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Seriously though, accountability is the missing thing. If getting banned for consistently making a mess is what it takes to get public bathrooms back, then so b

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

teddyh 4y ago
Some people think that a dictatorship is OK as long as the trains all run on time. The right way to solve the problem is not to harden the gatekeeping, but to improve society so that gatekeeping becomes unnecessary. But that’s hard, and has no obvious point where someone can extract money.
- ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
  What are the options to "improve society" so people don't make a mess in shared bathrooms? PSAs? Public shaming? Collateral put down to use bathrooms? Do you have any better and specific ideas? I can't think of much more gentle and more likely to motivate people to change behavior than a public accountability system, although it is regrettable that it must be run through a for-profit entity and look like a social credit score.
  - DoreenMichele 4y ago
    You improve society by starting where you are and going from there. I am glad to see a company trying to do something about this issue. I'm not thrilled with their solution but even if they fail, perhaps it at least gets people to stop accepting that nothing can be done about it.
  - DubiousPusher 4y ago
    Not worrying about it and accepting that sometimes life is gross?
    - derefr 4y ago
      Someone still has to clean the horrible mess; and that costs money (a lot of money, in the case where someone has created what's basically a biohazard by "writing in brown pen" on the walls); and companies / municipalities don't want to pay that money... which leads to the current situation, where there are basically no public bathrooms. "Just accepting it" is something individuals might do, but it's not something rational economic actors (like corporations) can do — they'll look at the costs of maintaining the bathroom, and decide they'd save money by not having a bathroom.
      - DubiousPusher 4y ago
        Human civilization survived open sewers, massive public latrines and unseperated water supply and waste. Not something I'd like to go back to by any means. But with modern knowledge and technology, and call me crazy if you like, I believe we can sanitize a few dozen poop disasters a day without bringing on a typhoid plague or breaking the bank.
        derefr 4y ago
        The more commonplace and universal something is, the less of a big deal people will feel it is to deal with. And vice versa. The very fact that we don’t all live in filth now, means that you have to pay a high premium to get someone to choose to be the person whose job constantly exposes them to it. See also: the profitability of electronics recycling (i.e. picking through piles of scrap for base metal to melt) in the developing vs. developed world. When people live in areas with mounds of trash piled all around them, they’ll dig through that trash for Pennie’s, because they already do thing like shoveling it out of the way every day. When people live in a nice house in a clean city, though, you’ll have to pay them a lot more to touch a scrap heap. (Or, to put that another way: it’s “but I might get tetanus!” vs. “My base risk of getting tetanus is so high that this job won’t increase my risk by much in relative terms… so sure, why not.”)
        DubiousPusher 4y ago
  - teddyh 4y ago
    Who makes a mess? People who don’t care, or who hate other people. How do we, as a society, make less of those? By investing in social programs, getting people out of poverty and drugs, civic education. Increasing the minimum wage. Eliminating wage theft. UBI. Will any of these work? I don’t know. But this is the way. Not stricter and stricter gatekeeping.
    - derefr 4y ago
      People who have all the privileges in the world still do horrible things to bathrooms. Ask any janitor working in a corporate office building. People who have nothing have no reason to care what others think; but people who have everything, and who never experience consequences for what they do, can be just as detached. Also, if you think about it, this service is fundamentally not meant to serve (or rather, avoid serving) the sorts of people you're picturing. These washrooms likely aren't intended to be placed in low-economic-class areas of cities. Homeless/drug addicts/etc aren't the problem they're intending to filter out. (Why not? Because those groups of people are used to being cronically un-bathroomed, and so have become inured to just finding a corner outside to do their business. See: San Francisco. When things like open port-a-potties are placed in these areas, the homeless ignore those and continue to do what they do.) Instead, I imagine that these bathrooms would be placed in generally bougie areas – the article cited public parks, but I imagine a major case would be "near food trucks in business districts." And the group they're trying to restrict access to, are "rich assholes who think society exists to serve them, and they owe nothing back." Consider, after all, the premise: you scan a QR code on your smartphone in order to get access. Who even has a smartphone with an active data plan? Not homeless people. This service is designed to serve exactly the same target audience as e.g. e-bikes/e-scooter rental services.
      - eurasiantiger 4y ago
        ”Who even has a smartphone with an active data plan? Not homeless people” You might be surprised.
        derefr 4y ago
  - askvictor 4y ago
    Education. Some of which needs to happen through parenting, so this is a multi-generational concept. But to start with, properly fund an education system.
    - creato 4y ago
      You think people are pooping on the sidewalk because they don’t know any better? Their first grade teacher failed them?
      - jotm 4y ago
        We were taught civics and society alongside math. Children/pupils/young adults also did cleaning, tree planting, everyday group work. I'm surprised some countries don't have that, it helps make a better society.
        NeutralCrane 4y ago
        Schools in America do the same. The issue is that outside of school, the lessons being taught by society are the exact opposite. It’s all about individualism and maximizing utility for one’s self while minimizing what one puts into society. Relying on our schools will educate us out of the problem won’t work. We have too many narcissists and sociopaths in our society, and we spend too much time catering to and rewarding them.
      - wizofaus 4y ago
        Given the way human faeces have been treated and disposed of throughout history, then yes, inherently we don't know any better than what we get taught growing up.
    - missedthecue 4y ago
      People destroy public property because we only spent $20,000 a year per person to educate them through high school? How much more to fix the problem? $1,000? $5,000?
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    >What are the options to "improve society" so people don't make a mess in shared bathrooms? 300% public shaming. Japan is an example of this working, to an unbelievably ideal extent even. Public restrooms in Japan are *clean*, they are spotless and sanitary no matter what time of day you visit one. You can probably eat off of those toilet seats, for all I know. The reason for this is because individuals who do not clean up after themselves in public spaces are shamed and ridiculed by Japanese society at large with no holds barred. It's "just not how upstanding members of society operate" to make a mess, be it in a public restroom or anywhere else, in Japan. You might see Japanese people picking up trash and cleaning up after themselves when leaving a public venue like a stadium or theater, probably other peoples' refuse too while they are at it. Frankly bewildering acts from the perspective of most westerners, but it's literally that sort of social attitude to be upstanding individuals that leads to clean public restrooms.
    - napier 4y ago
      That's part of the why but not the root of it. Underneath the social sanction element you mention is the fact that Japanese society raises people to give a thought for the sake of others, otherwise known in the west as manners / the golden rule.
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      > The reason for this is because individuals who do not clean up after themselves in public spaces are shamed and ridiculed by Japanese society at large with no holds barred. Not being from Japan, I’m curious: how does this work in practice? If I were to go into a bathroom in Japan and smear my own shit all over the walls and leave, 1. how does anyone know I did it, 2. if somehow someone actually knew I did it, how exactly would I be shamed and ridiculed, and 3. how would that negatively affect me if I didn’t care about shame or was incapable of feeling shame.
      - Dalewyn 4y ago
        That's the thing: It is deeply ingrained in the very foundations of Japanese culture and society to always conduct yourself in a manner that will at the very least not hinder others unnecessarily. Japanese are raised from the very beginning to be ashamed of making a mess and not cleaning up, to be ashamed of being irresponsible. Everyone is taught that "the Sun is watching you", that someone (or something!) somewhere is always watching you and judging you for your actions. A westerner might shit up a public restroom, intentionally or otherwise, and say to himself "I don't care; cleaning this up is the janitor's job." A Japanese person won't even dare, because they are taught to clean up regardless of a janitor. It is a common tradition and mandate in Japanese schools for students to clean their classrooms (and every-so-often even restrooms!) themselves at the end of the school day. Yes, the schools have janitors, the students are told to clean up themselves anyway because that's just how good people behave. This is all a facet of education and parenting, and the result of generations and millenia of such teachings. Their thought processes are fundamentally different from the west: A better society starts by being better individuals themselves first. Public restrooms in the west being an absolute shit show (pun intended) are a reflection of failed education and parenting in western society. The west can, and should, do better.
  - sto_hristo 4y ago
    First you have to know what you're actually up against. It's not a particular human behavior that is to blame, but stupidity itself. Some people are total morons and the behavior you're complaining against is merely a consequence of that. You can't defeat stupidity, it's a nature thing. You can suppress it though. Public shaming, forced fines, get violent with them... All these things work to certain degree and will get you through the day. But again - you're not solving the problem, you're just suppressing. Stupidity is ultimately unsolvable, because nature; and that is why all those utopic dreams always fail with impressive death counts.
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  The time tested way of improving society is widespread shaming and bottom up enforcement of norms. We don’t do that anymore, lest the liberties of the norm breakers are lost, and their feelings injured.
  - eurasiantiger 4y ago
    So… fascism?
    - Johnythree 4y ago
      No, Socialism. Let the local people decide. If the offenders thought that the locals might punish them, they would behave better.
      - eurasiantiger 4y ago
        No. They would just go elsewhere to commit offenses. Retributive justice is not really effective when the offender’s world view internally justifies their actions. It’s a common theme that criminals are victims of circumstance to such a degree that the enforcing entity is seen as another arm of the system that caused their criminal behavior in the first place. Imagine being in a car crash, having difficult pains, getting prescribed oxy- or hydrocodone, and after the script runs out, asking for a refill gets you a stamped as a drug seeker, never to receive another prescription ever again. But the pain and the withdrawals are still there. This has created an incredible numbed of convicted criminals and homeless people. A Venn diagram of these two populations overlaps with people who spend nights in public toilets.
        xyzzyz 4y ago
        > No. They would just go elsewhere to commit offenses. This is just denying the offenders all agency. If they literally cannot help but commit crime, the response from the society should then be to lock them up, as unfit to live in the society. I do not in fact believe that to be the case. Criminals have agency, and, as can be readily observed, respond to incentives too.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  >"but to improve society so that gatekeeping becomes unnecessary." I understand the sentiment but I ultimately find such a stance unhelpful and counterproductive because it is essentially saying the problems we face would go away if we only just created a utopia. Like, what's stopping us? Trying to create better public restrooms with a new system seems far more achievable than implementing a new socioeconomic system where no one feels like trashing public bathrooms and common areas.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    It doesn't need to be a utopia. Apartheid regimes or extreme poverty lead to gated compounds for the rich with depressing predictability. Toilets that exclude the poor are great for ensuring the rich have access to nice private toilets. Doesn't help those who can't afford the subscription fee.
    - ahtihn 4y ago
      > Toilets that exclude the poor are great for ensuring the rich have access to nice private toilets I don't think leaving toilets in a usable state after using them has anything to do with being rich or poor. It's not something that requires money.
    - Gareth321 4y ago
      > Apartheid regimes or extreme poverty The problem is that people are using these labels for countries like America, which clearly do not have Apartheid or extreme poverty. When one is so extreme in their beliefs and hyperbole, they are effectively asking for total social restructure. Ignoring the fact that such unhinged people should be nowhere near any such responsibility, the user above is correct: this will never happen. While these extremists wait for the glorious revolution, people in need today are missing out on good but not perfect solutions.
    - snapplebobapple 4y ago
- solatic 4y ago
  > gatekeeping becomes unnecessary This is pure fantasy. Society will always need prisons. Sure, there is much that society can and ought to do in order to reduce what may be judged as tragic or unnecessary incarcerations, but the incarceration rate will never be literally zero. Having prisons doesn't make society a "dictatorship".
  - bigthymer 4y ago
    > Society will always need prisons Not every society has needed prisons, especially smaller, tribal ones. Maybe our complex, global one currently does but I don't think it is a hard requirement.
    - crazygringo 4y ago
      Smaller tribal societies exiled you and you died. Or they just killed you. Prisons are an improvement over that.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    We were discussing banning people from social utilities, not setting prisoners free.
- Teever 4y ago
  Dude, I've seen disgusting messes in work bathrooms where everyone is well paid and free from the kinds of stresses and destitution that you're suggesting are the sole cause of this kind of behavior. Hell, I've seen a university professor walk out of a public bathroom without washing his hands after taking a shit. To be completely blunt people are fucking animals and many of them do these kinds of disgusting things in private bathrooms because they can do it with impunity. They don't care about other people and they revel in knowing that their disgusting behaviour is detrimental to the rest of us. Suggesting that we need to raise society up to some post-scarcity Star Trek utopia where all people are paragons of humanity before we can have clean public bathrooms is absurd.
- deltasevennine 4y ago
  >Some people think that a dictatorship is OK as long as the trains all run on time. Some people are influenced by propaganda and the historical connotations associated with the word "dictatorship." There's nothing inherently bad about the word, it's just the association. If you look at dictatorships objectively there are many successful examples. Here are a few modern ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictatorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictatorship That's just a couple. Your first reaction would be to say that the examples represent a minority. The problem is, though, if you look at ancient history, the most successful civilizations that prospered and succeeded were basically all empires with central rule. It shows that if you were intellectually unbiased, you would not simply dismiss "dictatorship" in a single sentence. Democracy is a recent phenomenon when viewed in terms of human history and, if anything, still experimental (there are many examples of complete failures of democratic governments). That being said, to swing it around to your statement. There is no definitive "right" way to solve a problem. Gatekeeping could work, and it could fail. Simply "improving society" can also lead to complete and utter failure. The inputs and various factors influencing the outcomes are so complex we cannot point to one way that works. So I say give gatekeeping a try. It's not like the government is doing this either... It's a business.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    > So I say give gatekeeping a try. It’s been tried. Many times. Throughout human history. It is littered with stratified societies, where every man had his lessers and betters to kick and cower before, respectively. This did not lead to any good outcomes. I say let equality and mutual respect have a chance.
    - deltasevennine 4y ago
      Uh yeah, and it's been tried with huge success as well. Huge huge success. Such one sided reasoning has no merit and is intellectually dishonest. I'm saying try it with restrooms. Because this hasn't been tried yet at all.
- nine_k 4y ago
  Improving society without accountability is hardly possible. Humans are not dark matter, they interact with each other very intensely. It's of course ideal when everyone is so nice and civilized that you don't need to lock your door. The problem is that such a society is a great hunting ground for a rare breaker, because it does not have a mechanism to resist breaking the rules. Such a breaker can inflict disproportionate damage and ruin things for everyone. Improving mores and living conditions should go hand in hand with protecting these improved mores and conditions from those who try to push the society back to the savage state for a minor benefit for themselves.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    You make it sound like the only alternative to solving all problems with shunning, ostracism and lifetime bans is to just let everybody do everything they want, and we don’t want that, do we, so let’s just do the first thing, huh? There will always be a small amount of people who don’t obey the social niceties. Some are psychopaths, or have some other mental problems. Some may have extenuating circumstances. But I believe that society can be improved such that these people are rare and far between, and society can invest in picking up the remaining slack. > Improving mores and living conditions should go hand in hand with protecting these improved mores and conditions from those who try to push the society back to the savage state for a minor benefit for themselves. Sounds great, except whenever such things are actually implemented, it tends to be a lot of steadily increasing punishment; any improvements, whatever they were initially, will eventually be cut from the budget since they do not give immediate visible results, whereas harsh punishment get great ratings. People love a good public flogging. This is a problem perpetuating itself. People don’t believe in the public spirit and goodwill of others, so they don’t want to invest in actually improving it, since they think it can’t be done. And so it goes.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Also, the dictatorship making the trains run on time was a lie. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/loco-motive/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/loco-motive/
eyelidlessness 4y ago
I’m tired of people being denied basic and non-scarce resources because some people presuppose they’re yucky (even while making people yucky with those presuppositions). If we’re banning anyone from public services, I’d start with those who want to deny those services to people who most need them, in the way most likely to reinforce their biases by denying them access.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Unattended, clean, public-accessible restrooms could very well be scarce resources.
- RHSeeger 4y ago
  From my point of view, it's not about being "yucky", it's about ruining it for others. If a bathroom is provided, and you convert it to a state that it cannot reasonably be used by others, then you don't get to use the next one. If free food is provided for people and you come in and take it all to sell it elsewhere, then you don't get to partake anymore. There is no way to provide things in a way that people cannot ruin them. And as long as people continue to ruin them (ie, we haven't yet "fixed society" as someone suggested above), we can either prevent those people from ruining them, or not provide them in the first place. I, for one, believe that "don't provide them in the first place" is not the right solution.
  - xyzzyz 4y ago
    In fact, denying the courtesies and benefits to norm breakers is exactly how you improve society. That’s like raising a child: you won’t convince a toddler with a reasoned argument about empathy, the value of preserving shared norms, and the benefits of delayed gratification. Instead, you tell them that if they misbehave, they don’t get to watch TV. Bums respond to incentives too.
    - Kaibeezy 4y ago
      This is basically the premise of the oddly compelling 2019 Spanish sci-fi/horror film, The Platform. Prisoners alternately experience privilege and deprivation, and it either makes them animals or socialists. Lots of food for thought, as it were. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Platform_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Platform_(film)
baron816 4y ago
This is a good summary for what it’s like to live in SF. There are lots of people around who are completely immune from any accountability and thus treat the whole city as a literal public toilet (and land fill).
- slumpt_ 4y ago
  Such is the consequence of a housing crisis and the downstream homelessness, despair, and of course mental illness. Don't give someone a roof and a toilet and they may just find any old place to go!
  - deltasevennine 4y ago
    Nah even the dog walkers here don't give a shit. The dogs piss and shit all over the entire city and the rich SF owners don't care.
    - atoav 4y ago
      This is what living in a society where winning more than the next person is the only thing that counts will give you. Why should anybody fulfill their part of the unspoken contract with the rest of society, if solidarity only goes one way? If people shall care about collective goods, there needs to be an actual collective spirit first. Places where this type of public infrastructure actually works are also places where people realized that you can't create a good society by letting the rich hoard their wealth and build walls while the homeless are beaten instead of helped. SF is a truly dystopian place in a certain sense.
      - jbuhbjlnjbn 4y ago
        Every company I have worked for has a certain number of people that are not capable, or willing, to leave the sanitary facilities in an acceptable state. From people actively soiling the facilities, to people not giving a fuck about leaving a mess (making a 'seat cover' out of tp, then leaving it on the floor; not cleaning after themselfes), to people with a 'not my job' egocentrical attitude. Those are studied engineers with good salaries, workplace stability. In Europe. The facilities are nice, bright and clean. Until those people leave them... From these lifelong experiences, I would guess there is a certain, not so small amount of people that are secretly incapable of altruistic behavior. For numerous reasons. Those ruin it for the rest of us. For this reason, as brutal and as it seems at first glance, I would really like to see such people identified and punished harshly for their parasitic selfishness.
trhway 4y ago
> If getting banned for consistently making a mess is what it takes to get public bathrooms back, then so be it. we have similar system already in place. It is called "no-fly list". Interesting that most of the people on this site is against it while seem to support the proposed "no-bathroom list". I wonder why so. May be it is because the people here allow for non-zero possibility that they may be subjected to the former while they are sure that the latter would never apply to them.
- borski 4y ago
  The no fly list is easy to end up on by simply having the wrong name. The “no bathroom” list blocks you if and only if you treat it poorly and make a mess. Not equivalent.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    You’re positing a theoretically perfect system. Compare instead with Google, who surely wouldn’t ban people for the wrong reasons, right?
belorn 4y ago
The system could hook into the medical records if we wanted to hear the excuses. The stereotype of old people going to the bathroom with a news paper exist for reasons, and it not because the toilet is such a soft chair to sit for 15-30 minutes. The toilet could include sensors for how soft or hard the stool is, and detect bacteria, in which case it could just add it to the users profile. Sticky and stinky urine, in combination with frequent needs are three major symptoms for a plethora of problems. Protein, from blood and mucus in either stool or urine are also both a big flag and they are very sticky to surfaces. Really sticky, and really stinky. Of course there is other reasons like drugs and alcohol. The restroom could detect those too and put it on the users permanent record.
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
  Have you noticed yourself sliding into fascist type thinking?
  - sdwr 4y ago
    First they came for the long poopers, and I did not speak out...
    - belorn 4y ago
      Give it a few decades and the probability of becoming one goes up significant. If anyone here is an Terry Pratchett fan, there is this scene with Cohen the Barbarian. The quote goes: the three best things in life are hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper. Its a joke with a bit of truth to it. Good teeth and good bowel movements are luxury objects that people tend to only notice when they lost them.
tomjen3 4y ago
I completely agree with you, and it is important to remember that all it takes is very few people to ruin it for everybody. With accountability comes consequences and that fixes the incentive function. However I also think the system requires something kinda like forgiveness, or maybe better yet, redemption. If, once you have been kicked out there is nothing you can do to be let back in then nothing incentivises you to better your actions. Maybe you could be let back in again by paying a cleaning fee, and having to provide pictures after you used the toilet for the next 40 times. Accountability is super important, but if you don't also have redemption then you end up with the US criminal system.
- teddyh 4y ago
  This is actually a reasonable counter-argument, were it not for the fact that practically every such systems, no matter how lofty their goals or how fair their initial rules, all eventually evolve to be instead a tool for oppression.
  - tomjen3 4y ago
    It is a tool of oppression right from the beginning, and its goal is to oppress certain behaviours so we can have a functional society.
    - teddyh 4y ago
      That is not the kind of oppression it will evolve into a tool for, though.
- antifa 4y ago
  What happens when you've been falsely accused? What happens when the person before you's 2/10 dirty is the person after you's 8/10 dirty? There's also a privacy problem with there being a poop log attached to our IDs.
teddyh 4y ago
No man is an island, entirely of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod is washed away by the sea, Europe is the lesser, as well as if a promontorie were, as well as if a manor of your friends or of your own were; any person’s ban diminishes me, because I am involved in the community; And therefore never ask to know onto who the banhammer falls; it falls on you. (With apologies to John Donne)
stuaxo 4y ago
In some places they have attendents for loos, that could work there. You need more budget put into these things.
giordano-bruno 4y ago

teddyh 4y ago

Some people think that a dictatorship is OK as long as the trains all run on time. The right way to solve the problem is not to harden the gatekeeping, but to improve society so that gatekeeping becomes unnecessary. But that’s hard, and has no obvious point where someone can extract money.

ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
What are the options to "improve society" so people don't make a mess in shared bathrooms? PSAs? Public shaming? Collateral put down to use bathrooms? Do you have any better and specific ideas? I can't think of much more gentle and more likely to motivate people to change behavior than a public accountability system, although it is regrettable that it must be run through a for-profit entity and look like a social credit score.
- DoreenMichele 4y ago
  You improve society by starting where you are and going from there. I am glad to see a company trying to do something about this issue. I'm not thrilled with their solution but even if they fail, perhaps it at least gets people to stop accepting that nothing can be done about it.
- DubiousPusher 4y ago
  Not worrying about it and accepting that sometimes life is gross?
  - derefr 4y ago
    Someone still has to clean the horrible mess; and that costs money (a lot of money, in the case where someone has created what's basically a biohazard by "writing in brown pen" on the walls); and companies / municipalities don't want to pay that money... which leads to the current situation, where there are basically no public bathrooms. "Just accepting it" is something individuals might do, but it's not something rational economic actors (like corporations) can do — they'll look at the costs of maintaining the bathroom, and decide they'd save money by not having a bathroom.
    - DubiousPusher 4y ago
      Human civilization survived open sewers, massive public latrines and unseperated water supply and waste. Not something I'd like to go back to by any means. But with modern knowledge and technology, and call me crazy if you like, I believe we can sanitize a few dozen poop disasters a day without bringing on a typhoid plague or breaking the bank.
      - derefr 4y ago
        The more commonplace and universal something is, the less of a big deal people will feel it is to deal with. And vice versa. The very fact that we don’t all live in filth now, means that you have to pay a high premium to get someone to choose to be the person whose job constantly exposes them to it. See also: the profitability of electronics recycling (i.e. picking through piles of scrap for base metal to melt) in the developing vs. developed world. When people live in areas with mounds of trash piled all around them, they’ll dig through that trash for Pennie’s, because they already do thing like shoveling it out of the way every day. When people live in a nice house in a clean city, though, you’ll have to pay them a lot more to touch a scrap heap. (Or, to put that another way: it’s “but I might get tetanus!” vs. “My base risk of getting tetanus is so high that this job won’t increase my risk by much in relative terms… so sure, why not.”)
        DubiousPusher 4y ago
- teddyh 4y ago
  Who makes a mess? People who don’t care, or who hate other people. How do we, as a society, make less of those? By investing in social programs, getting people out of poverty and drugs, civic education. Increasing the minimum wage. Eliminating wage theft. UBI. Will any of these work? I don’t know. But this is the way. Not stricter and stricter gatekeeping.
  - derefr 4y ago
    People who have all the privileges in the world still do horrible things to bathrooms. Ask any janitor working in a corporate office building. People who have nothing have no reason to care what others think; but people who have everything, and who never experience consequences for what they do, can be just as detached. Also, if you think about it, this service is fundamentally not meant to serve (or rather, avoid serving) the sorts of people you're picturing. These washrooms likely aren't intended to be placed in low-economic-class areas of cities. Homeless/drug addicts/etc aren't the problem they're intending to filter out. (Why not? Because those groups of people are used to being cronically un-bathroomed, and so have become inured to just finding a corner outside to do their business. See: San Francisco. When things like open port-a-potties are placed in these areas, the homeless ignore those and continue to do what they do.) Instead, I imagine that these bathrooms would be placed in generally bougie areas – the article cited public parks, but I imagine a major case would be "near food trucks in business districts." And the group they're trying to restrict access to, are "rich assholes who think society exists to serve them, and they owe nothing back." Consider, after all, the premise: you scan a QR code on your smartphone in order to get access. Who even has a smartphone with an active data plan? Not homeless people. This service is designed to serve exactly the same target audience as e.g. e-bikes/e-scooter rental services.
    - eurasiantiger 4y ago
      ”Who even has a smartphone with an active data plan? Not homeless people” You might be surprised.
      - derefr 4y ago
- askvictor 4y ago
  Education. Some of which needs to happen through parenting, so this is a multi-generational concept. But to start with, properly fund an education system.
  - creato 4y ago
    You think people are pooping on the sidewalk because they don’t know any better? Their first grade teacher failed them?
    - jotm 4y ago
      We were taught civics and society alongside math. Children/pupils/young adults also did cleaning, tree planting, everyday group work. I'm surprised some countries don't have that, it helps make a better society.
      - NeutralCrane 4y ago
        Schools in America do the same. The issue is that outside of school, the lessons being taught by society are the exact opposite. It’s all about individualism and maximizing utility for one’s self while minimizing what one puts into society. Relying on our schools will educate us out of the problem won’t work. We have too many narcissists and sociopaths in our society, and we spend too much time catering to and rewarding them.
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      Given the way human faeces have been treated and disposed of throughout history, then yes, inherently we don't know any better than what we get taught growing up.
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    People destroy public property because we only spent $20,000 a year per person to educate them through high school? How much more to fix the problem? $1,000? $5,000?
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  >What are the options to "improve society" so people don't make a mess in shared bathrooms? 300% public shaming. Japan is an example of this working, to an unbelievably ideal extent even. Public restrooms in Japan are *clean*, they are spotless and sanitary no matter what time of day you visit one. You can probably eat off of those toilet seats, for all I know. The reason for this is because individuals who do not clean up after themselves in public spaces are shamed and ridiculed by Japanese society at large with no holds barred. It's "just not how upstanding members of society operate" to make a mess, be it in a public restroom or anywhere else, in Japan. You might see Japanese people picking up trash and cleaning up after themselves when leaving a public venue like a stadium or theater, probably other peoples' refuse too while they are at it. Frankly bewildering acts from the perspective of most westerners, but it's literally that sort of social attitude to be upstanding individuals that leads to clean public restrooms.
  - napier 4y ago
    That's part of the why but not the root of it. Underneath the social sanction element you mention is the fact that Japanese society raises people to give a thought for the sake of others, otherwise known in the west as manners / the golden rule.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    > The reason for this is because individuals who do not clean up after themselves in public spaces are shamed and ridiculed by Japanese society at large with no holds barred. Not being from Japan, I’m curious: how does this work in practice? If I were to go into a bathroom in Japan and smear my own shit all over the walls and leave, 1. how does anyone know I did it, 2. if somehow someone actually knew I did it, how exactly would I be shamed and ridiculed, and 3. how would that negatively affect me if I didn’t care about shame or was incapable of feeling shame.
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      That's the thing: It is deeply ingrained in the very foundations of Japanese culture and society to always conduct yourself in a manner that will at the very least not hinder others unnecessarily. Japanese are raised from the very beginning to be ashamed of making a mess and not cleaning up, to be ashamed of being irresponsible. Everyone is taught that "the Sun is watching you", that someone (or something!) somewhere is always watching you and judging you for your actions. A westerner might shit up a public restroom, intentionally or otherwise, and say to himself "I don't care; cleaning this up is the janitor's job." A Japanese person won't even dare, because they are taught to clean up regardless of a janitor. It is a common tradition and mandate in Japanese schools for students to clean their classrooms (and every-so-often even restrooms!) themselves at the end of the school day. Yes, the schools have janitors, the students are told to clean up themselves anyway because that's just how good people behave. This is all a facet of education and parenting, and the result of generations and millenia of such teachings. Their thought processes are fundamentally different from the west: A better society starts by being better individuals themselves first. Public restrooms in the west being an absolute shit show (pun intended) are a reflection of failed education and parenting in western society. The west can, and should, do better.
- sto_hristo 4y ago
  First you have to know what you're actually up against. It's not a particular human behavior that is to blame, but stupidity itself. Some people are total morons and the behavior you're complaining against is merely a consequence of that. You can't defeat stupidity, it's a nature thing. You can suppress it though. Public shaming, forced fines, get violent with them... All these things work to certain degree and will get you through the day. But again - you're not solving the problem, you're just suppressing. Stupidity is ultimately unsolvable, because nature; and that is why all those utopic dreams always fail with impressive death counts.
xyzzyz 4y ago
The time tested way of improving society is widespread shaming and bottom up enforcement of norms. We don’t do that anymore, lest the liberties of the norm breakers are lost, and their feelings injured.
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
  So… fascism?
  - Johnythree 4y ago
    No, Socialism. Let the local people decide. If the offenders thought that the locals might punish them, they would behave better.
    - eurasiantiger 4y ago
      No. They would just go elsewhere to commit offenses. Retributive justice is not really effective when the offender’s world view internally justifies their actions. It’s a common theme that criminals are victims of circumstance to such a degree that the enforcing entity is seen as another arm of the system that caused their criminal behavior in the first place. Imagine being in a car crash, having difficult pains, getting prescribed oxy- or hydrocodone, and after the script runs out, asking for a refill gets you a stamped as a drug seeker, never to receive another prescription ever again. But the pain and the withdrawals are still there. This has created an incredible numbed of convicted criminals and homeless people. A Venn diagram of these two populations overlaps with people who spend nights in public toilets.
      - xyzzyz 4y ago
        > No. They would just go elsewhere to commit offenses. This is just denying the offenders all agency. If they literally cannot help but commit crime, the response from the society should then be to lock them up, as unfit to live in the society. I do not in fact believe that to be the case. Criminals have agency, and, as can be readily observed, respond to incentives too.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
>"but to improve society so that gatekeeping becomes unnecessary." I understand the sentiment but I ultimately find such a stance unhelpful and counterproductive because it is essentially saying the problems we face would go away if we only just created a utopia. Like, what's stopping us? Trying to create better public restrooms with a new system seems far more achievable than implementing a new socioeconomic system where no one feels like trashing public bathrooms and common areas.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  It doesn't need to be a utopia. Apartheid regimes or extreme poverty lead to gated compounds for the rich with depressing predictability. Toilets that exclude the poor are great for ensuring the rich have access to nice private toilets. Doesn't help those who can't afford the subscription fee.
  - ahtihn 4y ago
    > Toilets that exclude the poor are great for ensuring the rich have access to nice private toilets I don't think leaving toilets in a usable state after using them has anything to do with being rich or poor. It's not something that requires money.
  - Gareth321 4y ago
    > Apartheid regimes or extreme poverty The problem is that people are using these labels for countries like America, which clearly do not have Apartheid or extreme poverty. When one is so extreme in their beliefs and hyperbole, they are effectively asking for total social restructure. Ignoring the fact that such unhinged people should be nowhere near any such responsibility, the user above is correct: this will never happen. While these extremists wait for the glorious revolution, people in need today are missing out on good but not perfect solutions.
  - snapplebobapple 4y ago
solatic 4y ago
> gatekeeping becomes unnecessary This is pure fantasy. Society will always need prisons. Sure, there is much that society can and ought to do in order to reduce what may be judged as tragic or unnecessary incarcerations, but the incarceration rate will never be literally zero. Having prisons doesn't make society a "dictatorship".
- bigthymer 4y ago
  > Society will always need prisons Not every society has needed prisons, especially smaller, tribal ones. Maybe our complex, global one currently does but I don't think it is a hard requirement.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    Smaller tribal societies exiled you and you died. Or they just killed you. Prisons are an improvement over that.
- teddyh 4y ago
  We were discussing banning people from social utilities, not setting prisoners free.
Teever 4y ago
Dude, I've seen disgusting messes in work bathrooms where everyone is well paid and free from the kinds of stresses and destitution that you're suggesting are the sole cause of this kind of behavior. Hell, I've seen a university professor walk out of a public bathroom without washing his hands after taking a shit. To be completely blunt people are fucking animals and many of them do these kinds of disgusting things in private bathrooms because they can do it with impunity. They don't care about other people and they revel in knowing that their disgusting behaviour is detrimental to the rest of us. Suggesting that we need to raise society up to some post-scarcity Star Trek utopia where all people are paragons of humanity before we can have clean public bathrooms is absurd.
deltasevennine 4y ago
>Some people think that a dictatorship is OK as long as the trains all run on time. Some people are influenced by propaganda and the historical connotations associated with the word "dictatorship." There's nothing inherently bad about the word, it's just the association. If you look at dictatorships objectively there are many successful examples. Here are a few modern ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictatorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictatorship That's just a couple. Your first reaction would be to say that the examples represent a minority. The problem is, though, if you look at ancient history, the most successful civilizations that prospered and succeeded were basically all empires with central rule. It shows that if you were intellectually unbiased, you would not simply dismiss "dictatorship" in a single sentence. Democracy is a recent phenomenon when viewed in terms of human history and, if anything, still experimental (there are many examples of complete failures of democratic governments). That being said, to swing it around to your statement. There is no definitive "right" way to solve a problem. Gatekeeping could work, and it could fail. Simply "improving society" can also lead to complete and utter failure. The inputs and various factors influencing the outcomes are so complex we cannot point to one way that works. So I say give gatekeeping a try. It's not like the government is doing this either... It's a business.
- teddyh 4y ago
  > So I say give gatekeeping a try. It’s been tried. Many times. Throughout human history. It is littered with stratified societies, where every man had his lessers and betters to kick and cower before, respectively. This did not lead to any good outcomes. I say let equality and mutual respect have a chance.
  - deltasevennine 4y ago
    Uh yeah, and it's been tried with huge success as well. Huge huge success. Such one sided reasoning has no merit and is intellectually dishonest. I'm saying try it with restrooms. Because this hasn't been tried yet at all.
nine_k 4y ago
Improving society without accountability is hardly possible. Humans are not dark matter, they interact with each other very intensely. It's of course ideal when everyone is so nice and civilized that you don't need to lock your door. The problem is that such a society is a great hunting ground for a rare breaker, because it does not have a mechanism to resist breaking the rules. Such a breaker can inflict disproportionate damage and ruin things for everyone. Improving mores and living conditions should go hand in hand with protecting these improved mores and conditions from those who try to push the society back to the savage state for a minor benefit for themselves.
- teddyh 4y ago
  You make it sound like the only alternative to solving all problems with shunning, ostracism and lifetime bans is to just let everybody do everything they want, and we don’t want that, do we, so let’s just do the first thing, huh? There will always be a small amount of people who don’t obey the social niceties. Some are psychopaths, or have some other mental problems. Some may have extenuating circumstances. But I believe that society can be improved such that these people are rare and far between, and society can invest in picking up the remaining slack. > Improving mores and living conditions should go hand in hand with protecting these improved mores and conditions from those who try to push the society back to the savage state for a minor benefit for themselves. Sounds great, except whenever such things are actually implemented, it tends to be a lot of steadily increasing punishment; any improvements, whatever they were initially, will eventually be cut from the budget since they do not give immediate visible results, whereas harsh punishment get great ratings. People love a good public flogging. This is a problem perpetuating itself. People don’t believe in the public spirit and goodwill of others, so they don’t want to invest in actually improving it, since they think it can’t be done. And so it goes.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Also, the dictatorship making the trains run on time was a lie. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/loco-motive/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/loco-motive/

eyelidlessness 4y ago

I’m tired of people being denied basic and non-scarce resources because some people presuppose they’re yucky (even while making people yucky with those presuppositions). If we’re banning anyone from public services, I’d start with those who want to deny those services to people who most need them, in the way most likely to reinforce their biases by denying them access.

sokoloff 4y ago
Unattended, clean, public-accessible restrooms could very well be scarce resources.
RHSeeger 4y ago
From my point of view, it's not about being "yucky", it's about ruining it for others. If a bathroom is provided, and you convert it to a state that it cannot reasonably be used by others, then you don't get to use the next one. If free food is provided for people and you come in and take it all to sell it elsewhere, then you don't get to partake anymore. There is no way to provide things in a way that people cannot ruin them. And as long as people continue to ruin them (ie, we haven't yet "fixed society" as someone suggested above), we can either prevent those people from ruining them, or not provide them in the first place. I, for one, believe that "don't provide them in the first place" is not the right solution.
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  In fact, denying the courtesies and benefits to norm breakers is exactly how you improve society. That’s like raising a child: you won’t convince a toddler with a reasoned argument about empathy, the value of preserving shared norms, and the benefits of delayed gratification. Instead, you tell them that if they misbehave, they don’t get to watch TV. Bums respond to incentives too.
  - Kaibeezy 4y ago
    This is basically the premise of the oddly compelling 2019 Spanish sci-fi/horror film, The Platform. Prisoners alternately experience privilege and deprivation, and it either makes them animals or socialists. Lots of food for thought, as it were. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Platform_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Platform_(film)

baron816 4y ago

This is a good summary for what it’s like to live in SF. There are lots of people around who are completely immune from any accountability and thus treat the whole city as a literal public toilet (and land fill).

slumpt_ 4y ago
Such is the consequence of a housing crisis and the downstream homelessness, despair, and of course mental illness. Don't give someone a roof and a toilet and they may just find any old place to go!
- deltasevennine 4y ago
  Nah even the dog walkers here don't give a shit. The dogs piss and shit all over the entire city and the rich SF owners don't care.
  - atoav 4y ago
    This is what living in a society where winning more than the next person is the only thing that counts will give you. Why should anybody fulfill their part of the unspoken contract with the rest of society, if solidarity only goes one way? If people shall care about collective goods, there needs to be an actual collective spirit first. Places where this type of public infrastructure actually works are also places where people realized that you can't create a good society by letting the rich hoard their wealth and build walls while the homeless are beaten instead of helped. SF is a truly dystopian place in a certain sense.
    - jbuhbjlnjbn 4y ago
      Every company I have worked for has a certain number of people that are not capable, or willing, to leave the sanitary facilities in an acceptable state. From people actively soiling the facilities, to people not giving a fuck about leaving a mess (making a 'seat cover' out of tp, then leaving it on the floor; not cleaning after themselfes), to people with a 'not my job' egocentrical attitude. Those are studied engineers with good salaries, workplace stability. In Europe. The facilities are nice, bright and clean. Until those people leave them... From these lifelong experiences, I would guess there is a certain, not so small amount of people that are secretly incapable of altruistic behavior. For numerous reasons. Those ruin it for the rest of us. For this reason, as brutal and as it seems at first glance, I would really like to see such people identified and punished harshly for their parasitic selfishness.

trhway 4y ago

> If getting banned for consistently making a mess is what it takes to get public bathrooms back, then so be it. we have similar system already in place. It is called "no-fly list". Interesting that most of the people on this site is against it while seem to support the proposed "no-bathroom list". I wonder why so. May be it is because the people here allow for non-zero possibility that they may be subjected to the former while they are sure that the latter would never apply to them.

borski 4y ago
The no fly list is easy to end up on by simply having the wrong name. The “no bathroom” list blocks you if and only if you treat it poorly and make a mess. Not equivalent.
- teddyh 4y ago
  You’re positing a theoretically perfect system. Compare instead with Google, who surely wouldn’t ban people for the wrong reasons, right?

belorn 4y ago

The system could hook into the medical records if we wanted to hear the excuses. The stereotype of old people going to the bathroom with a news paper exist for reasons, and it not because the toilet is such a soft chair to sit for 15-30 minutes. The toilet could include sensors for how soft or hard the stool is, and detect bacteria, in which case it could just add it to the users profile. Sticky and stinky urine, in combination with frequent needs are three major symptoms for a plethora of problems. Protein, from blood and mucus in either stool or urine are also both a big flag and they are very sticky to surfaces. Really sticky, and really stinky. Of course there is other reasons like drugs and alcohol. The restroom could detect those too and put it on the users permanent record.

eurasiantiger 4y ago
Have you noticed yourself sliding into fascist type thinking?
- sdwr 4y ago
  First they came for the long poopers, and I did not speak out...
  - belorn 4y ago
    Give it a few decades and the probability of becoming one goes up significant. If anyone here is an Terry Pratchett fan, there is this scene with Cohen the Barbarian. The quote goes: the three best things in life are hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper. Its a joke with a bit of truth to it. Good teeth and good bowel movements are luxury objects that people tend to only notice when they lost them.

tomjen3 4y ago

I completely agree with you, and it is important to remember that all it takes is very few people to ruin it for everybody. With accountability comes consequences and that fixes the incentive function. However I also think the system requires something kinda like forgiveness, or maybe better yet, redemption. If, once you have been kicked out there is nothing you can do to be let back in then nothing incentivises you to better your actions. Maybe you could be let back in again by paying a cleaning fee, and having to provide pictures after you used the toilet for the next 40 times. Accountability is super important, but if you don't also have redemption then you end up with the US criminal system.

teddyh 4y ago
This is actually a reasonable counter-argument, were it not for the fact that practically every such systems, no matter how lofty their goals or how fair their initial rules, all eventually evolve to be instead a tool for oppression.
- tomjen3 4y ago
  It is a tool of oppression right from the beginning, and its goal is to oppress certain behaviours so we can have a functional society.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    That is not the kind of oppression it will evolve into a tool for, though.
antifa 4y ago
What happens when you've been falsely accused? What happens when the person before you's 2/10 dirty is the person after you's 8/10 dirty? There's also a privacy problem with there being a poop log attached to our IDs.

teddyh 4y ago

No man is an island, entirely of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod is washed away by the sea, Europe is the lesser, as well as if a promontorie were, as well as if a manor of your friends or of your own were; any person’s ban diminishes me, because I am involved in the community; And therefore never ask to know onto who the banhammer falls; it falls on you. (With apologies to John Donne)

stuaxo 4y ago

In some places they have attendents for loos, that could work there. You need more budget put into these things.

giordano-bruno 4y ago