And the reason the Public Bathroom disappeared from America is because we wouldn't want any place for the homeless to feel human either.
I'm sure it would be impossible today because of security, but it was common back then.
I'm sorry, that is nonsense. Who is "we" anyway? Voters? Government? The rich and famous? C'mon.
Nobody cares about who uses a bathroom. The issue is how it is used and cared for.
Public bathrooms, regardless of the venue, tend to suffer from the tragedy of the commons [0] effect. Most people use them as they would their own bathroom at home. All you need is a very small percentage who just don't care, who are absolute pigs, to ruin them for everyone. If you have ever gone to a public restroom at a Los Angeles beach you know exactly what I am talking about. They are nothing less than disgusting and sometimes revolting. And this is so due to a small percentage of animals (1%? Who knows?) who have no concept of social responsibility and consideration towards others.
My guess is you are not aware of what happened this year at schools all over the US [1] (and maybe elsewhere). This, again, was at the hands of a very small number of kids who, for who-knows-what-reason decide it is OK to behave like animals. At our kids school a handful (3 to 5?) actually got arrested. The school had to close all bathrooms except for two. Students had to ask for permission to go and could only go one at a time. They had to post a person outside each bathroom to go inspect it after a student got done. The animals caused tens of thousands of dollars in damages and the inconvenience to well-behaved kids cannot be measured.
And then there's a sense of scale. If you own a small restaurant, you can't have 300 people come in just to use the bathroom. You are not a bathroom facility. These things cost money and upkeep and, yes, they need to be clean and available for customers. At the limit you'd have to hire multiple staff just to clean and maintain the bathrooms --because they will get trashed.
As is always the case, reality isn't driven by a single convenient variable. One has to consider the multiple (tens, hundreds...) of drivers behind any effect. It isn't single-cause -> effect. It's often incomprehensibly-complex-multivariate-problem -> effect.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=kids+trashing+school+bathroo...
I suspect a camera that either operates outside visible light (or has a filter that operates as such), or that is limited wrt what information it is able to stream out (i.e. it can run ML/CV on raw video, but can only communicate the results rather than any part of the video feed).
Could also be useful in identifying e.g. people who pass out in a toilet cubicle.
Go work a CVS in an urban environment and you'll have to deal with people nodding off with needles in their arms. These same people are highly likely to be thieves as well
Public restrooms have also historically been gay hookup spots, and spots for hookers too.
Bathrooms open to the public always attract garbage humans.
In "public" places where the only security force is the police such as side walks, that is where people defecate in the open and you are relatively unsafe from violence.
There will always be people without a place to live, and people with substance abuse disorders. We can both agree that they do exist, even if we are upset by that fact and wish it was not so.
So, what do you think a good plan would be? Turn them into soylent green? Tut tut at them when their suffering mildly inconveniences our day/their presence upsets us(the current situation)? Improve life for everyone by having good public toilets? Something else?
But i do think society should be designed to minimize where they can do drugs, and where delinquents have sex in public.
And I do not think those who own private property open to the public for commerce should be burdened with their sleep, sex and drug spots. Not their problem. It's not the problem of a small business owner that someone had trauma and then made some bad choices in life and need to mod off in their restroom or sleep in the doorway or their restaurant
I mean, let's be honest, I'm relatively certain I wouldn't want you as a guest at my home either. I still think you should have access to places to take a dump when you need to.
Sounds like you have a different attitude wrt your own, private facilities compared to the public, common ones. Maybe the difference is you don't have to clean the public toilet?
Same thought process as "if you're in favor of higher taxes [on anybody], you should give all your money to the government"
They seem to be saying "you want private companies to pay this cost? Ok, would you pay it yourself?"
Which seems entirely a fair comparison, especially for smaller/family owned restaurants
In the case of taxes, the actual premise is, "I think [set X/behavior Y/product Z] should be taxed", so generalizing it to "I think more taxes should be paid by somebody" misrepresents the premise.
In this case, the actual premise is, "I think this is something publicly-facing businesses should do", so generalizing it to "I think _every_entity_ should do this", again, misrepresents the premise.
As for the restroom access, and the inevitable consequences, is your issue with the provision of the service, or with being obliged to deal with the consequences for less than fair compensation?
This doesn't mean every space open to the public - be it public property or private commerce open to the public, needs to burden themselves with solving the problems of homelessness and drug addiction
What I replied to was the part where you then switched topics away from any of that, to an assertion that, for some unexplained reason, one of the posters here should invite strangers into their obviously-non-publicly-facing-home's bathroom. I just don't see the connection there.
Only people who have hold minimum wage jobs in the service industry know this pain.
Everyone else keeps talking about treating people like humans never having seen the ugly side.
Like, for example, the side where you walk in on these fucks shooting up and then they threaten your life on the spot and leave a mess for you to clean.
Yeah, hard to have any compassion left when you've done that day in and day out while getting paid minimum wage and then going back to shit customers at the counter.
The easiest decision, is therefore, to close your bathrooms to everyone and discriminate equally. And maybe, only let the pregnant women and truckers use them.