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EU(or US) can't have public toilets because it's gonna get vandalized. For fun. One thing that perplexed me endlessly during my youth living in Sweden was seei

EU(or US) can't have public toilets because it's gonna get vandalized. For fun. 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

mancerayder 1mo ago
How is that not connected to police enforcement, though? In Europe and now the US the new generations are anti-police, anti-enforcement and generally consider authority and rules to be proof of an unjust society (X group is N percent more likely to receive a criminal summons when ..). 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.
- tomrod 1mo ago
  Enforcement is an external impetus. Internal impetus are better to cultivate. I can't answer how cultures tend to differ here from my limited vantage point, so what I'm really saying is respect doesn't come by itself typically.
  - x-complexity 1mo ago
    > Enforcement is an external impetus. Internal impetus are better to cultivate. Internal impetus cannot be cultivated if the youth do not want or desire to be taught cultivation.
    - tomrod 1mo ago
      Ish. Spare the rod, spoil the child type approaches haven't seemed to hold true in my experience.
- enaaem 1mo ago
  I cannot speak for the US, but having been in Europe and Asian countries like Japan and Korea, the simplest explanation is the difference in tolerance for petty crime, vandalism and litter. Is related to the broken window theory. 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.
  - ricardobayes 1mo ago
    That's right. We seem to have "allowed" or tolerated petty crime in most Europe. When I tell my foreign friends what kind of stuff happens in my area they always extrapolate and tell me I live in "8 mile". But it's not the case, almost everywhere in Europe has property crime (pickpocketing and burglaries), bigger stuff however is very rare.
dominicl 1mo ago
+1 Based on my perception of being raised in Germany but have lived in Asia for quite some time this is a deep cultural issue in the west. Concepts such as the German 1968 "Macht kaputt was euch kaputt macht" (break what breaks you), 'civil disobedience' but even "Sabotage" born during the industrial revolution as a workers uprising are all deeply embedded culturally. Not all of them I would like to give up, but it's hard to draw the line. 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.
mapt 1mo ago
Opsec permitting, how long ago was this? 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.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
RajT88 1mo ago
> EU(or US) can't have public toilets because it's gonna get vandalized. For fun. 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).
- tech2 1mo ago
  Historically that was always part of the bragging rights. The harder to reach, or more risky location, the higher the cred for having achieved it.
ajsnigrutin 1mo ago
It's not collectivism, it's the "no consequences" thing. "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.
- oogali 1mo ago
  I remember this “time” in my US classroom where we were all punished with if one person damaged classroom property (or worse, school property) but no one was willing to speak up and tell on the offender. 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.
MisterTea 1mo ago
Bathrooms aren't always closed because of vandalizing. NYC public schools lacked bathrooms and stall doors -- the various heroin epidemics saw to that. Schools closed boys bathrooms and removed stall doors to discourage drug use. 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.
- alistairSH 1mo ago
  That's not the norm across the US (thought it might have been for urban areas). 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.
- everdrive 1mo ago
  >-- the various heroin epidemics saw to that. But hey, it's walkable!
serf 1mo ago
I don't disagree with your points, but have you ever considered it strange that you're unable to relate to why someone would want to do something for fun? 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.
- NalNezumi 1mo ago
  I don't disagree to your points, but Asia (Japan specifically for me, since I had the opportunity to attend both school system) have vandalism and delinquent just the same as America/Europe. 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."
parineum 1mo ago
> 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. 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.
- samus 1mo ago
  > I think you'd find less graffiti in a rural bathroom than a large city bathroom. IMHO that's purely due to differences in population density.
  - parineum 1mo ago
    I'm not sure that matters so much, a toilet can only handle so much traffic. I suspect a wal-mart bathroom sees similar traffic, regardless of location.
    - samus 1mo ago
      Wal-Mart has a direct, strong financial motivation to maintain that public bathroom: Customers that have to leave because they have to go to the toilet will buy less things.
- SubmarineClub 1mo ago
  Yup, drive to any town a few miles outside a city and the bathrooms will be nice and clean, drug stores won’t have everything locked up, cafes and gas stations don’t have all their bathrooms locked up with keypads. Hmmm…remind me again why I should trust ‘team blue’ with running my city?
charcircuit 1mo ago
The US has public toilets.
- SirMaster 1mo ago
  Yeah I don't get this, there are plentiful public toilets all over the US.

mancerayder 1mo ago

How is that not connected to police enforcement, though? In Europe and now the US the new generations are anti-police, anti-enforcement and generally consider authority and rules to be proof of an unjust society (X group is N percent more likely to receive a criminal summons when ..). 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.

tomrod 1mo ago
Enforcement is an external impetus. Internal impetus are better to cultivate. I can't answer how cultures tend to differ here from my limited vantage point, so what I'm really saying is respect doesn't come by itself typically.
- x-complexity 1mo ago
  > Enforcement is an external impetus. Internal impetus are better to cultivate. Internal impetus cannot be cultivated if the youth do not want or desire to be taught cultivation.
  - tomrod 1mo ago
    Ish. Spare the rod, spoil the child type approaches haven't seemed to hold true in my experience.
enaaem 1mo ago
I cannot speak for the US, but having been in Europe and Asian countries like Japan and Korea, the simplest explanation is the difference in tolerance for petty crime, vandalism and litter. Is related to the broken window theory. 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.
- ricardobayes 1mo ago
  That's right. We seem to have "allowed" or tolerated petty crime in most Europe. When I tell my foreign friends what kind of stuff happens in my area they always extrapolate and tell me I live in "8 mile". But it's not the case, almost everywhere in Europe has property crime (pickpocketing and burglaries), bigger stuff however is very rare.

dominicl 1mo ago

+1 Based on my perception of being raised in Germany but have lived in Asia for quite some time this is a deep cultural issue in the west. Concepts such as the German 1968 "Macht kaputt was euch kaputt macht" (break what breaks you), 'civil disobedience' but even "Sabotage" born during the industrial revolution as a workers uprising are all deeply embedded culturally. Not all of them I would like to give up, but it's hard to draw the line. 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.

mapt 1mo ago

Opsec permitting, how long ago was this? 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.

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]

RajT88 1mo ago

> EU(or US) can't have public toilets because it's gonna get vandalized. For fun. 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).

tech2 1mo ago
Historically that was always part of the bragging rights. The harder to reach, or more risky location, the higher the cred for having achieved it.

ajsnigrutin 1mo ago

It's not collectivism, it's the "no consequences" thing. "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.

oogali 1mo ago
I remember this “time” in my US classroom where we were all punished with if one person damaged classroom property (or worse, school property) but no one was willing to speak up and tell on the offender. 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.

MisterTea 1mo ago

Bathrooms aren't always closed because of vandalizing. NYC public schools lacked bathrooms and stall doors -- the various heroin epidemics saw to that. Schools closed boys bathrooms and removed stall doors to discourage drug use. 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.

alistairSH 1mo ago
That's not the norm across the US (thought it might have been for urban areas). 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.
everdrive 1mo ago
>-- the various heroin epidemics saw to that. But hey, it's walkable!

serf 1mo ago

I don't disagree with your points, but have you ever considered it strange that you're unable to relate to why someone would want to do something for fun? 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.

NalNezumi 1mo ago
I don't disagree to your points, but Asia (Japan specifically for me, since I had the opportunity to attend both school system) have vandalism and delinquent just the same as America/Europe. 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."

parineum 1mo ago

> 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. 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.

samus 1mo ago
> I think you'd find less graffiti in a rural bathroom than a large city bathroom. IMHO that's purely due to differences in population density.
- parineum 1mo ago
  I'm not sure that matters so much, a toilet can only handle so much traffic. I suspect a wal-mart bathroom sees similar traffic, regardless of location.
  - samus 1mo ago
    Wal-Mart has a direct, strong financial motivation to maintain that public bathroom: Customers that have to leave because they have to go to the toilet will buy less things.
SubmarineClub 1mo ago
Yup, drive to any town a few miles outside a city and the bathrooms will be nice and clean, drug stores won’t have everything locked up, cafes and gas stations don’t have all their bathrooms locked up with keypads. Hmmm…remind me again why I should trust ‘team blue’ with running my city?

charcircuit 1mo ago

The US has public toilets.

SirMaster 1mo ago
Yeah I don't get this, there are plentiful public toilets all over the US.