This really hits home. As a person with IBS I basically cannot peacefully go outside in EU. I lived for many years in China and Thailand, and toilets are free, clean, and plentiful there, and you can easily ask any place to use their toilet - there's no stigma. I even had to run into a police station in rural China once. They were 100% chill about it, though they had to unlock a gate for me.
Xi Jinping really will be remembered as the Toilet King, he did issue a few decrees early on, and now in every Tier-88 rural Chinese village road you can find a modern toilet (yes, squat), clean, with water. Paper is hit and miss still though. Cross to Hong Kong and it's the same, but paper is reliable. Hong Kong is definitely richer.
Then take any shopping mall in Bangkok, that's an absolutely next level experience, clean, smells good, relaxing music. Mmm...
And EU is a freaking horror show. In many public toilets there's a used syringe compartment as well. Truly a 5-star service.
I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them. It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that. Not the worst thing in the world, but I do find it frustrating often to not have a bathroom available nearby (small bladder)
But, while the toilets aren’t the worst sacrifice, the cumulative sacrifices made on the alter of our huge antisocial populations are profound
I assume you're talking about software engineers, because in every office I've worked in the toilets have been absolutely filthy by mid-morning.
At my current place there are boot marks on top of the toilet seat that have been there for weeks, put there by one of the 10 people in the company.
I think we can just apply the broken windows theory here. If whoever's responsible for the toilet doesn't demonstrate that they care about its state of cleanliness and repair, the people using the toilet won't care about that either.
What worries you about the boot marks specifically?
> I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them. It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that.
What a weird way of stating the problem. There is too large a population of homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts wandering the streets. We didn't surrender anything, at least not during the last half century in the United States. We did as little as possible to deal with homelessness and mental illness and discovered there's good money to be made incarcerating drug addicts.
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I was picking up some lumber today (USA) and they were blaring some country song about "Try that in a small town" which was basically a gun owner's fantasy about shooting people. One of the lines was something like "we look out for our own". And that right there describes half the USA: outsiders not welcomed. ingroup/outgroup is nothing new, and its not like any country has really fixed it, and the countries that have seemed to "figure it out" are wildly racist (Nordic countries, Japan, etc.) or authoritarian (China), but that's that underlying attitude: it an outsider's fault. And even IF you are "one of their own" and you fall off the wagon, you find yourself with a bus ticket to a Blue State sanctuary city courtesy of your local Red Leaders.
I live in a city that is a dumping ground where Red States have bussed the homeless populations -- out of sight out of mind -- and even before this, homelessness was a growing due to skyrocketing rents, medical costs, and simply falling behind the treadmill. And now gave crazy new drugs, crazy new inflation, and even more unchecked greed, there's really no stopping this so called "antisocial" behavior.
Why care about a society when it doesn't give a fuck about you>?
Then again, when I was in college in the mid-80s, Freshman year a bunch of young white engineering boys in my dorm were laughing about how they smeared shit all over the bathroom walls of a McDonalds. So, it's been going on forever, but now the scale is massive. I include "white" because a lot of people think this is a non-white, non-rich, non-christian problem.
That thing about cities bussing their homeless elsewhere seems to be a pretty common urban myth. I don't think anyone has really shown that it's definitively happening on any large scale manner. And it should be relatively easy to show given that governments publish their budgets.
It's not a myth.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
Governor Rick Perry of Texas openly bragged about bussing the state's homeless to California for years.
Abbot does the same thing; he simply doesn't brag about it anymore.
The LAT did a series of articles (back in 2018, and sporadically since then) in which Steve Lopez tried to humanize the homeless in Hollywood. It took him over 2 days to find someone who has actually a local. The vast majority of the homeless came from...Texas. They were given bus tickets by local authorities and told that California would overlook their drug issues and even give them free drugs.
The last census I saw of the Los Angeles homeless population found that the percentage of homeless people in LA that were never housed in LA was higher than either the percentage of homeless people who had a severe mental illness or substance abuse issue.
Arrogance has nothing to do with race. Those assholes had zero discipline.
That was literally my point. Take a breath.
It takes a brave person to be selfless. The golden rule is how.
Portland?
Someday! Two more choices. ;)
Yet another consequence of no longer living in a high-trust society.
In China, it has more to do with putting drug users into labor camps: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/10/25/punish-and-cure-fo...
What I want to know is if anyone can identify when exactly the homeless issue became so bad. It was already a problem when I lived in the Bay, and when I moved back to the East Coast it had been 10 years in the making (conveniently when I was away). Clearly there a some sharp lines that can be drawn somewhere. But it's hard to get some actual answers.
Edit: rough clauding indicates it was when fentanyl took off, but idk, that doesn't seem wholly accurate.
When it became unfashionable to put mentally ill people in asylums. The additional fashion of "giving local people a voice" in construction projects planning did not help either.
The problem regarding putting mentally ill people in asylums is who gets to decide who is mentally ill? I mean that's literally incarcerating people for thoughtcrime. If people have committed no crime, how can we justify taking away their freedom?
California is a garden of eden, a paradise to live in or see.. but believe it or not you won't find it so hot if you ain't got that do(ough)-re-mi.
https://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Do_Re_Mi.htm
Circa 2015 when the reformulation of meth made it more likely to induce psychosis — as the new flow chemistry version altered which isomers were made.
At least, in Seattle.
> I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them.
Or a consistent race-based or immigrant underclass caste. A lot of countries have the blessing of not having a large population whom they can dismiss the condition of based on visual cues. They just moved from feudalism to universal humanism in one generation.
Whatever bad things you can say about China or Taiwan, they both think slavery is wrong and kings are childish. Somehow the west never caught up. Still having that debate, still trying to justify why their great-grandpas killed those people. China left Mao behind; and the US is still praying to slaveholders and mocking slaves' children, while eating their inheritance.
> It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that.
The west were slavers. They literally auctioned off women to have sex with (the "fancy trade") and put children (sometimes their own) into the fields for life. When some got the morality to be disgusted by that, it resulted in bloody wars (I would even include the wars Germany really started because it lost the colony race.) Their civil society was rife with sundown towns, and in Europe actual death factories were designed to murder civilians.
The west is run by degenerates and venerates degenerates. Until it faces that properly, it will never be safe. China did that.
> the cumulative sacrifices made on the alter of our huge antisocial populations
It's "altar," and the cliché usually refers to wasted efforts to preserve something (generally an abstract ideal.) Nobody is trying to preserve "antisocial populations." They're usually trying to dispose of the old ones after using them up, and to get new ones in who still can't vote. Ironically, the "antisocial populations" are also the ones who clean the toilets.
>Whatever bad things you can say about China or Taiwan, they both think slavery is wrong and kings are childish.
I remember China being pretty racist. A lot of people visiting got a clear message. Not aggressively but quite clear.
>The west were slavers.
Who sold them the slaves? Did Europeans go hunt for slaves or did they buy them? Who did they buy them from?
Also answer this, if Americans wouldn't have bought the African slaves, all those African-Americans that are now enjoying life in the land of the free, where would they have been born today? Think if they could push a button today to wipe slavery from the past, but that meant they get to spawn back in Africa, they would push it or not? Legitimate question. Because it's not like nothing good came out of it.
Antisocial people who destroy the public facility don't just come out of nowhere. People get driven to this. Not to say that you can simply ignore them when they're already everywhere, though.
People aren't driven to this, they escalate to this when there are no consequences attached to lesser antisocial behavior.
> massive population of antisocial people
'Social' isn't 'nobody annoys me'; it's empathy for, caring about, and helping others, especially those you don't like - otherwise it means nothing.
I'm in the West, and I support liberty - the defining feature of the West - uber alles; it's their right. I'm not threatening others' freedom so you can feel more at ease. (You are more of a problem for them - they can't have you locked up.)
There has to be a line draw somewhere. Generally people who say this don't actually have regular interactions with aggressive, hostile, homeless. Or are you just really cool with going to a coffee shop and have someone screaming in a pile of their own feces 20 or so feet away?
Living in Seattle, people focus a lot on the homeless because it's an obvious problem. The guy screaming at the corner, or the people sleeping on the sidewalk.
But I personally think people miss that its a symptom of greater social rot. I've had more issues with antisocial car drivers than any homeless individual. People screaming profanities because I'm crossing the street with the walk signal active, people narrowly missing me as they speed to work. Just yesterday my entire block lost power because a drunk asshole tboned another car going 75mph, killing a family of four while nearly shearing a utility pole.
The reality is that even if the line is drawn with the homeless the undercurrent of social rot is still there and it's not getting better. And I don't see people calling for car drivers to be institutionalized, quite the opposite in most cases even when they commit homicide.
The problem is that once you draw "the line", then what? Warehouse a bunch of helpless people in overcrowded prisons? Bus them to some other less-draconian municipality? Forcibly drug them into quasi-submission and then turn them loose again until the depot injection wears off? Or perhaps we should "just kill 'em", as Fox & Friends cohost Brian Kilmeade once suggested?
If they are committing crimes, they should be imprisoned for an appropriate period of time as a deterrent to crime, a punishment for their actions, and to facilitate rehabilitation (even though evidence shows this doesn't really happen).
If they are mentally ill and unable to care for themselves or pose a threat to the community because of their mental illness, they should be institutionalized and treated. If they are able to be released into the community after a period of time, checks should be performed to ensure compliance with treatment/medication.
I think you need to fix the cause not treat the symptom. I mean you should treat the symptoms as well, while fixing the cause of the issue.
Atm it seems everyone is trying to figure out how to treat the symptom, and they don't even know why, and they keep completely quiet about the cause of it all. Completely and utter mystery, or framed vague and unfixable enough that they do not have to really address it.
What the Swiss did back in the 80's with the heroin program...that's misinterpreted by US and they're specifically trying to mess it up in application. The Swiss didn't just give lab grade heroin to junkies, they ran a serious mental care and social reintegration program and used the heroin as basically bait. You had access to it but you had to go to their facilities where specialized people could start working with you.
What the US is doing is a mockery of that, they want it to fail so they can say it's not working and they shouldn't even try it in the future.
And I think it's quite clear to basically anyone with two neurons what the cause of it is, but authorities there are going to pretend they do not understand it. That it's some mystical unexplainable cause.
If they're doing lots of vandalism then yes put them in prisons. Get rid of 90% of drug charges to make room.
You get a much better score if the imprisonment is trying to rehab them, of course.
Forced rehab if needed and then somewhere they can work to pay their way, learn the skills to help themselves. There's a ton of manual labor that needs doing, potholes to be fixed.
Oh, so forced labour then?
If someone’s forcing society to pay for their living expenses, it only seems fair for society to force them to labor to cover the expenses.
I’m sure the next objection will be “what, so you’re going to concentrate them in some kind of camp?” Yes because that’s the smart thing to do with a large scale problem. Use scalable solutions.
Sorry, I don't have empathy when my own kids trash something.
Stranger unrelated to me? #YaGottaBeKidding
By definition, destroying public utilities is antisocial. Antisocial behavior is a huge problem in the US.
"EU" is too broad of a term to describe cultural/social/political norms such as public toilets. There are places in the EU with fairly decent toilets, and others with almost none. In some you have to pay in many public toilets, in others they are free. The best bet in most places are public buildings such as libraries. And very often cafes etc allow you use a toilet, esp if you have health reasons and ask them nicely, though ymmv. The biggest issue as others said is vandalism, so in (richer) countries where public toilets are cleaned more often the toilets are much better.
What's wrong about syringe disposal? A significant portion of population has diabetes. And even if a drug addict uses it, still better than throwing to the trash, similar to how cigarette disposals are mandatory in typical airplanes.
Some measures that mitigate a problem are associated with places where said problem is a frequent occurrence.
If a place has tornado drills and tornado shelters, it's a safe bet that tornados are at least somewhat likely.
Some safety and security measures have the effect of making a place feel unsafe and insecure, for this reason.
> What's wrong about syringe disposal? A significant portion of population has diabetes.
Ask yourself if that's truly what motivated those being installed...
> And even if a drug addict uses it, still better than throwing to the trash
The problem is they still throw their needles all over the ground. As is typical, the intentions are noble, but what ends up happening is people who can't even be bothered to not shoot up their gutter heroin in public are given society's tacit approval to do what they're doing, thus accelerating the societal rot.
I looked into this a while back (~6 years ago) and it basically broke down like this: diabetics outnumber injectable drug users two to one but not all diabetics use injectable insulin and the ones that do are more likely to do so at home. Drug users, however, have less compunction about sticking themselves in a public space, particular the homeless. Best guess based on these numbers is that it's a 50-50 split between these populations as to who's using public sharps containers.
> society's tacit approval to do what they're doing, thus accelerating the societal rot.
This argument could be made about providing drugs themselves but fails under the faintest scrutiny for sharps containers because said containers have wide uses beyond shooting up heroin.
Homeless heroin addicts who inject themselves in public are not uniformly distributed. Thus while in some places you would expect some such injectable drug use in a public toilet (though I doubt most would bother to go find a toilet for that anyway), that is unlikely for the majority of toilets in a country that contain syringe disposers. On the other hand, one would expect that diabetics who inject insulin would be closer to be uniformly distributed (conditional to the population distribution).
If one could find syringe disposers only in areas where public heroin use commonly takes place that would be believable, but it is not the case.
In contrast, there are actual, real programs and places in many countries to manage issues arising with syringe use, trying to reduce syringe sharing to reduce blood-transmissible diseases etc.
> not all diabetics use injectable insulin and the ones that do are more likely to do so at home.
I'd love to hear the citation for this one, as people using injectable insulin generally need to do in conjunction with eating, and I can't think of where you'd get the idea that T1 diabetics who use injectable insulin avoid eating outside the home as a general rule.
Granted, nowadays plenty of people are using insulin pumps which decimates disposable syringe use, but I'm really puzzled where you picked up that in-home/away-from-home impression from.
Anyone with type 1 diabetes is injecting while outside the home. Usually it's a long acting baseline insulin that you can inject at home and then a faster acting one that you inject before eating or drinking anything that's not water.
> Ask yourself if that's truly what motivated those being installed...
What motivates this infrastructure is the danger to workers if syringes are just thrown into the trash.
My dad had type one diabetes with a type A personality, and was very particular about making sure that syringes were disposed of properly. Not everyone is this careful, and they put others at risk.
> The problem is they still throw their needles all over the ground
But it's better if at least some of them are in the trash and not scattered around, isn't it? I may be wrong but it seems to me that public opinion doesn't matter to these people anyway, so there's no point in getting rid of such garbage bins
Nobody's choosing to use heroin because it's slightly easier to not litter needles. The tiny harm reduction measure is good.
oook, so if according to your message, the disposals are mostly used by diabetics, then again, what's wrong with them?
They weren't saying there is anything wrong with the syringe disposal per se, but instead that it's indicative of the people who use those facilities and the priorities of the authorities that manage them.
It is observed that you have junkies shooting up in bathrooms, evidenced by needles strewn on the ground. So the solution from the authorities is to install syringe disposal containers.
> So the solution from the authorities is to install syringe disposal containers.
Given the cost vs the benefits, why not? A box mounted to a wall is a pittance.
Feel free to elaborate your plan for the junkies that would be cost effective, practical and ethical.
It's like how immigrants are treated in the US. There's nothing wrong with them. They're in fact very beneficial. But since half of the dominant political ideology in the region cannot exist without a boogeyman, they get attacked anyway because they make a convenient boogeyman.
> China
> toilets are... clean
Okay I'm going to have to say that this _really_ depends on where you are. Sometimes, yes, especially newer buildings, but man I have seen some horrors there in the past few years when it comes to bathrooms in terms of cleanliness and smell (the frequent smoking in a lot of bathrooms doesn't help). This is coming from someone primarily experiencing Canadian and American bathrooms, for reference, and a lot of those are pretty nasty. I think it's getting better at least...
Just to be clear though I agree generally, at least from my experience with East Asia. Hong Kong often has really good bathrooms now IMO (I feel like it improved a lot between 2018 to 2023?). Japan is also really good from my experience (fancy-ass bidets). Taiwan was fine too from my recollection.
> _really_ depends on where you are
That kinda applies to anywhere in the world. On the average, I've seen much cleaner toilets in first-tier China cities than first-tier US cities.
And much more accessible as well. Free public toilets literally everywhere. All over the city, in every shopping center, in every coffee shop. And you don't need to buy a coffee and trash it to use them.
> I've seen much cleaner toilets in first-tier China cities than first-tier US cities.
That definitely tracks. LA has a massive unhoused person issue, many of whom with severe mental disorders. You feel a lot that in the commons, especially as you get near DTLA. New York is shabby and dirty in general. More so than a big city usually is. And it's not really a charming shabbiness from an extreme subtropical climate as you get in Taiwan.
The relationship China has with its tier 1 cities is more similar to other Asian countries, like Japan and Korea, than it is to the US.
The worst toilet I ever saw was in China, but at 5000 meters in Sichuan, it was two slippery two by fours that you had to straddle on over a big open pit (don't slip or lose balance!).
That was such an awesome trip circa 2005.
Well the worst one I ever saw was in New York City, of all places.
My favorite was a place in Chinatown with a curtain for privacy. Outside a couple of guys where killing a seemingly limitless collection of lives chickens.
Yeah I have IBS too. In Iceland once I ran into a gas station to use the toilet. The idiot owner tried to charge me about USD 3 as I came out. I just said I'll fill up gas and be a customer and he backed off. I filled about $0.10 of gas and left.
> I lived for many years in China and Thailand, and toilets are free, clean, and plentiful there
I don't know about China but this was the opposite of my experience in Thailand. The majority of public toilets I encountered had an attendant you had to pay for access. Shopping malls / hotels / other places were you were already paying to be there were the exception of course.
In every part of Thailand I've been to outside BKK, there's a gas station almost every few kilometers on every major road. Almost every gas station has a public restroom that's open 24/7, unattended. The ones that don't have a public restroom are typically right next to a string of restaurants that have a restroom you can use during the day for free if you ask.
I am ok with paying for public toilets if they are being kept clean.
In Japan, I've seen attendants looking for some payment to use bathrooms in hotels.
Where? 11 years living in Japan and I've never seen this once, and never heard it from friends or family.
It was in Tokyo. Couldn't tell you the specific hotel. But it had our event coordinator livid and she simply ignored them.
> As a person with IBS I basically cannot peacefully go outside in EU.
Try Poland. Basically every restaurant needs to have a toilet and every one of those must be made available to passers by, not just customers. They are clean and plentiful.
Weird. When I was living in Beijing, I made a mental map of all my bathroom choices when I wasn't at a luxury shopping mall, because they just weren't that convenient and available. This includes squats, which I included since sit down toilets were often hogged by some guy on the phone doing a long smoking session (squats never were, which is great when you absolutely need to go!).
But this was in the time when Xi had just taken office, so it is probably better now. I didn't see any issues on my trip to Chengdu this summer. I have a lot bigger problems in downtown Seattle today, which is just really bad (either the toilets don't exist, or there is some homeless guy doing drugs in the only stall they have). Sigh.
Yes it sucks. Much worse in Central America than Asia, apparently (many places will let you use the bathroom but they aren't very clean and many lack toilet paper or soap). Most of (non-EU, anyway) Europe is more kind about using facilities than the USA (when the businesses that have them are open, anyway).
There are apps and websites to find restrooms but the free restroom in America is indeed dying. Experiments with things like self-sanitizing enclosed all-inclusive pay toilet stations in outdoor areas in large cities in America almost all ended in them being carted away, broken, since people just seem to break them (for fun or sport, who knows). I guess people expected more for their quarter or fifty cents or a dollar than just emergency facility usage. Pity.
> Then take any shopping mall in Bangkok
That is an extremely small subset of Thailand. I wouldn’t surprised if high end malls in any western capital city also had good toilets.
Most toilets outside of malls in Thailand were bring your own soap and toilet paper and covered in water from the bum guns.