Starbucks may close its bathrooms to the public again
cnn.com
cnn.com
We can't have nice things because not enough of us are nice people. In places like Japan, where people are fundamentally more well-behaved, they can have nice things. I dare someone to ask why Japan doesn't have a problem with violent, drug-addicted, vagrants.
It's like how killer whales share their sense of self with others in the pod.
Japanese prisons are inhumane by American standards, but cheap and very effective. They don't allow prisoners to interact or form a prison culture, so they don't function as criminal training centers. Consequently, crime rates in Japan are among the lowest in the world, despite declining economic conditions and dense populations.
> When and how to speak. Strict silence is observed the majority of the time. During leisure times, talking should be done in a low voice so as not to disturb others. Utmost respect must be used when addressing guards or punishments will follow.
1. https://gaijinass.com/2017/03/30/brutal-realities-of-prison-...
Japan isn’t the only country with a brutal criminal justice system. Many of the other examples have high crime.
Extremely.
There is a reason they have the highest conviction rate in the world.
It’s not justice.
It’s the social expectation that the law officers are correct, no matter what.
If you are charged, you are guilty, as you cannot bring shame to the police.
No need to pretend they are just or proper.
Not just that, I think.
What's true of Japan is also true of parts of Western Europe.
>If someone is peeing on the street, they think oh how this makes my country look. In SF someone peeing in the street thinks aaah so much relief.
In France, public urination is viewed as an unofficial human right[0], but I don't think you'd have SF's problems in Paris.
It's just more "civilized" societies (with better education, law enforcement, social safety nets, regional investment, etc.).
The U.S. is a step towards Pandora from Borderlands (in scale, material social investment, and cultural ethos).
0: https://www.npr.org/2018/09/11/646567224/paris-tries-to-cont...
They still have a homeless problem, it's just without exacerbating factors.
As for property crime, no one wants to live in a society where someone can steal your stuff with impunity, as the broadly supported recent recall of the DA in SF has clearly shown.
Not prosecuting property crimes has to be the biggest what the hell did they think was going to happen I have ever seen. Impunity is a slippery slope.
Maybe you know different people than I do but I don't think that line of thought is as common as you think.
You know there's countries out there which aren't trapped in endless recividism cycles and enormous organized crime recruitment in the penal system right?
There’s an enormous amount of abuse in homeless encampments and on the streets. Shutting down psych hospitals didn’t reduce the abuse, it just moved it from a system we’re responsible for and could improve, to an un-system we can ignore and can’t improve. IMO, shuttering the wards was cruel.
We can desire a better world than these two opposite poles.
I don't disagree, but if you ask me which of these two evils I would prefer, I would always pick the peaceful one.
> people die in quiet desperation
To me this seems a much more dignified way to die than in a fit of mad violence, trying to take what isn't yours.
And likewise: everybody wants dignity. But I don’t see anything particularly dignified in suicides of shame or abandonment.
The whole problem here is that this isn't true. Some significant majority of us do. But there is enough of a minority who are content with violence and chaos as to totally destroy peace and order if they are left unchecked. This is true basically any place criminality is studied. The only remaining question is how do we deal with this minority?
As someone without aggressive inclinations, I'm don't have sympathy or regard for those who display them. As a matter of primacy, I would like to live in a peaceful society. Anyone who violates this basic social contract has lost their humanity in my eyes. I would not object to their summary execution (in cases of absolute certainty of guilt), much as dangerous animals are routinely euthanized.
The maintenance of civilized order, and resolution of conflict via due process, are the only things distinguishing people from animals. This isn't remotely comparable to making the trains run on time.
> I don’t see anything particularly dignified in suicides of shame or abandonment.
To me there is nothing more dignified than being unwilling to impose yourself on others. If no one wants to help you, and you cannot continue on your own, then taking your own life is the only dignified course, given the alternatives.
Then you would’ve euthanized nearly all of Japan circa WWII, since their widely popular militaristic regime committed countless atrocities across Asia/Pacific and shattered peaceful society for millions around the world.
> people you deem unworthy
I'm not deeming anyone "unworthy". I'm just pointing out that humans who act literally like dangerous animals should be treated as such. To me, humanity is a mode of behaviour, not an irrevocable trait.
I eagerly await your application of the same logic to tailpipe emissions.
Aggression and violence are clearly very different things. If they weren't, self-defence would not be a justification for anything. Ignoring this clear and sharp distinction does nothing to help you either.
Why should humans who behave indistinguishably from dangerous wild animals be treated any differently?
Is immediate and severe escalation of violence in response to aggression ineffective?
> primary danger being to themselves
The secondary danger posed to innocent people, as well as the knock-on effects of normalizing minor property crime (colloquially "we can't have nice things") and the erosion of the innate trust in strangers that more civilized places tend to have, don't seem worth feeling good about how empathetic and virtuous you are.
Because they aren't dangerous wild animals, while dangerous wild animals are. In humans dangerous wild behaviour is a (hopefully, and ususally) more or less temporary and fixable aberration, while in many kinds of animals it's the immutable default.
That difference shouldn't be too difficult to grasp, or is it?
> Is immediate and severe escalation of violence in response to aggression ineffective?
Not at fixing the immediate danger, but yes, as a means of maintaining a human(e) society it seems rather ineffective.
The humans in question are dangerous, they're not civilized (so they're wild), and they're animals, so yes, they are.
> In humans dangerous wild behaviour is a (hopefully, and ususally) more or less temporary and fixable aberration
This isn't substantiated by research. Quite the opposite actually, psychologists have found that no intervention is effective in modifying violent antisocial behaviour in young males (and it's almost entirely young males). The only solution seems to be incarceration until around the age of 30, at which point most people simply age out of these behaviour patterns.
Also, there are many dangerous animals that can be rehabilitated, pet dogs for instance. It doesn't stop us from mandating they be put down.
> as a means of maintaining a human(e) society it seems rather ineffective.
I'm asserting it's effective at maintaining peace and order. I'm also asserting that the fact of peace and order is more important than the treatment of those who violate it.
And I could assert quite a lot about your assertions, the mindset behind them, and what kind of society that leads to.
But I can't be arsed to: No matter how many deluded authoritarians you manage to bring to their senses, or just reduce to a heap of smoking online cinders, more fresh ones just keep popping up. And I got bored with Usenet flamewars decades ago.
I am certainly not a libertarian. Having said that, here is a scenario which clarifies the difference between "aggression" and "violence", imo - someone peacefully living in their home, when someone breaks in for a burglary. At that point, if the homeowner shoots and kills the burglar, that behavior is non-aggressive, violent and justified in my opinion.
So yes, definitely not hairsplitting and nothing to do with liberatarianism.
Sad that you're so quick to chock up issues in the USA to "not enough of us are nice people" when there are huge material differences between the USA and every other developed nation.
This can't be the whole story because a "mentally ill drug addict" is still the same person even if they buy something for $1 and become a customer.
An old homeless man wandered in, wearing filthy clothing but brand new white sneakers that someone had presumably donated. Speaking loudly to himself about something. Fished around in his jacket for a while and produced some kind of gift card, and ordered a coffee. Then walked to the corner of the store and took a piss on the floor.
An unsolvable problem for the most “progressive” state in the richest country in the world, apparently.
This is as much about tax policy and wealth inequality.
Many Californians acknowledge that there needs to be more housing built, but many of them are also NIMBYs who don't want multi-family housing built in their areas, because it'd lower their personal property value if there was more housing available.
I've seen handful of YouTube videos interviewing homeless people that were pushed out due to high prices and none of them seem the drug-addict pee-on-the-starbucks-floor type. I've seen videos about homeless camps that self-regulate drug free zones for non-addicts.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NXJAYUwlC8 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9abrZwnPThE
Definitely a sad situation, but functional people seem to try to continue to be functional.
Hard worker being evicted for rent and resorting to drug use sounds like a nice narrative, but it feels fictional. Do you have any sources on people being evicted b/c of rent issues and becoming insane?
It takes a good number of years on the street to transition to that stage.
>Hard worker being evicted for rent and resorting to drug use sounds like a nice narrative, but it feels fictional.
Probably because there's an unholy amount of wealth and power pushing the narrative that the correlation flows the other way.
A housing first approach to homelessness would depress property prices. Nobody owning a major media outlet wants that and they can shape what "feels real".
Do you have a source for this?
> A housing first approach to homelessness would depress property prices.
No amount of housing will cure drug addictions or mental health problems.
But the main part of problems -- for others, if not the drug addicts themselves -- caused by drug addiction are not direct but indirect: Crime (to get money for drugs) and "general nuisance" behaviour like peeing on the floor at Starbucks.
More "liberal" drug policies (like, e.g, Portugal's?) would go a long way towards fixing the former; providing housing for the homeless would go a long way towards fixing the latter. Sure, it's "fixing the symptoms, not the disease" -- but since the "symptoms" seem to be a large (the largest?) part of the problem (it's them the OP article is about, and what we seem to dicussing here), fixing them kind of is fixing "the problem".
There's no constitutional prohibition, though, to offering druggies "drug camp", located somewhere in Outer Nowhere, where they get all the drugs they want.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tokyo+homeless&hps=1&iax=images&ia...
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Wish we as a society could meaningfully discuss these sorts of issues, our inability to tackle reality hurts everyone
Most people are "honest and law-abiding", but you have a few rogues, either civilians or in government, etc., who spoil it for the masses of well behaved people?
My country has rogues. But I’ve also got my wallet back every time I ever lost it. It leaves an impression. It builds the culture’s brand in a positive way.
I couldn’t really imagine to not have access to bathrooms, it’s such a critical thing.
In most places where I live (San Francisco) it's easy to get access to the bathroom for free if you don't look like you're about to do heroin.
I stopped off to buy gas during a drive a couple weeks ago and the gas station didn't have a customer-accessible restroom, neither did the Subway across the street, or the Dominoes next to it, or the grocery store next to that.
I guess not wanting to sterilize the bathroom surfaces hourly served as a good excuse to not make them available, and they're in no hurry to reverse it.
Of course not. Unions aren't for the corporation, they're for the masses being screwed by the corporations.
https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_e596a4452e66f1c24519e7badb...
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/starbucks-ceo-says-pub...
"The new policy for Starbucks’ 8,000 company-owned US stores comes in the aftermath of an explosive incident last month in Philadelphia, in which two black men were asked to leave a store after using the restroom without making a purchase, and were arrested for trespassing after they refused. The episode triggered protests as well as apologies from Starbucks officials and the Philadelphia police, and led the company to schedule a day of racial-bias training on May 29."
It appears to me that Starbucks openly acknowledged they had a problem. Before this point, there was no official policy so it was up to individual Starbucks employees to decide whether you looked "too shady" to be allowed into the restroom, so the permissive policy was an improvement. Changing from that to an explicitly not permissive policy is also an improvement over how things were before, because now it's clear instead of subjective and down to individual employee biases. Clear policies are good that way!
> the public is turning against San Francisco's Chelsea Boudin and others who tried to be permissive with the homeless.
Chesa Boudin's recall was not meaningfully any representation of a shift in public opinion. He won his office originally with a small portion of the vote due to the ranked choice voting used for the office, and the recall was a yes/no. It was inevitable that once a well-funded recall campaign ran, he would struggle to get over 50% 'yes' votes when he failed to get 50% in his original election. In general, it is very easy to recall politicians in California, and the campaign to remove him was funded to the tune of over $7M usd - way way more than every other measure on the ballot put together. In practice the people who voted for him before voted for him again, and the people who didn't vote for him before didn't vote for him again.
In the end, nothing is likely to change, since SF's problems are not something an AG can solve by themselves. The police were actively refusing to arrest known criminals even when his office asked them to.
Within two months of Starbucks' big attention-grabbing press release about public bathrooms and charging points, the Starbucks where I lived installed keypad locks on the restrooms and bolted metal covers over all of the power outlets.
Recently, the Starbuckses where I live have removed all of the seating, and now refuse to give water to homeless people.
Starbucks' increasing hostility toward human beings is the reason I no longer go there for myself. Only when I'm picking up something for my wife.
There are even Starbucks locations now that are drive-through only, with the sidewalk-facing side just a door for the employees and a lot of blacked out glass where a cafe should be. Great way to destroy a neighborhood, Starbucks!