3 ms·

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 r

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)
teddyh 4y ago
The only acceptable short-term solution I can think of at the moment is simply to increase the cleaning until the bathrooms are always acceptable. There are some things which could be done to turn this from prohibitively expensive to simply very expensive one: One idea mentioned in the article is to turn a tradidional timer-based activity to a level-based trigger; i.e. if you have two bathrooms at the same location, and a reporting function so that every time someone sees an unacceptable bathroom, it is promptly cleaned while the other bathroom provides redundancy. This way, it only gets cleaned when necessary instead of periodically. This is, of course, only papering over the problem in the short run. Which is why the real solution must be to improve society. Ostracizing people who behave badly will only make society worse.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  Ye. People are overstating the problem with having public bathrooms. It is just that it need cleaning like hourly and be closed during night so people don't sleep there. Even if you don't have users who pee all over the ring and floor the bathroom will look like a mess after 100 visits.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    We have 4 people who live in our house. I don’t track bathroom visits, but I’m pretty sure we each average 5 per day or 140 per week, with one bathroom getting 75-85% of the usage. We clean the bathrooms every two weeks and it’s far from “a mess” when it comes time to clean it, so much so that we need to have a calendar reminder to do it. I think there’s something about “the public” that’s underlying that difference.

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)

teddyh 4y ago

The only acceptable short-term solution I can think of at the moment is simply to increase the cleaning until the bathrooms are always acceptable. There are some things which could be done to turn this from prohibitively expensive to simply very expensive one: One idea mentioned in the article is to turn a tradidional timer-based activity to a level-based trigger; i.e. if you have two bathrooms at the same location, and a reporting function so that every time someone sees an unacceptable bathroom, it is promptly cleaned while the other bathroom provides redundancy. This way, it only gets cleaned when necessary instead of periodically. This is, of course, only papering over the problem in the short run. Which is why the real solution must be to improve society. Ostracizing people who behave badly will only make society worse.

rightbyte 4y ago
Ye. People are overstating the problem with having public bathrooms. It is just that it need cleaning like hourly and be closed during night so people don't sleep there. Even if you don't have users who pee all over the ring and floor the bathroom will look like a mess after 100 visits.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  We have 4 people who live in our house. I don’t track bathroom visits, but I’m pretty sure we each average 5 per day or 140 per week, with one bathroom getting 75-85% of the usage. We clean the bathrooms every two weeks and it’s far from “a mess” when it comes time to clean it, so much so that we need to have a calendar reminder to do it. I think there’s something about “the public” that’s underlying that difference.