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Lack of bathrooms has been called tragedy of the commons in this thread, but it's not the "commons" that are the problem. The worst 10% of society determine wh
by xyzelement 2mo ago
Lack of bathrooms has been called tragedy of the commons in this thread, but it's not the "commons" that are the problem.
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.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 2mo agoI tried to find a good term for this trend and the best I could do is "defining deviancy down" defined as "the tendency of societies to respond to destructive behaviors by lowering standards for what is permissible." It's like a behavioral Overton window that grows downwards.
- gdevenyi 2mo agohttps://www.jstor.org/stable/41212064 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41212064
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 2mo agoExactly. Just need to find time to properly read this.
- arjie 2mo agoYou're right about who is causing the damage etc. but the 'commons' does not refer to the people; it refers to the shared resource. So a public park is the commons. And when it gets polluted with plastic rubbish etc. because externalities are not internalized that's a tragedy of the commons.
- xyzelement 2mo agoThanks for both teaching me and not losing the forest for the trees of my point.
- Exoristos 2mo agoThe fallacy in "the tragedy of the commons" is that there's something inherent in having a shared resource that dooms the shared resource. At least this is the popular understanding. And I'll add that if we look at shared resources both with more breadth -- e.g. across history and cultures -- and in more depth -- e.g. cross-analysis, they come out looking much more successful than you'd think.
- DavidWoof 2mo agoThat's not true. As with all game theory payouts, it's not saying that a Nash equilibrium is inevitable, it's saying that to avoid it you need incentives outside the game, it's saying that the incentives of the game itself don't suffice. 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.
- cortesoft 2mo agoThat isn’t what the tragedy of the commons is. It isn’t about something inherent in having a shared resource that dooms it. It is about the idea that when there is a limited, shared public resource, individuals making rational self-interested decisions will often lead to a situation which no individual would choose. That doesn’t mean it always has to end in tragedy, though. It just means you can’t just go fully “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.
- dragontamer 2mo agoMore specifically, tragedy of the commons is inevitable in a purely capitalist society. It's a pro-regulation argument.
- ackfoobar 2mo agoYou are of course right about what the word "commons" refers to. Still, I want to quibble. 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.
- ssl-3 2mo agoA reduction of public restrooms didn't stop the worst 10% of society from having public sex, shooting up drugs, or destroying an area with their lack of defacatory etiquette -- did it? 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.
- xyzelement 2mo agoAgreed. However it becomes unstable and a massive liability for society to maintain public restrooms. So yes the 10% fuck it up for everyone unless cracked down on.
- mym1990 2mo agoHow is maintaining public restrooms a "massive liability"? Surely its an inconvenience but massive liability seems a bit of a hyperbole.
- lotsofpulp 2mo agoTry 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. Or, think about how much someone would have to pay you to do that job.
- notact 2mo agoAlso: the liability of getting stuck with a needle.
- leviathant 2mo agoMy first job was "stockboy" at Kmart in 1996, at 1996 American minimum wage, and part of the job involved cleaning toilets. 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.
- floro 2mo agoWe are experiencing "changing consumer habits"
- paulpauper 2mo agoHomelessness and the post-2008 wave of poverty ruined it. A few people who need to use a public bathroom everyday is fine, but when you have 100x of ppl who are desuetude, on drugs, mentally ill etc. emptying their medications and needles and so on it becomes a public health hazard, attracts crime, and overwhelms staff. Better to just shut it down altogether or limit to staff only. .
- deadbunny 2mo agoGood thing that stops the "destitute, on drugs, mentally ill etc" from doing this simply by removing the public toilets right?
- skinfaxi 2mo agoWell it becomes someone else's problem, right? That kind of short-term thinking is in vogue at the moment.
- nxc18 2mo agoPortland put out portable toilets during the pandemic. They had big signs on them about how toilet access was a human right, or something like that. 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.
- deadbunny 2mo agoSeems like the problem is the utter lack of mental health support to me.
- 9x39 2mo agoThe utter lack of it? There's an entire industrial complex around homeless "support" to do magic tricks on money. 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.
- slig 2mo agoTen percent is way too optimistic, I'd say 20% are destroying everything for the majority.
- black6 2mo agoWe are all at the mercy of the bottom quintile. The rules you follow (or are expected to follow) are based on the behavior of the bottom quintile, the taxes you pay are to support the bottom quintile, the greatest risks to your life and property come from the bottom quintile, the dearth of comfortable public spaces is because you have to allow the bottom quintile to be there, and our zoning laws (in the US) are developed for fear of the bottom quintile.
- gjm11 2mo agoPretty much all of that is false. 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_United_States#/media/File:2023_US_Federal_Budget_Infographic.png 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.
- jiscariot 2mo agoAnd people with means, move from common to private spaces. Others will not have the same choice and things become more stratified, because a subset of society decided to cede public spaces.
- diogenescynic 2mo agoIt's because 50% of voters are choosing to decriminalize laws and make everything into the oppression olympics. California legislature just proposed allowing 'crimes of necessity' this week. We can't have nice things now because crimes are not enforced/prosecuted and there are no consequences. We're moving from a high trust to low trust society in rapid time.
- al_borland 2mo agoPeople who vote in favor of these soft on crime polices should be required to provide a room in their home to these people they want to keep out of jail.
- ebbi 2mo agoI don't think I quite agree with that. 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.
- xyzelement 2mo agoThis is real. But also "pee on the seat" is gross but not the level of damage a diseased homeless dude does to a bathroom.
- redox99 2mo agoThe distribution in those offices is probably the same, a small percentage of people cause almost all the nastiness.
- ajmurmann 2mo agoI'm of the opinion that the pee issue happens when there is no urinal. Insufficient urinals => no toilets in usable state.
- wildzzz 2mo agoFor several months, we had someone pissing on the floor of the men's room. I work at an engineering firm in the suburbs, these people all make $100k+ and most are senior professionals. I don't know if they found him by figuring out badge swipes (he hit a lot of bathrooms) or if he just stopped on his own. 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.
- kuschku 2mo ago> maybe some did it to be funny after the signs went up That's the antisocial behavior mentioned elsewhere in the thread.
- phendrenad2 2mo agoThe replies here really exemplify the core reason we have this problem - about 50% of the population (on HN, probably more outside of HN) doesn't understand that everything has an economic cost, and cleaning hepititis-infected needles and excrement smears up all day is an extremely costly activity, not just because no one wants to do it, but because if someone gets sick they'll sue the city for tens millions of dollars.
- baublet 2mo agoThis thread is more a reminder of how easy it will be to find people to man the gas chambers when Republicans turn their sights on the homeless. Some wretched dehumanizing of people here.
- matheusmoreira 2mo agoIs it really so surprising? 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.
- phendrenad2 2mo agoCorrect, as evidence, look how easy it was to make you overlook the current abuses of the homeless (at the hands of corrupt nonprofits) because it doesn't look sufficiently fascist to trigger you.
- hitekker 2mo agoSome people here seem to identify with that 10%.
- snvzz 2mo ago>The worst 10% In reality, about 2% or even less. We could live in paradise if we just removed them from society. Put them in a box.
- latexr 2mo agoYou’re suggesting imprisoning over 160 million people. That’s orders of magnitude higher than even the largest Holocaust estimates. It’s more than the population of Russia.
- pizzafeelsright 2mo agoNo. Not prison. Prison is inhumane. 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.
- latexr 2mo agoHN is getting insane. One person is suggesting “removing from society” 2% of people, the other is outright explicitly calling for their deaths, and the comment on the insanity and scale of it all is the one getting downvoted.
- pizzafeelsright 2mo agoRemoving people with whom the group with the power of the sword is exactly what happens. Religion A does not like Religion B which eventually leads to laws, wars, genocide. Most of these inside thoughts are not well accepted in a diverse, multicultural, professional setting so they go unspoken. I would also argue that the desire to remove 'them' is universal because of safety or desire. I think we disagree on the criteria which is really where the factions start their battle. Do we use criteria based upon belief, genetics, or agency?
- varispeed 2mo agoThe problem is lack of enforcement and the fact that politicians are disconnected from working class and most simply hate them and don't care. 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.
- peterfirefly 2mo ago> 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
- amilios 2mo agomake people pay and this problem is solved. it blows my mind that there is an obvious solution here that we simply refuse to touch because... principle?
- ackfoobar 2mo agoThis might be the your missing puzzle piece: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_in_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i...