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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   38791 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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Counterpoint: it is becoming more common for grocery stores & gas stations to lock their bathrooms. This is a downscaling of trust.

Maybe retail is more accepting to take money from anyone regardless of appearance. But the real trust is if they'll let you take a shit like a civilized person.

Yeah, as someone who commutes via public transit and who walks a lot, the lack of publicly-available toilets is a massive hindrance to my life, and is nearly entirely a result of the fact that homeless people cannot be trusted not to make those bathrooms filthy, or not to use them to shoot up drugs or clean themselves. When I visited Japan, I was blown away by the number of publicly-available toilets - surely a sign of the high trust level of the society. (As well as the generally small number of homeless people in that country.)

Counter-counter point: free tap water everywhere, and at least our toilets support flushing toilet paper (looking at you, Mexico)

Comparing yourself with a third world country is not the W you think it is.

In Basel, I remember when the downtown public restrooms got considerably upgraded! Automatic doors, light soundproofing, self-cleaning toilets, etc.

Not sure where they stand today, but I think this initiative would be completely wasted in most major US cities. I'm sure there were still junkies shooting up in them, but that activity was often traceless.

Public toilets in Switzerland, certainly in the big cities, are infamously drug injection/use sites, especially in Basel and Zurich. Occasionally they make an effort to clean them up, but I’m skeptical it lasts long.

Oh yeah. I remember the needle bins in the public parks, and the permissive attitudes regarding the use sites. And yet, somehow I never encountered somebody shitting in the streets, passed out on a bench, or going schizo at a random passer-by. The mentality seemed to be "Fine, you can do those things. The moment this starts getting ugly or impinge on anybody else, you will get hauled off. Keep it invisible." I saw more social dysfunction from imported Turks and Albanians than from the junkies.

Not sure how well this model has survived. My experience was about 20 years ago. But I had the sense that this only possible as a result of 'Swiss Culture', if that's not too vague. Being a smaller country also helps. It seemed to work well enough for them, but if anybody pitched the idea needle bins in the nearby parks around me here in the US, I'd tell them they're crazy.

Yes, this has been a pretty big annoyance when taking children into city downtown areas, especially. It isn't trivially easy to locate, then walk to, then order at a coffee shop or something, then get and remember the code in time.

Last time I was in Japan I was using a public restroom in a park in an apparently rough part of Yokohama. The soap was a bottle on the counter with a handwritten note "please don't steal the soap" (in Japanese ofc).

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