on this forum usually.
What does that mean ? There are massive differences in EU between not only countries but even also regions of one country. How can you say that toilets are horrendous in 27 different countries with 27 different cultures ?
edit : and disclaimer, I live in France and I'm not proud of our public toilets because we are clearly amongst the bad ones (even if again it really depends on where you go, that's still too random to be acceptable) but my experience have been pretty positive in most other EU countries I visited.
At least you have some. I've seen them. Public restrooms aren't a thing in the US, except for some beaches and parks. We don't even have trashcans at intersections besides bus stops. Speaking for LA, Miami, Charlotte and Las Vegas. Perhaps other municipalities do.
Warsaw and Posen were quite similar to NL by the time I left — paid toilets that weren’t all that great and sometimes outright gross. I’ve also been to Berlin and I wouldn’t call the experience amazing either. I don’t remember using public toilets in Serbia, Switzerland or Spain when I was there.
But so far European track record is not great. To the point where I’m a bit pleasantly surprised other places actually do this well.
I was also shocked by the cost incurred if you get out of home diarrhoea in Europe. Might as well buy adult diapers.
I don't know about China but this was the opposite of my experience in Thailand. The majority of public toilets I encountered had an attendant you had to pay for access. Shopping malls / hotels / other places were you were already paying to be there were the exception of course.
Try Poland. Basically every restaurant needs to have a toilet and every one of those must be made available to passers by, not just customers. They are clean and plentiful.
It's mandated by law. Your country is just one political decision from this luxury.
Drug use is already unlawful, and the homeless are routinely criminalized for existing - so if that is "tolerate" then what proposals are you trying to promote?
There are apps and websites to find restrooms but the free restroom in America is indeed dying. Experiments with things like self-sanitizing enclosed all-inclusive pay toilet stations in outdoor areas in large cities in America almost all ended in them being carted away, broken, since people just seem to break them (for fun or sport, who knows). I guess people expected more for their quarter or fifty cents or a dollar than just emergency facility usage. Pity.
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.
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 there's willingness to crack down on the explicit problematic behavior.
Restrooms are unique in that they are available to the public but, due to their inherently private nature, are a place where it is difficult to enforce social norms. Because of this, within the confines of the restroom itself, the authorities are all but irrelevant.
I was scrolling through the addictive and easy to stumble into YouTube reels feature and came upon a livestream of a gentleman having some sort of 'public restroom party' in a stall. By this, I mean he had collected every roll of toilet paper available, shredded them into confetti, and was throwing the confetti up into the air while blasting music at full volume out of his bluetooth speaker. He had a few thousand viewers and people appeared to be donating money for supercomments. I didn't stay to watch the end of the livestream, but I don't imagine he cleaned up.
By the time the private-but-livestreamed confetti party is over, the damage is done. You can try to anticipate every single unwanted activity in a restroom and try to prevent it beforehand (e.g. tinted lights to prevent IV drug use), but someone, somewhere will find a way to creatively make the owners decide a few frustrated customers who are told "no public restroom" is a small price to pay for the alternative.
Japan seems to be just about a best-case scenario, due to the ubiquity of convenience stores, the government's seemingly high prioritization of building and maintaining public toilets, and a culture which places a high value on cleanliness.
It seems like it would be hard to replicate in countries that lack clean and plentiful public toilets without changing the culture first. But reading another comment it sounds like China has made great strides in improving the state of their public toilets due to a strong push from leadership. So it is possible, but again it would start with actually wanting to improve things.
Similarly, free public bath/shower disappeared in SF. Some wealthy person (forgot his name) built some free public showers in the 1900, but they eventually got all closed. Paris still have about ~20 free public bath/shower running. Wondering if we should also bring those back. This is a basic human need (after restrooms and food).
I had no choice. The businesses had a choice. The parks manager had a choice.
And now I understand why SF stinks.
Feels like tons of micro regressions around our expectations of privacy these days
If you look at a graph of the world population it’s seems clear to me that freely available common resources are just going to continue to get overused and ruined as we continue to add people to the equation
tbh I think this falls into a more familiar pattern with a coincidentally fitting name: enshittification
no one makes money off of public toilets, so they don't exist anymore
Men seeking same-sex encounters transformed the pissoir into something its planners never intended. Who ultimately determines the meaning of a public space: its designers, authorities, or the people who use it?
The law determines that public space can't be used for any sexual activity.
I'm not sure what constructive classroom discussion you can have when the example is based on the law being broken.
There are countries were public bathrooms are everywhere - New Zealand is a good example. As a tourist, you're never too far from one. Which is good, since quite often that may be the only human made thing, surrounded by beautiful nature.
Thankfully I found one in a cinema.
Divorce.
The wife can just say she doesn’t feel comfortable with you in the house.
Now you can’t find another place to live because the divorce has ruined your credit while still stuck paying the mortgage.
Most of us are much closer to living in a porta potty than we’d like to think
Because of women and no-fault divorce? Didn't expect to see that conclusion in the comments. Maybe if we make it illegal it might slightly lower rates of homelessness, but let's see what it does to domestic violence, suicide, and spousal homicide statistics.
Be single.
Get sick.
Get fired.
Medical bills will ruin you instead. America has an accelerated path to homelessness most civilized countries lack.
https://lazyholidayplanner.com/essential-tools/japan-toilet-...
https://www.cnn.com/travel/gallery/japanese-public-toilet-ph...
https://www.toilet-map-jp.com/en
https://toiletrix.org/toilets/japan
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_toilets_i...
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!
What did you like about it?
I'm not trying to diss you, I usually like contemplative movies but this one was just too repetitive for my taste.
The daily pause the main character makes as he leaves for work -- looking up at the sky, to be present and notice.
I loved the concept depicted in several scenes of the main character interacting with someone unknown through a tic-tac-toe game: finding a whimsical connection rather than throwing out the piece of paper.
The depiction of tender relationships between people.
It's a quiet film, comparatively, almost nothing happens. I found it very beautiful.
I was thrilled to learn the word komorebi - sunlight leaking through trees.
Yeah and effectively any store outside urban America.
> Starting a national crusade to cast away coin-operated commodes, Gessel told newsmen, "You can have a fifty-dollar bill, but if you don't have a dime, that metal box is between you and relief."
I'm sympathetic to this argument. Carrying around loose change with US-style billfold wallets has never been convenient, and back in the day you'd often find yourself without change for a bus fare or a pay phone and so on in a critical moment.
Today, though, almost everyone carries either a contactless credit card or a phone with an NFC wallet. I would pay $0.25 for access to a clean public toilet if I could swipe one of those instead of having to carry change.
LA Metro has these restroom facilities at their rail stations, which are free for a 10 minute visit but require an access code on your phone or a standalone entry pass. I've never used one, but heard great things. https://thronelabs.co/
This is one of those things that gets ruined by credit card transaction fees though, right?
It is kinda depressing that after all these fintech companies and society's ~decade long scam-filled obsession with cryptocurrency, we still don't really have a good solution for microtransactions. Credit card companies still take that fixed fee everywhere, right?
LavSeeker - shows toilets listed in OpenStreetMap.
https://cartes.app/?cat=toilettes&perspective=non#14.58/48.8...
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.
https://www.portland.gov/water/about-portlands-water-system/...
I have seen indoor fountains gradually being replaced with water bottle filler stations, but I personally wonder how often those filters get replaced.
I never really understood the economics of public restrooms in America. Who pays for them?
Thank these folks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i... - the road to hell is paved with good intentions I suppose.
Americans. The same population as most of the beneficiaries.
Local sales, income, and/or property taxes.
Municipalities, counties, state, and the federal government all have the power of taxation in the US.
like do you want to pick up that piece of toilet paper you dropped on the ground in that thing with nothing to clean your hands other than sanitizer?
funny enough, I find many public campground vault toilets to be pretty clean, because the camp hosts clean them daily. theworste one I've ever seen is the first bathroom into yosemite from sf. it's not because the homeless are coming from SF to shit there. It's because a) that's the first place you can panic dump, b) there's a line, c) that's where the tourists go. it's also the most graffitied one by far.
if you don't give people a way to clean up easily... then you're dependent on the official service interval. shits gonna happen.
Tons of free to use BBQs too.
I mean, sure, if you get into some weird factory blocks or developing area where nobody lives, they don't have it there. Any established residential or commercial area usually will.
When I traveled to Thailand, I first stopped in Abu Dhabi. The bathrooms in the airport were amazing. I couldn't believe they had stalls that were basically personal bathrooms (whereas in the US, your feet are exposed, and anyone who wants to see you can simply peak through the many cracks, or even throw something on you from above). The bidet thing was a little weird at first, but had no choice but to use it.
Likewise, when I got to Thailand (Bangkok), I could not believe how clean the bathrooms were (with the personal room-style stall as well). These bathrooms were as clean as you'd find them in a clean-freaks home.
When I arrived back in the States (JFK NY), I needed to use the bathroom really bad, but upon entering the restroom... I just couldn't do it. Urine all over the floors and toilets. Even at the entrance. Graffiti everywhere. Absolutely disgusting.
It really changed my perspective. And let's not forget bidets... I'm mind-blown that people in the US use tissue paper to wipe their a*es. Yeah, I've done it for most of my life as well, but after using a bidet in multiple countries, you realize how tissue paper alone isn't effective. It honestly makes me angry that they're not in every public/private bathroom.
But this was in the time when Xi had just taken office, so it is probably better now. I didn't see any issues on my trip to Chengdu this summer. I have a lot bigger problems in downtown Seattle today, which is just really bad (either the toilets don't exist, or there is some homeless guy doing drugs in the only stall they have). Sigh.
Is it true that there are a ton of paid toilets in the EU? And are those generally nicer than free ones?
If this could be useful, I've been working on a tool to map public restrooms: throneroom.app. Hope is for parents, blue collar folk, but most importantly the IBS community to have a resource where they can vet bathrooms before visiting. Open to any input if this could be helpful to you!
There are sharps containers in the bathrooms in my office in the US. It's to support people who have to inject insulin and the like, not injectable narcotics.
But I think they'd be a good idea in places that have drug use problems. I do not want to deal with an accidental needle-stick from some homeless drug-users syringe.
That is an extremely small subset of Thailand. I wouldn’t surprised if high end malls in any western capital city also had good toilets.
Most toilets outside of malls in Thailand were bring your own soap and toilet paper and covered in water from the bum guns.
Toilet (also single) at the train station (that sees 500k+ volume per day) is 1.5€, and also not great. At least it takes a card.
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.
The only place I’ve seen worse toilets is USA and Europe. Toilets in Japan are a dream.
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.
In places where these things were problems with public restrooms, they remain problems without public restrooms.
The 10%'ers are still doing their dastardly things. The remaining 90% of society still has the same messes to clean up (or to willfully ignore).
Nothing has been improved in this process.
The problem of course then is the guy across the street is forced to make the same decision
So yes the 10% fuck it up for everyone unless cracked down on.
People made horrific messes in them. Employees and/or owners had to clean them. They don't wish to do so. Public messes; private employees and/or owners being made to clean them is pretty much the story.
It filters out that bottom 10% that can't coherently speak or present themselves to pass a vibe check in asking for bathroom access.
Things did improve for those with standards, at the cost of having to deal with the bathroom equivalent of barbed wire topped walls around your home compound. That IS better than walking in on the bottom 10% or the disasters they create, but only slightly.
Collectively, squeezing the bottom out by denying them access building by building, block by block has helped turn parts of cities around. It's not that different than locking up your food high in the air when camping so animals don't get into it - they don't come around and stop coming around if they are.
It isn't about improving things or fixing the problem, it is about mitigating cost.
Public sex, shooting up drugs, and vandalism still occur; but the owner/operator of the bathroom no longer has to maintain the bathroom or deal with individuals complaining about the poor state of the bathroom as a result of the behavior.
It certainly had some limitating factor. Until late 2010-early 2020s, public displays of gay sex were considered improper rather than brave, injecting drugs in public was a matter for the police, and shitting on the streets was considered a nuisance that could be avoided by the shitter having self-agency and choosing to shit elsewhere.
It's like a behavioral Overton window that grows downwards.
Virtually all offices I've worked in, the bathrooms have been less than ideally used by colleagues. The people you'd class as 'commons' may not be having public sex, shooting up drugs, but many can be dirty and/or selfish. And this is in an office where cleaners regularly clean the facilities (I'd hazard more frequently than public toilets are cleaned). There's always be pee on the floor, pee on the seat, etc etc.
It's also entirely possible it was mass hysteria. Sometimes people miss the urinal and maybe some did it to be funny after the signs went up.
In reality, about 2% or even less.
We could live in paradise if we just removed them from society. Put them in a box.
but the US is not poor. The US has the richest "poor" people in the entire world. There is a massive social security net with massive redistribution. There was no "post-2008 wave of poverty".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i...
Let the pleb piss in the hedges like animals they are, meanwhile spaff the taxes on some vanity projects so the mates can buy new yachts.
I wish we had capital punishment for corruption like in China.
The selective enforcement is insane. If it really applied to everybody then China would be a free country because the entire CCP would have been executed.
In practice, it's only for enemies of the powerful (which is mostly the coalition around Xi). Even then, most CCP members who are convicted get a much milder punishment
The incentive to do the right thing that a coin-deposit shopping cart ("trolley") adds is the ultimate return of that coin. It's not much money, but it is nonetheless returned when the cart is put back where it belongs.
If a cart always costs 50 cents and there is no hope of ever getting that money back, then: The monetary incentive to return the cart doesn't exist.
In practice, no.
In my experience there is no correlation between payment and state of bathroom. I've been to paid ones in terrible state and free ones in amazing state. And I also don't see any trend or correlation there.
The alternative would be social workers, more psychotherapists, free healthcare, ...
- Ask the attendant.
- Explain the problem.
- Someone behind you gives you fifty cents.
- Attendant waves you in.
- Come back and pay later.
- Someone nearby helps.There was a stretch of road around 600m long, where there were at least 100 vending machine and exactly ZERO trash containers. And no, people did not keep after themselves, I saw plenty of discarded cans on the floor, just slightly outside of vision.
Tokyo, 2025.
In heavily touristed areas, though, it’s become a topic of much outrage on social media where people are illegally dumping garbage in recycling bins. A lot of times foreigners are blamed - and to be fair there are lots of videos out there of foreigners disposing of trash incorrectly - but of course it’s not just foreigners who are responsible. And this illegal dumping seems to have led to some vendors not putting out recycling bins in heavily touristed areas.
A new law was passed in December 2025, in response to increasing amounts of litter in some areas of Tokyo, which requires vendors who sell food to install trash cans. It also imposed new fines for littering [1]. So possibly the area where you experienced this issue has already seen some improvement in the past year. However, the linked article also says that vending machine operators in those areas were already required by law to put out recycling bins.
I’ve also noticed that a lot of people will just leave a can on the ground next to the vending machine if no bin is provided (or if the bin is full). The expectation is generally that if you sell some food or drink item, you also should accept the trash after it’s consumed, even if it's not legally required. So it seems like vendors are “punished” with a pile of trash for breaking that social contract, or people just otherwise feel entitled.
On a similar note, if you ever buy food from a food truck or stall, the vendor will usually happily dispose of any trash when you’re finished - even if they don’t explicitly put a trash can out.
In my opinion though public trash cans and public toilets aren’t really equivalent. It may be inconvenient, but you can always just hold onto trash until you reach a suitable place to dispose of it. But when it comes to using the toilet - and especially for children or people with certain disabilities - there’s a limit to how long you can hold it in.
[1] https://soranews24.com/2025/12/11/tokyo-considering-law-requ...
There are _some_ neighborhoods, especially in Tokyo, where sometimes it can be difficult. Like certain parts of Koenji you can walk into random conbini that have locked bathrooms and signs saying no public use. Fortunately it's not all too common.
Only thing about public toilets in places like parks or neighborhoods is they almost never have soap.
One is near a popular fishing spot, and probably got tired of people coming in smelling like dead fish, using the toilet, and not buying anything. They have a big sign saying the toilets are for customers only, and a map with directions to nearby public toilets. They don't actually lock the doors, though.
The other one I'm not really sure what their reasoning is, but the owner installed a button behind the counter to remotely unlock the bathroom door, and you have to ask the guy behind the counter to use the toilet. There are a ton of 1-star reviews on Google mentioning the toilet situation.
But other than those two I don't think I've ever had an issue using a toilet at a convenience store.
Also on a side note - it's pretty hilarious reading reviews of convenience stores in Japan. Lots of 1 star reviews because someone was cut in line, the worker didn't say thank you on the way out, the manner in which the worker placed items in the bag, an item was not microwaved enough, etc.
I often see ppl urinating in the public here in Europe - taxi drivers in the bushes where I talk walks, two days ago I saw elder folks just doing it near the sidewalk; but can I blame them? - often you just can't find a goddamn toilet even if you want to; so humiliating when you're just forced to do it because of - you know - body
This is absurdly false.
I think the war with Iran is not justified. It is a waste of money, a waste of human life, and a waste of our world influence. But there are many in Iran who literally wish death to the USA. The founding manifesto of Hezbollah - an organization so tightly coupled to Iran that they view the Supreme Leader of Iran as their ultimate clerical authority - lists its first objective as resistance against the US.
While I'm sure the US has bombed a significant number of such people, I wouldn't call Iran as 'never meant us any harm' (though I'll still say the current war is a stupid mistake).
https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar
The actual number is 8 trillion
I tend to think that killing democratically elected leader of a country because they wanted to nationalize their oil, installing a dictator, then spending years trying to destroy the country could possibly upset people.
You clearly don't know much about Iran or Iranians if you think they are all raving lunatics bent on destroying the world for fun.
But, it makes the defense industry a whole lot a money, and its good for getting Republicans elected. But helping US citizens, some of which might have gasp brown skin, that doesn't make any defense contractors any money at all! /s
>anyone
What? I’ve never heard of this, what part of the world do you live in?
Classrooms teach about reality (among other things) and there are many things in reality that don't involve obedience to the law, as it exists at a particular time and place.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
Follow-up question: Does an enclosed stall count as "public space"?
Look at the photos in the article, they weren't enclosed stalls. Its elegant in a way, just a couple feet of opaque material that wraps the beltline of a central aiming point. Basically as good as going on a tree but without people getting uptight.
When it's one person, true, but when it's a population, the politics historically changes and the law accedes to pressure to stop enforcing that determination.
Nowadays it'd be $5.25 per use, plus tip (22% or more).
Road to hell is paved with good intentions.
This is open forum, let people voice their ideas even if you strongly oppose them. At least then folks don't live in illusion how rest of society has similar opinions on it as they do. I strongly oppose apple or meta for example, but asking for bans on this topic here would be ridiculous and put me into crank territory, right.
You don't like the discussion? Close that tab and move on into something more productive is the best advice I can give you
Its nothing to do with not liking the discussion. People who have no idea about the research done in to homelessness, have not spoken to hundreds of homeless people or worked in support services to actually genuinely know about the situation are just causing more issues and hindering progress. Rough sleeping has been a thing as long as humans have been on the earth, and uninformed people just seem to think its a money issue or there is some other simple solution that lazy governments aren't doing. If the solution was a simple one of money in the right place it would have been solved years ago. The situation is infinitely more complex than that. Every persons story, reasons, and attitude to help are completely different.
Feel free to have your open forum discussion, but as proven thousands of times before this uninformed discussion does nothing other than to cause arguments through unnecessary tension and hostility. This is a problem for very experienced people to work on, not for common people with no real life experience to throw comments on a public forum about.
Everybody poops; shit happens. The only real question is: Where does this shit happen?
But to answer your question, public things are paid for by the public.
Almost like an airline bathroom size - might be a bit claustrophobic but these are for emergencies and space saving would be big.
the doors could be wired to sensors that are connected to a central network that shows in real-time the availability and also some alarms if something is out of the ordinary etc.
I have similar stories from our local neighborhoods where another parent might yell at you but the tales of your exploits made it home before you did. And there consequences waiting for you.
It’s a matter of timeline, not country.
By the late 1990s, I started to see said teachers pushing kids along as to 1) not deal with them again, and 2) pressure from district/state to not have as many failing students a.k.a. optimizing for the metric.
I went to public high school in the same era in the northern VA suburbs and we had bathrooms available. With doors even. In our 3-building campus, there were at least 6 full sets of bathrooms that I remember (so there were probably more), plus two sets of locker rooms which had toilets.
But hey, it's walkable!
In the EU countries I have visited you can ask most coffee shop and restaurants to use their toilet without any issue. In the most touristy places you are supposed to buy something, which usually is a coffee or a small bottle of water.
Every non-EU citizen should be aware of what to expect in Germany, and even worse in France, Italy or Greece. Shithole is a perfect description - it is just unbelievable how barbarically bad we are at public restrooms in comparison to anything you find across developed Asian countries.
Even beyond just cleanliness, you always have harassing bathroom bouncers in private AND public facilities in Germany, basically acting as highway robbers to steal your money without ever actually cleaning anything. At best they look up from a phone and nod when you pay your urine toll.
The only half usable bathrooms are from corporations like Sanifair which are making a business out of uncontrollable, basic human bodily functions. China doesn't need to invest in psyops against Germany or the EU at all if we are perfectly able to make ourselves look bad in comparison. Just use Occams razor.
And of course the major issue is vandalism and destruction by a huge population of junkies, homeless, aggressive (male) youths etc. on top of anti-social behavior, hegemonially pushed by American individualism ever since WW2. I guess this is the point where you can accuse me of injecting ideas that could originate from Chinese psyops? In the end I want a society that cares for its fellow citizens.
Maybe you'll make it out to all be like the nordics. Maybe you'll make it all out to be like Sicily, or Croatia. Whatever lie you have, Europe has something to back you up, lol.
I'm exaggerating (less than I want to be) but not joking here.
Someone from bumbfuck nowhere visits one big city and generalizes their experience, good or bad.
Or how all of HN is constantly convinced that the entire US is only SV or NYC, which is why they continually praise how Uber broke the "Taxi Cartel" that didn't exist anywhere else.
Or how much of the country only knows of cities from the propaganda they were fed by Fox News, which is why my brother told my mom that Portland Maine was a war zone back during the BLM marches, because 20 kids were laying down in front of the police department, which was a nothing burger and cops weren't even bothered, more like amused.
But the city is somehow not a warzone when ICE abducts 100 people off the street and kills at least one.
That's the antisocial behavior mentioned elsewhere in the thread.
Even in cities, why do I have to take a dump without doors?
Why do I see mom's letting kids take a dump and pee in the streets whiloe they are wearing pants that have no coverage in the bottom area? wtf is that.
---
And out of 100s of comments, how did you spot my comment so quick? and it is the first comment right after you joined? You replied within minutes of my posting,
@TRACK: rykelchen
Little kids peeing is a bit of a special case.
They just showed their delinquency very differently. Some weird form of "honor among thieves/不良/yakuza" deal, which mostly meant they were aggressive, hanged out late (loitering around convenience store asian squatting with a cigarette in their hand) and driving around in loud bikes and fight each other. Breaking public things was a rare overstep.
So I still don't get it no. There are many ways to have "delinquent fun" so to say, so why at one place the same need is put out on public things vs the other place it is taken out on... Each other(?) is a mystery to me.
>Tell me, how does the whole 'kids take care of their own bathrooms' thing work out for bullies?
This is the most predictable counter argument I get when the public responsibility in school in Asia is brought up, and it sounds fair on the surface on it but it is a red herring; bullying exist independent of collectivism or individualism nor collective responsibility or not, and neither address it, and neither is anyone claiming it addresses bullying.
And no bully don't usually love it. Because there's something called a teacher that checks in if everyone is doing their part and if a malicious actor is not, they get reprimanded. This is ofc not perfect and doesn't solve "teachers pet/favoritism" issue, but it does its job of teaching the students that "if everyone collaborate, one can circumvent race to the bottom Nash equilibrium when no one cleans the room." which I would say is a much better systemic approach than "idk individualism, things are shit because we are too lazy to think about responsibilities nor systemic way to uphold some trust in social settings"
"If your system is built on the assumption of every actor acting ideally, that's a broken system."
What a bizarre extrapolation. They just don't see why smashing up bus stops is fun. Maybe you can answer, what's fun about it? I don't get it either. I was a teenager once, I don't see why destroying things that are useful for everyone (including you) would be fun.
If you want to change something, understanding it is a very good first step. Usually it means you're on the path toward finding a cure rather than simply treating symptoms.
I feel like society kinda ran out of rebelliousness with kid rock and then rap culture (late 2000s Jay-Z, Chris Brown). It seems to have dried up. Modern lookmaxxing and gym rat culture, travel vlog, influencers are now the cool kids, van-life and nomadic travel are the new stick-it-to-the-man.
Young people are going to look at Ukraine and realize that flower power and stick-it-to-the-man are utterly bizarre. Who in Ukraine is doing the John Lennon routine? John Lennon's message is totally bizarre now.
In terms of "the tragedy of the commons", that outside incentive is usually public shaming in smaller communities, or rules and laws in larger and more anonymous communities. If you look at shared resources across history and cultures, you usually find communities enforce very strong outside incentives against spoiling the commons instead of just relying on the kindness of strangers.
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 “laissez faire” and let everyone do whatever they want, and expect the common to be preserved. The only way to protect the common is to take some sort of collective action; pass a law that limits how much an individual can take from the common, or set a quota and allow people to bid, etc.
The collective action doesn’t even always have to be a legislative action; you could create a taboo around using too much of a common, or use social shaming to get people to only use their share.
The point is that you have to take SOME collective action to prevent the tragedy.
Or, think about how much someone would have to pay you to do that job.
And, honestly? If more people had to clean toilets in use by other people, maybe we wouldn't have so many folks expecting other people to clean up after them. I see countless posts in my Facebook group about trash on the street. In the time it took to take a photo and post it to social media, they could have picked up the trash and taken it to a nearby bin.
But I suppose that experience goes two ways. Some people think they're above the human condition, to the point where they won't even clean up after themselves, even in their own homes. And other people recognize that it's actually not that hard to clean things up, if you just do it. We all have good and bad days.
I think you might be giving away the class you were raised in if you think it’s infeasible to pay people to clean toilets.
It doesn’t really bother me. At many of the places I work and volunteer, our norm is to establish a rota, so as not to shove the job onto whoever’s lowest paid, least experienced, or most willing to be bullied into it.
Every single employee in a fast food establishment has cleaned toilets, including the horrors you blame on homeless people, like shit smeared on things.
Every single Circle-K employee has cleaned toilets.
The cost for hiring someone to clean toilets is minimum wage.
But that would cost so much that most municipalities or businesses would not afford that.
Some places, of course, do afford that; they are relatively few, as one might expect. Especially as people become more wealthy and the cost of their work grows.
Because they are underfunded often.
The problem was not eliminated. If anything, the effects were amplified.
It just moved the poop mess and dirty needles from one defined space back to everywhere else. In this way, they're easier to accidentally encounter while out-and-about, and yet simultaneously harder to intentionally find and clean up.
I think this kind of result has strong resemblance to what is colloquially known as a footgun.
Also even the most messed up people would use a urinal, if avaiable.
how about some of them being ADA-conforming, with maps noting where they are?
You don't get arrested for public urination. You get a citation, if you are drunk they might haul you to the jail for public intoxication, but you are out when you sober up.
As long as you don't pee near a school and what not you should be fine.
There's a reason why people lock themselves up in gated communities as soon as they can afford to. People want nice things, and out there they can't have nice things. Society sucks. Everything public sucks. Better to create your own little oasis of goodness in private property so that those who would ruin it literally cannot enter.
Elitism is the private solution. Public spaces are still unsolved. You'd do well to present a solution. Ignoring it and then accusing society of "dehumanization" is not gonna solve anything. There's a limit to the general suckiness people are willing to tolerate before they radicalize and vote for the guy promising to clean it all up.
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?
Death.
Repeat offenders, those who are violent, rape, or murder are removed forever from society. There is no reason for a rapist or thief to be permitted to murder after their 2nd 3rd, or 4th offense.
Locking away someone for a large portion of their life to deny them employment, rob them of education, limit their positive contributions, and subjecting their families to the inability to bring wholeness is unjust and unkind.
if the government were smart they'd pass a law to do this, makes it much easier to get rid of cash
Hmmm…remind me again why I should trust ‘team blue’ with running my city?
IMHO that's purely due to differences in population density.
Just because they smile when you ask a random restaurant for using the toilet does not actually mean they are happy when people do.
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.
This might tell us something about the nature of government management or employment.
>How is maintaining public restrooms a "massive liability"? Surely its an inconvenience but massive liability seems a bit of a hyperbole.
The labor costs of having a bathroom be cleaned (in certain regions) might very well be cost prohibitive, hence the OP’s linked article. For example, Best Buy has to spend money to keep bathrooms clean, whereas online only vendors don’t. Maybe it can make sense for Best Buy (or smaller operations like coffee shops) to not have a restroom.
One by one, they were all burned down. Homeless people seem to be really good at destroying stuff. My apartment building is taking on new low income tenants and the rate of fires - with sprinkler activation - is boggling. The public park I walk by often is losing a little bit more greenery to homeless fires every few months, but I’m still saddened by the loss of a large, beautiful tree - torched by a camper.
The problem isn’t removing public resources, it’s keeping them in working order against a persistent opponent.
Portland's county allocates $9m annually. LA's county allocates $4b annually. Should it be 2x that? 20x? 200x before any positive change occurs?
"Mental health" is a non-answer designed to shift accountability and agency from individuals into everyone else vis a vis whatever system is expected to provide this vague "support", despite the failed track record of these systems to improve anything but their employees' and contractors' pockets.
You're advocating for making red-backs less visible?
Consider Meta-borg, it's their own comment history that may damn them in the multiplying deliberate child manipulation trials as common people clearly see how they think.
I just wish the people who value critical thinking so highly when we are talking about the js ecosystem or llms, didn't turn into Victorians when we talk about poverty
Red backs are an Australian spider that has a painful, potentially fatal, bite - you want to know what they are when dealing with them (often just moving them away from people you love, sometimes straight up the vacuum tube).
Meta - formerly Facebook, is facing an increasing number of trials across the US and other countries related to their internally discussed in emails handling of children. attracting them, hooking them, and grooming them to be adult units of income, etc - regardless of detrimental effects.
Your attitude towards them being a nuisance is what needs to change. For example you could easily go out today and invite a rough sleeper to come back and stay at your place for a few nights. That would get one of them off the streets immediately.
One thing that I continue to wonder about is why is sympathy always directed at the person who is visibly in rough sorts - these people are definitely suffering from mental illness and substance addictions, but there are rarely calls for sympathy directed towards those who have to suffer annoyance, harassment, and sometimes abuse at the hands of these individuals. Not to mention the mental toll it takes on people seeing their communities and favorite haunts slowly degrade over time.
People don't want to live in depressing conditions, so I think some sympathy should be directed at them who have near zero ability to improve their surroundings while academics and NGOs wring their hands about the "homelessness problem" without actually making these communities better in any meaningful sense.
I remember China being pretty racist. A lot of people visiting got a clear message. Not aggressively but quite clear.
>The west were slavers.
Who sold them the slaves? Did Europeans go hunt for slaves or did they buy them? Who did they buy them from?
Also answer this, if Americans wouldn't have bought the African slaves, all those African-Americans that are now enjoying life in the land of the free, where would they have been born today? Think if they could push a button today to wipe slavery from the past, but that meant they get to spawn back in Africa, they would push it or not? Legitimate question. Because it's not like nothing good came out of it.
The reason that Africa is in a poor state of affairs is because of rampant colonization and pillaging by European settlers, of which enslavement was a byproduct. In your alternate universe where slavery never happened, Ethiopia and Mali would be wealthy empires.
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 in Africa suggests to me a general poverty of knowledge about any pre-colonial African history.
Slavery was a foundational economic and social pillar of the mali empire.
The colonization mostly happened after slavery.
I am also not trying to excuse past behaviors or anything of the sorts. It was what it was and we always strive to do better when we know better. But that being said, systems are built around what is functional considering everything that can happen. When you account for everything to insure your safety and survival, it seems to work out like it did. On all sides.
And again, these interactions are never one way, longer term there's benefits to both sides, the local country, and descendants of all slaves and slave owners.
And just as an aside, I could very well argue most of us are still slaves today, but with clearly way better conditions and freedom of movement. But if you don't toil away daily, 5 days a week, you risk medical issues or lack of shelter, kind of like the homeless discussion in this thread. In some cases even death.
So putting what a few rich people from hundreds of years ago did, on me, a regular European folk, is shortsighted or even evil. I had nothing to do with any of it, my ancestors were peasants. And the same is valid for most people OP is referring to when saying "europeans". It's pure nonsense.
It is effectively a Han ethno-state, led by a de-facto king, with many novel forms of discrimination normalized into the culture.
The grandparent post is just talking about incentives.
I guess what you're saying is that if you pay 50 cents for the bathroom then there's no actual incentive to keep it clean because the 50 cents is gone either way, unlike a cart deposit?
You're probably right about that, but I also don't think most people actually need an incentive not to make a huge mess. I would put money that most messes in public bathrooms are caused by the people that the 50 cent charge filters out. The rest experience some social pressure from the attendant to keep things clean. If all else fails, the attendant can clean up a mess before the next person uses it
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 federal spending is Social Security, the great majority of which is pensions. Pensioners are very variable but they're mostly not in the bottom quintile. Then "nondefense discretionary" spending which is a mixed bag but again is mostly not bottom quintile. After that comes Medicare which again is mostly pensioners. Then defense, which isn't really "to support" any particular subset of the population. Then Medicaid, a lot of which is for poorer people, so I'll give you that one. Then "other" which from the description in the chart is mostly not bottom quintile. Then income security programs, which is probably mostly bottom quintile. If we say that all of Medicaid and income security are "bottom quintile", 10% each of Social Security and Medicare, and 20% each of "nondefense discretionary" and "other", go to support the bottom quintile -- which I think is probably all on the generous side -- then that comes to about $1.56T out of $6.1T of spending, or out of $5.5T if you prefer not to count debt servicing.
The greatest risks to my life and property are from disease (for my life), wear and tear plus accident (for my physical property), and stock market instability (for my investments). None of those things has much to do with the bottom quintile.
In the US, homicides are about 0.02% of deaths, and most of those happen to people within that bottom quintile you evidently resent so much.
The dearth of comfortable public spaces is because you have to allow the bottom quintile to be there and not-bottom-quintile people like you want to make those spaces as unwelcoming to them as possible even at the cost of making them less comfortable for everyone. And also because your society has failed to provide the bottom quintile with better places for the things you don't like them doing than those public spaces.
It may well be true that zoning laws are developed for fear of the bottom quintile. You might want to consider the possibility that the fear is as much of a problem there as the bottom quintile itself.
Many transit centers are owned and operated by a municipal transit agency and typically have restrooms, especially large airports and train stations.
Public rest areas are pretty common along major highways and these include restrooms.
Publicly-owned parks usually provide a place to poop, too: Sometimes it's an installation with composting toilets, sometimes it's just a seat over a septic pit that needs pumped out periodically. Sometimes, it's fancy with flushing toilets and sinks for handwashing. Other times, it's just a rented portajohn (that may be full of spiders and smell like death, or be very tidy). And sometimes, they're locked at night when the park is closed. But -- usually -- public parks of any substance offer something for facilities.
Just last week, I worked next to a public park in a very small town (population ~2,000) with some well-maintained basketball and tennis courts. There were a couple of portajohns present. (I did not investigate them further.)
And when there's a major events that draw crowds, like our very public fireworks displays in downtown areas: Temporary restroom facilities are provided.
What we don't have very much of here are permanent, literal-public restrooms in the denser parts of cities. That is very problematic, but it is slowly improving[1].
[1]: https://downtownservices.org/news-article/three-public-restr...
You've never been to the beach, a city park (or state or national park), a highway rest stop, or any of the thousands of other places public restrooms exist?
What a weird take...
I was also not considering things like port-a-potties during public events, since i was only considering permanent structures.
This is not just laws, but stores putting everything behind plastic barriers to stop theft. Or "customer only" rules for bathrooms. Literally the article in question is discussing this type of rule.
As someone else described, the bottom quintile decides the overall level of trust in a society.
> 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 against a ban in favour of 'counselling and education'.
Despite the vast majority of the British public not participating in incest, the NHS seemed to think it is right that they pay for the care of the people that do.
A common shared resource - the NHS - is exploited by the worst people (who value economic advantages over their child's health) and everyone suffers.
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.)
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.
Obviously can't speak for the entire country of Spain, but that tends to be true here too. The more touristic places, especially closer to the beaches, tend to have "Toilets for customers only" signs though, which is kind of understandable as people start using them as changing rooms otherwise, and get overrun with tourists not really caring about how they leave things.
Even then, I cannot imagine somebody saying no when telling them "I have a health issue and need to use a toilet", in most cases.
Pretty sure you were in Tibetan areas at those altitudes, a large part of Sichuan is actually Tibetan.
Free, clean toilets are everywhere in America, just not in the dense city centers (walkable, transit-oriented, mid-rise or higher) that people tend to visit on vacation. I'd estimate only 10-15% of Americans live in these city centers, whereas in China it's probably closer to 50%. With the raw numbers, this difference shouldn't be underestimated.
aka exactly the place people need them regardless of which country
In the boonies it's much more acceptable to go in the bush in either country as well
What are you basing this on? China does not have a "tier" system for its cities, and certainly not one based on "the quality of life for the middle class there".
That definitely tracks. LA has a massive unhoused person issue, many of whom with severe mental disorders. You feel a lot that in the commons, especially as you get near DTLA. New York is shabby and dirty in general. More so than a big city usually is. And it's not really a charming shabbiness from an extreme subtropical climate as you get in Taiwan.
The relationship China has with its tier 1 cities is more similar to other Asian countries, like Japan and Korea, than it is to the US.
Usually if you are extremely poor or extremely rich there are no consequences for you. The extremely poor are desperate and have nothing to lose, society already took everything from them. The extremely rich are above the law. As inequality increases crime increases with it, from vandalism to financial crimes.
This is why equality is so important. When the average Joe has a good job, good salary, and a home then can lose things that society has helped him to get and can take away.
A simple and unremarkable person could once upon a time have their basic factory job (or similar), make enough to own their home, and have a decent unremarkable life with their family. I think the pressures of housing costs or rent and other costs of living squeezed those people, often to distress. It's obviously not the entirety of a solution, but it's surely part of it.
People act bad like this not because they're any more particularly free to, but because they're given incentives to. People get slighted by their county, state or the federal government, and everybody else shuns them. It's normal and practically expected to ignore homeless people, for example, and even blame them for their condition. The rich and the lucky are hostile and entitled, while the poor and mentally ill are harassed and taken advantage of. People get radicalized, even trained to commit worse crimes by what's expected of them. Nothing else gets attention or achieves anything.
It's never been about consequences, people do this whether it'll get them 25 years or not. People do this whether they'll get caught or not. They do it because they think it needs to be done, they think it's deserved and they want to get back for everything that's been taken from them and caused to them. And for that, everybody hates them and treats them like everything that's wrong with the country. When in reality, what's wrong with the country is what's creating people like this. Seeing violent criminals makes me sad for what they suffered, not angry at them for being the problem.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
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 from...Texas. They were given bus tickets by local authorities and told that California would overlook their drug issues and even give them free drugs.
Edit: rough clauding indicates it was when fentanyl took off, but idk, that doesn't seem wholly accurate.
Your child is "difficult"? To the asylum it is!
As for the class I was raised in, my parents worked 24/7, my mom cleaned 20+ bathrooms every day, and my parents, myself and my sister slept in one room until I was 16 years old. I have also worked at places where public restrooms were obliterated, and caused quite a bit of rancor among the staff, resulting in restrictions on who could use them.
But that is neither here nor there on the current supply and demand of people willing to do that job.
Cool.
My point was that I was a minimum wage worker and still cleaning toilets. Did it for minimum wage. There were many other coworkers doing the same.
You said
> 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.
That's only plausible if you were unwilling to do so yourself and couldn't conceive of anyone else doing the job.
Its literally one of the lowest paid jobs there is.
If you are claiming its infeasible to pay for someone to do that job, you are just saying you dont think that anyone should be paid to do the job.
>Its literally one of the lowest paid jobs there is.
Today, real life says that is not sufficient pay if we want more public bathrooms (in the places lacking them, such as urban, high density areas).
My conclusions are not based on my feelings or opinions, but a simple observations of real life market trends.
> society's tacit approval to do what they're doing, thus accelerating the societal rot.
This argument could be made about providing drugs themselves but fails under the faintest scrutiny for sharps containers because said containers have wide uses beyond shooting up heroin.
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 pumps which decimates disposable syringe use, but I'm really puzzled where you picked up that in-home/away-from-home impression from.
The thing is that European cities have always been kinda dirty and crime infested, and it has little to do with American culture war. I do not have an explanation for this, because you will need dig deep into history for that, but the good news is that things are overall improving. Overall crime is overall trending down. For example, the inner city of Amsterdam used to be full of junkies and now that has been almost completely cleaned up. And football Hooligans used to be a much bigger problem than they are now.
Internal impetus cannot be cultivated if the youth do not want or desire to be taught cultivation.
If you're a well groomed adult and walk up to the counter at a coffee shop and ask for the code, they'll usually just give it to you no questions asked.
The selective enforcement is the point, because they use these policies to keep away the "types" of people they don't want in the businesses (i.e. unhoused people, teens, etc).
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.
If one could find syringe disposers only in areas where public heroin use commonly takes place that would be believable, but it is not the case.
In contrast, there are actual, real programs and places in many countries to manage issues arising with syringe use, trying to reduce syringe sharing to reduce blood-transmissible diseases etc.
What motivates this infrastructure is the danger to workers if syringes are just thrown into the trash.
My dad had type one diabetes with a type A personality, and was very particular about making sure that syringes were disposed of properly. Not everyone is this careful, and they put others at risk.
But it's better if at least some of them are in the trash and not scattered around, isn't it? I may be wrong but it seems to me that public opinion doesn't matter to these people anyway, so there's no point in getting rid of such garbage bins
Yeah, well, that's your culture and a direct end result of how people are treated and made to feel part of or outside of it.
In Australia there are diabetics and drug addicts as much as anywhere, but rarely problems with sharps on the ground or littering in general- go figure <shrug>.
Drug use: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-15/australian-drug-use-w...
Australians have consumed 22.2 tonnes of methylamphetamine (meth), cocaine, heroin and MDMA in a year, according to the latest wastewater survey.
Diabetics, sharp disposal: https://www.diabetesaustralia.com.au/resources/safe-sharps/
Drug users, sharps: https://www.healthywa.wa.gov.au/Articles/U_Z/Where-to-find-n...
At the suburban council level: https://cosp.t1cloud.com/apps/KnowledgeBase/mySouthPerth/art...
It is observed that you have junkies shooting up in bathrooms, evidenced by needles strewn on the ground. So the solution from the authorities is to install syringe disposal containers.
Given the cost vs the benefits, why not? A box mounted to a wall is a pittance.
Feel free to elaborate your plan for the junkies that would be cost effective, practical and ethical.
Edit: This plays into something I observe in most "data-driven" organizations. Having a statistic available about recovery costs makes it easy to shift the conversation toward that statistic, when you actually ought to be asking questions about (in this case) the causal impact of that intervention on the subway's overall profitability, the need for easily available public transit and whether there ought to be a fare in the first place, the public good (or maybe harm -- the point is that we ought to be discussing it one way or the other) done by using fare-jumping collections as a mechanism for training people to be less antisocial in other aspects of their lives, or whether that obscene cost of fare collection is actually a reasonable baseline and should be improved. Your statistic, while interesting, is almost useless when trying to figure out what we should do next, at least by itself, and when paired with human psychology it can be actively harmful.
It does shovel a lot of dollars at law enforcement and let the Adams administration pretend to be tough on crime despite engaging in a lot of it, which was the actual intent.
Similarly stores with loss prevention guards are probably losing money, but I'd much rather that than having to click a button to unlock items, etc.
Nevermind that the economics of your argument are completely blind to the fact that the funding sources of the MTA and the NYPD are completely different.
More crazy is the downstream effects of putting up your hands and letting crimes go.
All this for what ? Social justice? Here's my counter to that - the subway is a public good, For the People a socialist would say.
So you encourage stealing from The People.
This is false. In California the guard can use non-deadly force to detain a suspected shoplifter. Retailers may have a company policy telling guards and employees not to physically confront shoplifters, because that introduces escalation risk, litigation risk, and risk of injury. It’s simply cheaper to let the item go, in many cases. I’ve read that Target will strategically do this until a person steals enough that it becomes a felony, and then release the hounds.
> In NYC a decree stopped the police from issuing summonses for not paying the subway fare. Because it was said to be racist. Today, tons of people, especially normal professionals - happily do not pay the fare, while the system is said to be in financial deficit.
I’m not sure where you get your information from, but I suggest you reconsider your sources, because this is also false (not the deficit, but a decree stopping police from issuing summons): https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/excel/analysis_and...
I assume you are referring to a 2018 policy reform. Your concerns are debunked here: https://www.manhattanda.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Fare-...
And it's not this other one on the same street, cause this was free https://maps.app.goo.gl/Firjcsabthu8DHtQ6
But I'm sure there still exist quite a few, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were especially found in right-wing cities like Nice.
Toilet: "Sign up (learn more) or proceed with Google Account ..."
Google: "pissoir.fr wants access to your pissing history ...(Y/n)"
Toilet: By pissing here, you consent to the collection and analysis of urine samples ..
:)
But I personally think people miss that its a symptom of greater social rot. I've had more issues with antisocial car drivers than any homeless individual. People screaming profanities because I'm crossing the street with the walk signal active, people narrowly missing me as they speed to work. Just yesterday my entire block lost power because a drunk asshole tboned another car going 75mph, killing a family of four while nearly shearing a utility pole.
The reality is that even if the line is drawn with the homeless the undercurrent of social rot is still there and it's not getting better. And I don't see people calling for car drivers to be institutionalized, quite the opposite in most cases even when they commit homicide.
There is never shit. There are no needles. These people leave you alone. They are literally insane and on absurd drugs, but they leave you alone.
Why is this true in Portland Maine, but not Portland Oregon?
> someone screaming in a pile of their own feces 20 or so feet away?
This is a hypothetical, and follows a typical pattern of trying to box people into a response using a situation that effectively never happens. It's like people asking if you'd support torture 'if you knew there was a bomb in an elementary school somewhere in NY, but didn't know which one'. That's never happened.
I have had many apparently housed people yell at or even threaten me, and almost run me over.
So I've never seen it or anything like it, spending lots of time in many neighborhoods of many cities. Human shit, to provoke an emotional reaction (of disgust) at other humans, is a favorite of the anti-freedom crowd. It's not the unhoused people, generally the most vulnerable people I know and encounter, that disgust me.
If they are mentally ill and unable to care for themselves or pose a threat to the community because of their mental illness, they should be institutionalized and treated. If they are able to be released into the community after a period of time, checks should be performed to ensure compliance with treatment/medication.
You get a much better score if the imprisonment is trying to rehab them, of course.
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.
Where is your office located? What are the national origins of your co-workers?
> 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.
Are you complaining no one cleaned it up, including you? Or are you complaining that the company didn't get cleaning services?
"So, Inspector Lestrade, ..."
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.
That assumption says a lot more about you that it does the person you were responding to.
Would you care to suggest a concrete definition of "bottom quintile" according to which the claims made by black6 are true?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...
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.
Additionally, not all areas of the country are infested with the “homeless and drug addicts”. People can spin that all they like but areas where people take care of their local services are plentiful.
Lastly, don’t talk to me about prohibitive pricing in government initiates. When we stop spending hundreds of billions bombing other countries, then come talk about things being too expensive.
Nice condescending comment about the homework though, you must have been pleased with that one.
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.
Cleaning up bodily fluids, which likely come from drug users, is a whole other thing.
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. Policies such as Portugal’s decriminalisation have shown we can make a bigger difference when we treat those people as people.
Either way, the point of your parent comment is that most people don’t even pick up trash, which is itself a problem.
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.
When I was a kid growing up in the 80s/90s, you rarely saw homeless camps like they are now where they openly use drugs. You never saw public restrooms that were completely disgusting. Fast food bathrooms were clean back then.. now they are horrible. Things are not the same... The worst bathrooms back then were at the public parks where they were covered in pee and not cleaned well, but weren't destroyed by drug usage like they are now. I don't remember seeing piles of needles (or even one needle) like you do now.
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...
Businesses don't spend money to put locks on bathrooms for the fun of it.
This is the same reason that getting rid of fare-checking is bad - the sorts of people who are kept off the transit system by enforcing a fare, are not people you want to be in an enclosed space with.
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.
Thanks, I wasn't able to find an archive. I'm sure you noticed the quotes were accurate and I thank you for the support.
> Many many many things that are unwise and can increase pressure on communities' resources are not illegal.
Nobody said they were. The argument was that cousin marriage should be illegal since it which doubles the rate of birth defects as the genomics article mentions.
> "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]".
But the NHS Genomics Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal is very far from "some guy working for the NHS wrote a blogpost", as I'm sure you're aware.
> The article wasn't at all about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do"
Yes, it was. Not banning incest marriages increases the risk of birth defects.
> the actual thing they published (and unpublished shortly after, after backlash stoked by the right-wing press):
I'm sure you're as thankful for the right wing press for raising awareness of the matter, and likewise am disappointed about the left wing press for ignoring it.
No. But what the NHS blog thing said was that this particular thing shouldn't be illegal, and you appear to be arguing that that's bad because it's unwise and can increase pressure on the community's resources. And I am pointing out that in general the bar for making things illegal is, and should be, higher than that.
> the NHS Genomics Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal
That is not what happened. Someone wrote a blogpost saying "here's a thing that isn't illegal; some people are saying it should be illegal; here are some arguments for and against". That differs from "proposing that incest not be illegal" in the following three ways: (1) "proposing that X not be illegal" gives the strong impression that X is currently illegal, whereas in fact the thing in question is currently legal; (2) the relevant proposition is not "that incest not be illegal" but "that first-cousin marriage not be illegal"; first-cousin marriage is not incest in UK law, nor in many other jurisdictions' law, and no one[1] is even slightly proposing that incest in general should be legalized; (3) the blog post does not take the position that first-cousin marriage should definitely be legal. It does quote some other people and organizations that think it shouldn't be made illegal.
[1] Well, I bet someone somewhere is. "All universal generalizations are false". But no such proposal is made or discussed in the blog post in question.
I do agree that it seems likely that the author of the blogpost thinks that it wouldn't be a good idea to illegalize first-cousin marriage; but there is an important distinction between "putting up a blog post that seems on the whole not favourable to doing X" and "proposing that X not be done".
> Yes it was. Not banning incest marriages increases the risk of birth defects.
It probably does. (Though you might recall, having now read the article, that it points out an expert's opinion that most of the increase in birth-defect risks in these communities comes not from the existence of first-cousin marriages in particular but from the general practice of marriages between somewhat-related people, which banning first-cousin marriages would not change.)
But that's an entirely separate matter from whether the blogpost was about whether the NHS should pay for the resulting birth defects. Suppose the UK bans first-cousin marriages, and some people have children with their first cousins anyway, and some of the resulting children have birth defects. Should the NHS treat those children? I say: of course it should. Perhaps you would prefer to let the children suffer or die without whatever help the healthcare system could have offered them. But the blogpost doesn't address that at all. It isn't even slightly about who the NHS should treat.
> I'm sure you're as thankful [...]
Nope. The blogpost in question seems pretty sensible to me, and in any case its presence or absence surely makes zero difference to whether first-cousin marriages actually get made illegal or not, and to whether any given pair of first cousins actually get into one or not. I doubt the right-wing media feeding frenzy did either very much good or very much harm directly, but I bet it helped to stoke the widespread hate and fear of immigrants which seems like it might lead to the next government being run by Reform, who I firmly expect to be incompetent buffoons who will do a great deal of harm to the UK whether or not their positions on social wedge-issues like immigration, transgender people, etc., have any merit.
As for the left-wing press, there isn't much of a left-wing press in this country; I suppose there's the Guardian and the Mirror but both are pretty milquetoast (which on the whole I am glad of; I think the more extreme forms of leftism are mostly misguided).
Mental "asylums" that were almost as bad (and sometimes worse) than prisons is clearly bad. But just leaving people to live on the streets or end up in actual prisons isn't strictly better.
I'm not saying we should bring back the asylums, at least the way they were, but there should be a better way to take care of people who aren't able to care for themselves.
For years a woman ran around in traffic and was killed by a car to protect her from the state. Nothing could be done? She had to die?
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Ca...
That's not really an option now since the last people to blindly believe in institutions to that extent are the boomers and it'd be a tough sell to even them.
2. Katie Wilson was elected last fucking year, replacing a pro-cop, pro-establishment incumbent, whereas the usual suspects have been bitching about Seattle for decades. Par for the course, of course, the usual newspapers were running hit pieces about how her failed policies have ruined the city a day after she took office, without a shred of self-reflection.
[1] Wasn't so long ago that Seattle's top-paid cop ($390,000/year!) was caught collecting overtime by napping in her car... Illegally parked in the middle of a bus-only lane. (I guess that's also Katie's fault, despite it being a year prior to her election.)
I haven't heard of that, other than laws banning pulling people over for minor mechanical issues like broken tailights (used sometimes as coverup for prejudice). Could you give examples?
> Aggressive drivers can get away with a lot more bad behavior now and have little fear of consequences.
I haven't noticed driving getting worse, except around the pandemic. Is there data?
I’m sure the next objection will be “what, so you’re going to concentrate them in some kind of camp?” Yes because that’s the smart thing to do with a large scale problem. Use scalable solutions.
But the mentally unwell person didn't force society to pay for their living expenses. Society decided it couldn't stand them living their life the way they were and locked them up.
Society pays for locking people up because it is done for the benefit of society. The point is that a functioning society is more productive than an unorganized one, and so can afford to do that kind of thing.
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.
https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2026/08/vandals-set-fires-i...
Seems like, after all of these police and prosecutorial "reforms", we are back to deriving why many state powers exist from first principles. Fun to watch in real time.
> 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 protect people's rights.
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...
And to prevent them from committing crime for some time. That might need to be a very, very long time. It is the most important reason to lock people up, sometimes.
Atm it seems everyone is trying to figure out how to treat the symptom, and they don't even know why, and they keep completely quiet about the cause of it all. Completely and utter mystery, or framed vague and unfixable enough that they do not have to really address it.
What the Swiss did back in the 80's with the heroin program...that's misinterpreted by US and they're specifically trying to mess it up in application. The Swiss didn't just give lab grade heroin to junkies, they ran a serious mental care and social reintegration program and used the heroin as basically bait. You had access to it but you had to go to their facilities where specialized people could start working with you.
What the US is doing is a mockery of that, they want it to fail so they can say it's not working and they shouldn't even try it in the future.
And I think it's quite clear to basically anyone with two neurons what the cause of it is, but authorities there are going to pretend they do not understand it. That it's some mystical unexplainable cause.
We can start there, then move to address the more structural, long-term problems that contribute to these issues.
An action that reduces drug use by 5% a decade from now is fine, but taking a criminal off the street today yields far greater present value.
>The vandalism happened between about 10 p.m. on Aug. 21 and 7 a.m. the following day, according to officials.
But also, the lack of desire to spend money on staffing government restrooms in the first place.
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 you are right, people that disagree with incest are at fault.
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 a free society we very frequently allow people to do things that are bad ideas.
Do you think it should be illegal to have children when over the age of 35? That causes increased birth defects, I think about as many per instance as first-cousin marriage does. Do you think it should be illegal to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol while pregnant? Ashkenazi Jewish people have a very substantially increased risk of some genetic problems; should they be forbidden to have children?
I dunno, maybe you do think all those things should be illegal, in which case there's no inconsistency in calling for first-cousin marriage also to be illegal. But I'm guessing you don't, for reasons along the lines of "it's usually better to allow people to do things they want rather than having the government intervene heavy-handedly in their lives". That is also the main reason why it might be a bad idea to make first-cousin marriage illegal.
With that said: I repeat, I did not in fact say that "allowing incest and increasing birth defects among children is sensible". I said that the blogpost is sensible. There is not a valid inference from "document X is sensible" to "everything that document X, overall, seems to be in favour of is sensible".
The blogpost looks at arguments for and against banning first-cousin marriage. It doesn't, explicitly, take a definite position on that question, though it does seem like its author thinks that first-cousin marriage shouldn't be made illegal. I think it's a sensible blogpost; I would think the same if its author had the opposite apparent leaning, if it had the same overall shape of presenting reasonable arguments on both sides. If I think about the matter some more and decide that actually banning first-cousin marriage would on net be a good idea, I expect I will still think the blogpost is pretty sensible.
> I personally imagine it is things like widespread organised rape that was ignored by the police for many years
The Rotherham scandal was scandalous, I agree, and it seems likely that the police deliberately avoided investigating properly because they were afraid of being called racists, and all of that is very bad. But I don't see how you get from there to "therefore the British immigration system is bad". Consider another scandal involving a lot of sexual abuse of minors: the one around Jeffrey Epstein. The people involved in that were mostly (not exclusively, but mostly) rich middle-aged white men. Do we conclude that we should be trying to keep rich middle-aged white men out of the country? Most people don't. Rather, we say: here was a particular network of people, most of whom happened to be rich middle-aged white men, doing Very Bad Things; we should deal with those particular people, and we should improve our systems for spotting Very Bad Things, and if some of those got overlooked because bits of those systems are too generous to rich middle-aged white men then we should change that.
Likewise, in Rotherham there was a particular network of people, most of whom happened to be Pakistani immigrants or children thereof, doing Very Bad Things; we should deal with those particular people, and we should improve our systems for spotting Very Bad Things, and if some of those got overlooked because bits of those systems are too generous to Pakistani immigrants and their children then we should change that.
But being a rich white middle-aged man, or a poor Pakistani young man, isn't some kind of guarantee of being a sexual abuser, and we would do no one any favours by attaching the crimes of the individuals to the whole group and saying: let's get all the rich white middle-aged men out of the country. Or all the poor Pakistani young men.
(In both cases you could make an argument that it wasn't all coincidence that the people came from those particular demographics. E.g., if your mode of sexual abuse involves sequestering the victims on a private island then it's much easier to do if you're a billionaire; some Pakistani communities have traditionally had very high rates of child-marriage and maybe those traditions make men from those communities more likely to become child abusers or something. But in both cases we can also observe that there are an awful lot of rich white middle-aged men and poor Pakistani young men who somehow manage not to abuse any children at all, and conclude that it's probably better to target the crime itself rather than some broad demographic within which we found a bunch of criminals.)
> a steady increase in Islamic terrorist attacks
Yeah, maybe getting up to an average of one event a year, with a total (coming mostly from a couple of particularly severe cases) of something like 100 deaths from terrorism in the last 25 years. Four deaths a year! That's almost one third as many as people dying from having their clothes catch fire, and almost a quarter as many as people drowning in their bathtubs!
Obviously 100 deaths from terrorism is 100 too many. (And 100 deaths from people drowning in their bathtubs is 100 too many.) But, with terrorism as with bathtubs, the number is actually not all that large, and it doesn't make a great justification for large-scale social change such as radical overhaul of the immigration system.
(It does make a great tool for stirring up xenophobia, though.)
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.
> 1. things that are unwise and can increase pressure on communities' resources
> 3. The article wasn't at all about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do".
Increasing pressure on communities' resources is that community paying for people that engage in incest.
1. Does doing X have costs? 2. If so, and if X is done, who should pay those costs? 3. Should we make X illegal?
In the present case, first-cousin marriage does have costs, one of which is that it increases the number of children born with genetic problems that make their lives worse and (if the government pays for medical treatment to mitigate them) costs money. So the answer to the first question is yes, and so far as I can tell no one disagrees.
If some pairs of first cousins marry, and their children have genetic problems, then some of the costs are paid by those children. In a country with socialized healthcare like the UK, the default is that some other costs -- those of helping the children to have longer and/or better lives -- are paid by the government, and hence by everyone's taxes.
You might want to argue that those costs are the fault of the particular people who entered into those marriages and they should have to pay them. Unfortunately, in many cases they probably can't afford to do that. You might want to identify some community that they belong to and somehow make them pay, but that's pretty difficult to do; the UK isn't set up to levy different taxes on (say) Muslims or people whose ancestors lived in Bangladesh or whatever, and on the whole that seems obviously a good thing.
You might want to argue that in any case the nation shouldn't be paying, and that the NHS should refuse to treat whatever problems those children might have. In that case it will be the children who suffer; I personally am not a fan of making children suffer for their parents' bad decisions, but some people are.
So the second question is certainly one that we could argue about. But the blogpost we are discussing never touches on that question.
What the blogpost is about is the third question. Answering that is a matter of weighing the costs of X against the costs of making X illegal (loss of personal freedoms every time anything is made illegal; making some communities feel persecuted; loss of whatever benefits, if any, communities in which first-cousin marriage is practised get from it; making X happen illegally rather than legally, as opposed to making X not happen).
That again is something that could reasonably be argued about, and the blogpost does argue about it. But, I repeat, it's an entirely separate question from the second one.
So I continue to assert that the article wasn't about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do". It didn't discuss that question at all. It discussed the entirely separate question of what measures if any should be taken to make there be fewer "people that do".
Yes, hence wanting to ban incest marriages.
> and they should have to pay them. Unfortunately, in many cases they probably can't afford to do that.
No, I and the other commenter are not arguing that. Make incest marriages illegal in the UK, make incest married people ineligible to migrate to the UK. It's very simple. This thread is begininning to resemble the "left wing discourse" quote so I'll stop here.
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.
A scientist doesn't say, 'there's life on Venus, prove me wrong'. A lawyer doesn't say 'you burnt down the house, prove me wrong'. They have to prove their claim. Otherwise, nobody responds - in science they'd be ignored, in court the defense doesn't even need to say a word.
Otherwise, we just don't know. I gave you the respect of taking your argument seriously, and of finding and reading your citation, even as you were hurling abuse and outrage (and maybe hadn't read it yourself, it seems). If you will step up now and contribute, you'll find a welcome reception and an interesting life and discussion. You can contribute. Someone else probably cited that quote and paper, and didn't read it, and look where it left you. You can do better than them, you can find some actual truth - and we'd both learn things, I'm certain.
But now you just don't know, admit it. Your assertion is possible of course, but IME it's also possible otherwise - homeless people are among the most vulnerable. For example, is the crime rate among homeless people more or less than the crime rate in corporate executive offices or on Wall Street or in the offices of elected representatives - I could see it either way. I just don't know.
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.
Stating that a blog post with an argument is sensible normally indicates you feel the argument itself is sensible. If you feel otherwise, communicate better.
> your description of my "long rant" (a characterization that obviously I dispute, but no matter) you mention several other points I made.
But they weren't points, they were irrelevant offtopic facts as discussed.
> whether or not it is reasonable to do as you have been doing and simply call it "incest"
Fucking your cousin is incest. You know that. Don't pretend otherwise.
> incidental eight-word summary included the words "right-wing"
You didn't mention the public furore, or the press in general. You specifically mentioned the right wing press. Obviously you thought it was relevant. You know that. Don't pretend otherwise.
> we don't try to make every bad thing illegal because making things illegal has costs
Yes, but making choices that cause birth defects to double obviously has a massive cost that outweighs the incredible benefits of cousin fucking. Which you know.
> you were trying to cite it as somehow representative of official attitudes in the UK
It was representive of government attitudes: the NHS Genomics Education Programme is part of the government. You're intelligent enough to know that too so I'll go back to the point made in the other thread you replied on and leave it there: https://x.com/MillennialWoes/status/1893134391322308918
Yup. I feel that the argument in the blogpost is sensible. That is not the same thing as thinking that a particular policy that the blogpost leans toward is a sensible policy.
> If you feel otherwise, communicate better.
Good idea! I might try writing a couple of paragraphs distinguishing what I actually said and meant from the similar-sounding but very different thing you said I said. Oh, wait. I did, and you proceeded to ignore it.
> Fucking your cousin is incest. You know that. Don't pretend otherwise.
There are two separate points here. Let's begin with the one you're presenting as if it's the only one, namely whether first-cousin marriage is incest. That's a question of definitions; let's see what the dictionaries say. The Oxford English Dictionary: "The crime of sexual intercourse or cohabitation between persons related within the degrees within which marriage is prohibited; sexual commerce of near kindred." Marrying, or having sex with, your first cousin in the UK is not the first of those things; whether it's the second depends on what counts as "near". (I think it's very reasonable of the OED to leave that unresolved; the point is that what counts as "incest" for a given person will depend on what feels to them like "near kindred".) Chambers says: sex between people closely enough related that marriage is prohibited, so fucking your cousin in the UK is not incest by that definition. Merriam-Webster says the same. Wiktionary: "between close relatives, especially immediate family members and sometimes first cousins", so they're on the fence.
So: no, actually, there is nothing like general agreement that fucking your cousin is incest.
However, that isn't actually the key point here; my own inclination is to define incest (outside specifically legal contexts) broadly enough that it does include first cousins. The reason I object to the way you've been wording things isn't that I think the thing in question isn't incest, it's that there's a difference between claiming something about incest and claiming something about a particular variety of incest.
Specifically, you'd talked about "the NHS Genomics Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal" and one of the many things I found misleading about that was that the blogpost in question was not talking about incest in general but about one particular case of it.
A proposal "that incest not be illegal" would mean, e.g., permitting marriage between brothers and sisters, or fathers and daughters. No such proposal was made, or considered, or so much as gestured at in the blogpost we are discussing.
> Obviously you thought it was relevant. You know that. Don't pretend otherwise.
Of course I thought it was relevant, otherwise I wouldn't have mentioned it. I'm not pretending anything, and I'm getting very bored of your baseless accusations of dishonesty.
You called my comment "a long rant about" three things. One of those things was represented in that "long rant" by, in total, one word in a throwaway remark. Yes, I thought that word was relevant. No, it was not in any way one of the main topics of what I wrote.
> Yes, but making choices that cause birth defects to double obviously has a massive cost
Like the cost of allowing people to have children when over the age of 35. Do you want that to be illegal? (I have asked you this question before. Of course you have ignored it.)
> that outweighs the incredible benefits of cousin fucking.
Here is a complete list of things I have said in this discussion or elsewhere about benefits of cousin fucking.
(That was the list.)
> It was representative of government attitudes [...]
It was a blogpost. The full extent of what anything in it tells us about government attitudes is: there's someone, working for the government, who thinks X and doesn't mind saying so on a blog with the NHS's name attached to it.
That's not nothing. The opinions of people who work for an entity have some connection with the entity's own opinions, in so far as it has them. But they're not the same thing. You can get a sense of where they agree and disagree if, for instance, some sort of public outcry draws attention to the thing that someone wrote so that the institution has to decide whether to stand by it or not. In this case, the institution decided not to stand by it.
No two of the following things are the same. (1) The opinions of some random staffer at the NHS Genomics Education Programme. (2) The opinions that that staffer thinks worthy of inclusion in a blogpost. (3) The opinions of the NHS Genomics Education Programme. (4) The opinions of the NHS. (5) The opinions of the UK government.
In this case, it seems clear that the random staffer was not in favour of making first-cousin marriage illegal. (That's #1.) The blogpost they wrote didn't actually say "first-cousin marriage should not be made illegal", though it also didn't go out of its way to hide its author's opinion. So #2 is already a bit ambiguous. Once the attention of the NHSGEP's management was drawn to the thing, they retracted the blogpost. (That's #3. Of course you can argue about how far they retracted it because it really didn't match the NHSGEP's collective opinion, and how far they just wanted that opinion not to be visible.) #4 and #5 aren't even in the picture.
> https://x.com/MillennialWoes/status/1893134391322308918
For the benefit of anyone who prefers not to follow that link: it complains that a lot of "leftist discourse" consists of people pretending not to understand things.
At no point in this discussion have I pretended not to understand you or the points you're making. For that matter, I'm not sure I've ever suggested or implied that I don't understand you or the points you're making. I just don't agree with them.
There absolutely is a rhetorical pattern where someone acts like they don't understand something, perhaps in order to make the person they're talking to have to make explicit something that they would rather not say in so many words. Sometimes it's a reasonable thing to do. Sometimes it's just being a dick. But I don't think I've done anything of the sort anywhere in this discussion.
There is, unfortunately, also a rhetorical pattern where someone insists that obviously the person they're talking to knows that they're right and is just pretending otherwise. That one's pretty much always just being a dick, and I'm afraid it's what you've done a lot of in the comment I'm replying to right now.
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 reported that homeless individuals were 514 times more likely to be arrested and charged with a felony and were often facing multiple criminal cases. The data shows substantially higher rates of robbery, residential burglary, assault, arson, and vandalism. " - https://www.sdcda.org/content/MediaRelease/Homeless%20Data%2...
"Los Angeles Police Department crime data from 2018 to 2021 shows that homeless individuals, while only 1 percent of the population, are suspects in 6 to 8 percent of all crimes and 11 to 15 percent of violent crimes." - https://abc7.com/feature/homeless-crime-los-angeles-data-res...
You're welcome to admit you are wrong about the precious "unhoused" who are committing assault at a rate 130x times greater than normal people in San Diego, or you can keep trying to deflect about Wall Street. $20 says you're the same type of person that thinks a pitbull is a safe nanny dog.
Why would anyone take these comments seriously? Why would I spend my time on them? I think I will be moving on. I hope you have a good rest of your day.
You pretended that whether the law allows incest right now is relevant about whether incest marriages should be illegal, you pretended that the legal definition of incest was relevant to whether cousin marriage should be illegal, and you pretended you didn't know if a government agency publishing something is a government opinion. You pretended that there was a cost of making incest illegal as if there was no cost of doing otherwise and pretended in your most recent mesage that you didn't do that.
> For the benefit of anyone who prefers not to follow that link
You need to read a wider set of media. This isn't helping.
I did not. I already explained why I brought that up, and it was not because it makes a difference to whether such marriages should be illegal.
(Well, almost. As I mentioned elsewhere, there are costs to changing a law, so actually whether something is legal now does have some effect on whether it should be legal next year as well. But that wasn't my point.)
> you pretended that the legal definition of incest was relevant to whether cousin marriage should be illegal,
I did not. I already explained why I brought that up, and it was not because it makes a difference to whether such marriages should be illegal.
(General point: there may be only one thing that you want to talk about, but that doesn't oblige your interlocutor to talk about only that thing. And, more specifically, if in talking about that one thing you say things that are misleading, it's reasonable for the other guy to point out that you did so.)
> and you pretended you didn't know if a government agency publishing something is a government opinion.
I did not. I disagree with you about whether everything posted on a blog belonging to a government department "is a government opinion". There is no pretence involved.
> You pretended that there was a cost of making incest illegal
(There is, obviously. Also, I remark once again that "making incest illegal" is not an accurate characterization.)
> as if there was no cost of doing otherwise
I absolutely did not; I acknowledged that first-cousin marriage is a bad idea and that it would be better if people didn't do it and that it increases the frequency of genetic problems in resulting children. Saying "doing X has costs" is not remotely the same thing as saying "not doing X has no costs". It's a tradeoff, like everything else in life.
> and pretended in your most recent message that you didn't do that.
I did not.
> You need to read a wider set of media.
Maybe I do, maybe not, but you have absolutely no information about what set of media I read.
You need to stop translating everything you read into the stupidest possible one-bit black-and-white "everything about X is good" / "everything about X is bad" version of itself.
In Europe it's frequently teenagers (even those whom parents provide good lives), football fans, drunk people, etc.
Some people are antisocial and destroy public stuff just for laughs, not because they feel resentment towards society.
This is how an empire dies. One toilet/park/swing at a time.
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
We've consistently built a tiny fraction of the new residential units needed for projected population growth for decades now. Supply has been barely growing while demand surged; what else should we expect?
Other parts of the country have not been as extreme, but this has played out in other cities too. We've had terrible housing policy, and increased homelessness is a direct consequence.
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 homeless who tend to make up the majority of all homeless people. These are the folks who might have jobs, live in their car, have a gym membership to shower, etc. You could spend a lot of time with many of these people and have no idea they were homeless and as a result they aren't included in many people's perception of the problem of homelessness. Therefore, it's hard for people to believe that something as simple as lowering rent prices could actually solve homelessness for a majority of homeless people.
Are you talking about the homeless who are actually causing any problems (the chronic homeless)? Or the meaningless statistical group of "Everyone who doesn't have their own/rented home today"?
> Way easier to end up homeless after losing your job when paying 3k/month in rent than 1k/month
Any person without serious mental and/or substance problems can handle losing their job without sleeping in the streets. By virtue of not being mentally ill and addicted, everyone else has "friends" and "family" somewhere who would say "Oh, gee Fred, sorry you lost your job. Sleep on my couch for a few weeks while you're looking for work."
The only people who don't are those who have burned every bridge by repeatedly betraying the trust of those who love them (theft, bringing drugs into their home, sexual abuse, etc).
A lot of people also sleep in their cars and shower at the gym while putting their lives together. Now, those people DO count as homeless in the official counts, but they aren't the ones causing any problems, and they also consume only a tiny fraction of the public resources that "The Homeless" we see on the streets do.
So, while lower rents would help with the official numbers, you would see little improvement on the streets because that's not why they're there.
(All that said, I'm sure there's a small pipeline from the 'temp homeless' to the 'chronic homeless,' which is probably 99.9% made up of people who are in the "living in the car" or "couch surfing" phase who make the poor choices to take up an addiction to drown their sorrows.)
Separately, the other problem with the "just build more housing" plan is: These cities aren't surrounded by 50-foot walls. They're not closed systems. Say we build so much that the $3000 rent drops to $1000. Now, people from elsewhere, seeing that SF is now as cheap as Fresno, will decide to move there, as the weather is way better, and there are tons of cool things about living in a world-class city by the sea. The low prices pull people from elsewhere just as reliably as low air pressure causes wind to blow towards it. (This is also why these temperate coastal cities can't fix things with money: The more comfortable you make it to be homeless in your city, the more tweakers from the hinterland will gravitate to the city.)
After the Civil War, when many plantation properties became economically unsustainable, occasionally the main house would be abandoned by the owners, and the remaining sharecroppers would take up residence; one house that used to be for one extravagantly wealthy family, now occupied by a handful.
In Newport, RI, after the income tax made maintaining grand Gilded Age domiciles untenable, many were subdivided into multiple units. Again, a house for one family (and there servants) turned out to be decent housing for multiple.
People keep saying that America has a building deficit, and to some extent, we do. But we also have a lot of physically massive houses that house one family, because those families can currently afford it. Historically, that has not been a permanent state.
The less fortunate simply deal with shrinkflation of the bottom tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Only 12% of married Americans under 30 own a home in 2026. In 1960 it was 52%.
https://wealthvieu.com/homeownership-rate-by-demographics/
The pandemic-heightened desire for more spacious and independent living, as well as “excess” savings accumulated early in the lockdown stages of the pandemic, propelled headship rates of young adults by two percentage point to 43.1%, the highest level since 2010. This still didn't meet parity with the historic norms of 1990-2000s.
https://eyeonhousing.org/2023/01/how-pandemic-changed-living...
In other news, U.S. Home Prices Are up 29 Percent Since 2019.
https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/global-research/real-estat...
tl;dr Americans will vote for an Economy over a Society, so long as Social policies continue to be villainized in political discourse.
I hope you don't think San Francisco having spent a lot of money on the problem (the $100k per person figure in isolation is deceptive, but let's not dwell on that) means we've expended more than a really minimal amount of effort as a nation on the problem. Consider how little the problem of homelessness was discussed during the last presidential cycle, or how often it's discussed in congress, and I think you'll see what I mean. (consider the words used when debating it and you'll really understand what I mean)
https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/did-ronald-reagan-...
The homeless situation as we know it had multiple causes in the 80s and prior. Part of it was Reagan-era policies wanting to save money, but the other half (which in my view would have probably still "achieved" the same end result) was activists who argued that involuntary institutionalization violated the rights of those who were committed. "The Left" and "The Right" were full partners in dismantling what we had. In my opinion, both were too stupid to realize the consequences of just deleting what existed without having a realistic plan for how to deal with those people. It's like if you realized your water heater was consuming $30 worth of electricity every month so you just turn the breaker off and say "We saved $30 and improved our climate footprint" but now everyone has to take cold showers forever and the dishes don't get properly cleaned.
Days later I saw a sign in their window saying the bathroom was for customers only.
The problem with severe schizophrenics is that they don’t like and won’t take their meds if left to their own devices [EDIT: regardless of how much social support you provide, even though we certainly didn’t provide enough]. Institutions are in no way perfect, but One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is not a documentary.
In my country the entire justice system has been hijacked by activist judges who are hell bent on promoting these whacky ideas and letting serious criminals go virtually unpunished.
what’s the difference here?
Most homeless shelters are run by religious charities. The majority of them treat homelessness as a sin, either by intentional policy or accidents of attitude. These "charities" often require a lot of work to keep being allowed to use their housing at their shelter from regular job hunting to regularly attending worship sessions to "zero tolerance" policies on everything from curse words to keeping private possessions to having pets to sometimes taking/keeping necessary medication. It's hard to keep your mental health in good shape when the groups that are housing you in the worst weather are berating you for being terrible sinners and treating you like prisoners.
Outside of shelters the most common interactions between homeless people and the cities around them are interactions with cops, who very rarely have mental health training or social work experience, and treat homeless people like criminals because their job is sometimes to treat everybody as would be criminals.
You ever really talk to a homeless person? The ones that really survive become very organized. They have a list of shelters memorized, which months they prefer to be at each one, what things they need to fake about themselves they need to do to survive in that shelter for a few weeks, how much "rent" they need to raise before they get there (some shelters often cost pennies per day just to show that the homeless person is "working" somehow; some homeless panhandle just to afford shelters), and exactly how long they can stay before they inevitably get kicked out (most shelters are "short term", intentionally). Just listening to all the rules and regulations and requirements makes me think I would go schizophrenic dealing with that world. It sounds like being stuck in a middle school that never ends, if that middle school's "classrooms" were all in entirely different parts of a city and all had deeply different rules. I can easily see why homelessness often causes mental illness in the US.
Institutions are close to the right answer, but for an entirely different reason than you assert. We do need better secular institutions (in the endowed place of learning sense, not the mental hospital sense) with mental health as one goal among several such as long-term support in charge of dealing with the homeless. The numbers keep showing that the greatest fix we've found for homelessness is making sure that everyone has a home where they feel safe and private and don't have to do anything to "earn" much less keep that home.
Why the fuck are we so soft on these gutter trash in this country.
Our problem isn't insufficiently harsh punishment. Our problem is unlikely punishment. The US spends more on incarceration and less on policing and the justice system. You are less likely to get caught and punished in the US but if you get punished it's harsher. Yet studies have shown that a milder punishment that happens more swiftly and with higher certainty is much better for preventing crime.
Not sure that helps with mentally ill homeless but it's at least an improvement we could aim for
For more serious anti social behaviour like gun crimes, violent crimes and drug trafficking there are very strong mandatory penalties up to and including corporal punishment and execution.
Conviction rates in these countries are upwards of 99%. So in cases of intervention a punishment is almost certain.
It has repeatedly been shown that the severity of punishment does not sway crime nearly as much as the certainty of punishment does [1]. This all feels like a byproduct of the hyper-individualism we have in the West and the US, especially.
[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/670398
Influences related to migration have overwhelmed whatever support systems there are to tackle this.
The idea that we are soft on crime is insane.
Harsher punishments do not lead to lower crime.
Crime is committed at a higher rate than in any other advanced nation, though some of the others are catching up.
> The idea that we are soft on crime is insane
Not even a little bit insane. There are a million criminal laws on the books that do not get enforced at all. For example, I live in a state that is stereotypically conservative and "tough on crime" and any marijuana-related products are strictly illegal, most often at the felony level; yet I constantly smell it while driving on the road, no less! People are smoking while driving all the time. This cannot be described as anything but soft on crime.
The US system was overall built by and for people who are largely self-governing. This philosophy gets in the way of a true hard-on-crime pivot.
Fentanyl and meth seems to be largely a North America issue. I previously was curious how other countries dealt with it. The only country I found that had previously had a meth issue was Estonia or Latvia (not sure anymore). It apparently was really bad for years. They fixed it by finding the single meth lab. Not a solution that's viable for us.
No idea what Japan does with its homeless but my money is that it's something like forced admission which isn't gonna fly in the US.
It isn't a particular drug: if it isn't Fentanyl or meth it will be something else, whatever is available. In the UK it is a mixed bag, but for many the problem substance is alcohol which isn't controllable the way other drugs are because of it being legal and so commonly used in a non (or at least less) problematic manner.
The problem hits from two directions: many homeless people start the path to addiction by needing an escape and that escape method spirals and takes control, and a lot (not the majority by any means, but a sizable segment) end up destitute because of spiralling substance problems to start with.
Of course many homeless do not have a substance problem, or at least not one that would be insurmountable on its own. Financial issues (that wouldn't go away if you strip the cost of the illicit substances out, accommodation is not cheap and suitable jobs are not readily available, etc) and mental illness (separating this from drug issues is complex: "self medication" is of course a major complicating matter) are probably far more common.
> curious how other countries dealt with it
Not well, for the most part. From an outsiders PoV (sat in my small but comfortable flat with the paid mortgage and no drug issues, though the mental health thing needs work) it doesn't seem to be a bad as it has been in the past (maybe in part due to efforts to make it less visible rather than fixing the issues?) but is growing again and I suspect will do so more rapidly if AI does what it promises to the job market.
You can get a life sentence there for first offense import or manufacture of narcotics. Beyond that, your family will suffer socially.
It is not because the US doesn’t lock people up enough.
Once again, I don't know much about Japan but I doubt there is a large ethnic minority that is only about fifteen percent of the population but somehow accounts for almost half of all incarcerated people in Japan.
From Google:
> Low Incarceration Rates: Japan maintains one of the lowest incarceration rates in the developed world (roughly 35 to 40 prisoners per 100,000 residents, compared to over 500 per 100,000 in the US).
The homeless were people that could not care for themselves or be of use in some way. The grey area might be junkies.
This statement is very load-bearing in your whole argument though. Losing a job can completely derail a person's daily habits and cause their issues to worsen, either by the additional stress or by forgetting to keep their meds. It's downhill from there.
I had cousin who was homeless in San Diego. Over the years she came into money a couple times, either from family members or through inheritance. Instead of getting a place to live she figured drugs were a better use for that money. We tried everything to get her off the street, and nothing worked. She wouldn't even stay at a shelter. Because she had no intention of giving up the drugs.
They just don’t deserve to destroy our public places.
Often times, these "sweeps" just trash everything. Imagine if you were trying to put your life back together. You got an Obamaphone so you can call state assistance programs and email job prospects. You have some basic clothes, maybe some food, maybe some few possessions you have saved from your past life.
Then the cops come and take all of it and throw it away.
Gee, I wonder why it's so hard for people to escape homelessness in the US?
Imagine trying to live any life in a world that rejected your right to property?
How do you suggest that would work? Obviously you can’t just buy hope, so could you provide some specific ideas?
Anyone living in a tent city would most likely not only survive but thrive there
Unless you mean to say that you don't care either way if they do.
(If your value system places zero value on that, then my value system places positive value on spending your money on things you very explicitly don't value.)
If you were given strange meds that you don't understand anything about by someone who wasn't your personal doctor in a situation that feels like a prison out of your control, would you take them?
That's equally a straw man question, but a useful one to maybe establish empathy for the situation that homeless "guy" might have found himself in.
That's also assuming that is the correct proximate cause. As far as I know science has not yet found exactly a "don't use excrement as spray paint" drug. There are people that will do that which don't need meds and there are people that will do that even on most anti-psychotic meds.
But let's talk about some of the root cause of it all: If you find yourself in a world that you cannot control, that won't let you use any bathroom without buying a coffee/being a customer, that doesn't want you to exist, that says you are only as valuable as the property that you own but then won't allow you any longer to own any property due to some bad luck or misfortune, at that point "the only spray paint I have to send a message about how much this world sucks" might seem pretty clear.
I find it easy to have sympathy with that sort of (straw) man, because there is a logic to it. It's not necessarily a psychotic break. At least, not necessarily at first a psychotic break.
What would I personally do to prevent that? I'd try to prevent people from being homeless in the first place. I'd try to get people mental health resources sooner ahead of crises rather than trying it do it in the middle of a different one (bankruptcy/homelessness). Which is the same as I suggested statistically seems to be the only thing that works: give people private houses with locks and keys and help them feel safe and secure in them, with a sense of ownership and privacy, and with no need to "earn" it or "rent" to keep it. Maybe it doesn't stop the person from covering "their own" walls in feces until they feel safe and secure enough (and that's still a public health problem in the meantime) to try an antipsychotic med that they need to take. But as far as I'm aware no one wants to take or trust an antipsychotic medication if they don't at first feel like they live in a safe enough or secure enough place.
Which again also circles back to "institutions are almost the correct approach, but for the wrong reasons" I mentioned before. A place with mental health resources seems to be an important part of that, still, but I don't think you can address mental health problems in a prison, especially in a society that values private property and private spaces, without first addressing the problems around homeless not having access to private property and private spaces.
But yeah, that's mostly just my opinion on the subject based on statistics and studies that I've read. You don't have to take my word on it. One archived secondary source (with additional links): https://academicweb.nd.edu/~rwilliam/ndonly/readings/SocProb...
Because putting people in prison for weed does not stop people smoking weed.
When you see statistics about people incarcerated on marijuana charges, what they normally obscure is either that's not the only charge or they pled down from something more serious.
There isn't a single person in federal custody there for marijuana possession and only that.
About a half a dozen who were nearby when the bridge collapsed, and, of those, only two actually missed seeing it happen. *Everyone* heard it, though: a great roaring waterfall of concrete and steel that echoed across the derelict plains for minutes and miles. The local folk would have told you that it was the river flooding a month earlier what had done it; that, and the heat of that summer havign roasted the old tarmac to pieces. But that wouldn't have been the truth; not entirely. Their hindsight failed to reach past a few preceding seasons, the road's slow degradation after years of use and somewhat fewer years of maintenance as far beyond the horizon as the sea. The columns that supported the span, plunging deep into the river below it, had had great, sweeping cracks for as long as the youth who periodically swam out to tag them could remember. The chain link fence that ran along the bridge's sides had rusted through to a twisted ragged heap even before then.
The river the bridge had spanned was the _____, and the bridge itself - part of an interstate, from back when there had been states - had linked the northern and southern portions of Jefferson County (which still existed). Thankfully, no one was on it when it finally gave up the ghost. (For a few days, the Hughes of just south of the old rails were worried for their son, Kurt, who had failed to return home that evening; but he eventually turned up a week later, having spent the time with his girlfriend.)
The loss of the ancient connector meant 50 miles extra travel for anyone who wanted to get from Dodge to Shelley, already a 70-mile trek. With gas so hard to come by, that was no small thing. Rebuilding it would have been ideal, but the fact was that there was no one around who could possibly manage such a project; most of that expertise was locked up in Atlanta, New York-Jersey, Charlotte, and St. Louis, and not one of the territories so mentioned was on good terms with small, flyover, Sep-sympathizing Jefferson County. Besides that, there were scant funds for construction equipment and materials anyway; the curse of Jefferson's self-sufficiency knocking unwelcome on the doors of Jeffersonian hearts more often than any stranger. The bridge would not be rebuilt. So, after the commotion of the actual collapse had died down, and the locals had ceased stopping by to gaze at the ruins and shake their heads and scowl, the structure, half-submerged stone monolith, lay placid and abandoned.
None of this is really important, except for the part about the 50-mile detour. That... that is actually very important.
The Biker learned of the bridge's collapse well before reaching Jefferson County. For all that had broken down from neglect or sabotage or accident in this land over the years, it seemed that the grapevine was as resilient as ever. The proprietor of a public house - the one he'd stopped in at when it came time to transfer some of his precious fuel from an emergency tank to the hot rod proper - was the bearer of the bad news. He'd thanked her, pulled out the Handspring loaded with a bootleg map app, and started searching for a new route. This one wouldn't do, it was likely to be more of a still-glowing crater than a road; and that one, that one ran right through hardcore Sep territory. And this one... No, he'd definitely run out of fuel. ...Maybe the second, again? If he could be quick, go at the right time of day... Too risky, his common sense told him. Nonsense, said the impulsive part that had gotten him out of (and, admittedly, into) many a hairy situation. T could outrun any trouble he might find. And he wouldn't find any, because he would be very, very careful. 'You don't got a choice, bub. Gas isn't cheap OR plentiful.'
"Shit."
He hit the Handspring's power button and gingerly slid it back into his leather side saddle, and delayed his oncoming foolishness by taking the moment to glance around like he was looking for someone who was looking for him. Other than the pub, a converted vinyl-sided colonial, there was nothing but the coiled curves of cracked suburban roads and sidewalks; the mounded plots that lay along them, where the foundations of dozens of long-dismantled domiciles had once stood; and each building's replacements, bunches of grass and scrub, waving occasionally in the odd and rare breeze, which were staking out their own homesteads.I can pass along some of the inspiration, at least:
https://playlists.at/youtube/embed/?playlist=FdW1CjbCNxw%2CS...
The social net prevents homelessness.
We don't get broke because of medical bills.
Labor laws prevent being fired without prévenance.
Being fired grants you employment benefits.
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.
Of course people will come out and scream Gestapo! And talk about their freedoms, but are the only two choices in life complete anarchy and a police state? Can't we live somewhere in the middle like a reasonable society? It's really just slippery slope fallacies all the time like either we don't police at all or do north korea style surveillance.
Also the demonization of police, the need is to have better police, not no police! It's just absurd what people come up with, it's so unreasonable yet these ideas gain such a large following.
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.
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?
That's the point here, the invisible homeless are people who are _fully employed_ but they're still too poor to have homes to live in.
Gotta be some kind of weather vane for you guys.
One more thing:
> something as simple as lowering rent prices
Suppose you solve that (by market means, constructing an incredible amount of homes, or by communist means, by draconian rent-control cutting all rents by 70%). A 2-bedroom apartment in SF is now $1,200 and there are 50,000 of them vacant. Would these apartments not be immediately rented by 50,000 households from elsewhere who have always wanted to live there but haven't been able to afford it? Either the rents would shoot right back up if we're letting markets function, or the apartments would be insta-filled by a few very lucky people, with a years-long waiting list for any housing that ever opens up. There will always be one more person who will be happy to move to a great climate, top-tier city, unless the rents are obnoxiously high.
The better solution is definitely "build an incredible amount of homes" though $1200 probably is not be obtainable even at extreme ends of possibility. We also should consider it a region wide problem and not just an SF problem - the whole bay area needs to build more, as rents in Oakland, Daly City, San Mateo, etc are related to SF prices as well. If the region is going to add jobs we better add housing at the same rate, and we've massively failed at that.
But anyway if the market actually starts functioning as new supply appears any tent decrease would incrementally attract some new tenants from elsewhere. Rents only shoot back up if the supply increase isn't sustained addition, or we somehow artificially lower rents for a short period. In a functioning market we should find an equilibrium price and when demand spikes faster than units can be built, be development would spring up that in a few years would push prices back towards normal (as jobs / the economy clearly moves faster than new housing can be constructed). But even in the booms when construction should be seeing the influx of people with high salaries and trying to develop new housing to keep up... Well, the volume of new housing just didn't keep up.
I read an interesting article that laid out how that's ultimately rooted in what level of government pays for what. It's easier for local politicians to call for harsher punishment because prisons are run by state or federal but police is funded locally.
This is why you can get pulled over for a broken taillight in the US and have 3 police cars behind you complete with a K9 unit, but if that same car gets stolen, you'll probably get asked to make a report and never hear a peep from the police again.
The US also doesn't train police officers well compared to most European countries. In the US it takes just a few months to become a police officer. In Germany it takes years.
Very good conversation on the general topic: https://youtu.be/6gMwh3jkWy0?is=MiTI5N1wdEpd_izP
I'm not sure anyone has really cracked how to get it done without that part, though certainly tweaking the spending from prisons to police would help a lot. The trouble in the US at least is people (rightly) don't trust police, and don't want to give them more power, so it also needs to be paired with reform on that front for the population to accept it.
The UK already went down this road years ago - cameras everywhere, public restrooms nowhere, prompt and automatic ticketing for parking violations but precious little in the way of assistance from humans should you need it. The shut-in dotage of a former empire too afraid to leave its house.
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.
The more western solutions are compassionate containment like in Finland.
America cant make up its mind if it wants to be like China or Finland.
(It was news because the old building's stairs couldn't support the weight of the SWAT team and collapsed, injuring many of them.)
my Pakistani coworkers are absolutely wonderful. Sweet, hard-working, very enjoyable to talk to, but their families and lives are just a totally different universe and they don’t share it.
The honestly very poor black community around the area? they fucking hate us white people. like actively, all the time, no what no matter what you have or haven’t done they don’t like your ass one bit. i’ve seen inside some of the homes, and they are filled with independent black power movie posters about shooting Whitey. No kidding.
I know it takes a village, but when people are so very different and forced to be near each other, it doesn’t mean that they will socialize or help each other; it’s like living on two different planets. there’s all kinds of social research showing this now, and what you get is micro segregation along income lines, rather than everyone helping each other and lifting up the community together.
I wanted for most of my life for people to get along and the world to be a better place, thinking that education and modern access to information could somehow make things better. It seems that was entirely and completely wrong. when people have any kind of discomfort at all about new culture or new person or new idea? They pretty much just run away.
The people here on hacker news are probably an exception, because we are here searching for commentary and interesting ideas and new information.
Did you replace folks' smoke detector batteries for them?
The way I found to get around this prejudice was to go to church most Sundays and walk around with a sling bag full of 9V batteries and knock on doors to offer to maintain smoke detectors. (It probably didn't hurt that I was also good for bumming cigarettes off of and slowing down to have a chat.)
YMMV, but showing up and doing work was apparently what my neighbors in East St. Louis and Atlanta wanted.
It is not like that where I live.
The first generation of immigrants have trouble, natural enough. But are very keen that their children do better.
As for racism: Most racism here is systemic, from the state. There is casual ignorant racism, of course, but little hate.
What a mess has been made of your country. You should work to fix it.
It took us a lot of work to get here, and we have a long way to go. But I cannot imagine living in a society such as you describe.
Native Americans are not related to Romans.
Slaves brought by force from Africa neither.
That said, there's a joke that the white people version of this is the little bug in the lower right corner of the Windows desktop background that tattles on you for not having activated.
Which, like, y'know, that's fair.
I think identity rootlessness is an underestimated factor in immigration woes. Youth of all kinds can often be exploited into adopting a destructive self-identity, but some groups are more vulnerable. One notorious Swedish gang actively recruits from the foster care system.
It's wild to see how this flipped completely around in such a short time and now some markers of integration seem to go backwards and at the same time some consider it biggoted to demand/expect assimilation.
His grandfather made his fortune by operating a restaurant and a brothel for miners in Whitehorse during the Gold Rush years, his father compounded that with an actual real estate 'empire' and the grandson 'earnt' money via dodgy wealth transfer schemes and sank much of it into get rich quick scams and branding deals based on fraudulent representation and money laundering, now leading the country in historic levels of open corruption.
I agree with your analysis of the Trump family who have been detrimental for US society.
Unless Sweden in majority is prepared to broom out all that they have accepted in, then this how it is, a mix of cultures having to find common directions and minimise friction over the next generation and a half.