The right way to solve the problem is not to harden the gatekeeping, but to improve society so that gatekeeping becomes unnecessary. But that’s hard, and has no obvious point where someone can extract money.
I understand the sentiment but I ultimately find such a stance unhelpful and counterproductive because it is essentially saying the problems we face would go away if we only just created a utopia. Like, what's stopping us?
Trying to create better public restrooms with a new system seems far more achievable than implementing a new socioeconomic system where no one feels like trashing public bathrooms and common areas.
Apartheid regimes or extreme poverty lead to gated compounds for the rich with depressing predictability.
Toilets that exclude the poor are great for ensuring the rich have access to nice private toilets. Doesn't help those who can't afford the subscription fee.
The problem is that people are using these labels for countries like America, which clearly do not have Apartheid or extreme poverty. When one is so extreme in their beliefs and hyperbole, they are effectively asking for total social restructure. Ignoring the fact that such unhinged people should be nowhere near any such responsibility, the user above is correct: this will never happen. While these extremists wait for the glorious revolution, people in need today are missing out on good but not perfect solutions.
I don't think leaving toilets in a usable state after using them has anything to do with being rich or poor. It's not something that requires money.
Will any of these work? I don’t know. But this is the way. Not stricter and stricter gatekeeping.
People who have nothing have no reason to care what others think; but people who have everything, and who never experience consequences for what they do, can be just as detached.
Also, if you think about it, this service is fundamentally not meant to serve (or rather, avoid serving) the sorts of people you're picturing. These washrooms likely aren't intended to be placed in low-economic-class areas of cities. Homeless/drug addicts/etc aren't the problem they're intending to filter out. (Why not? Because those groups of people are used to being cronically un-bathroomed, and so have become inured to just finding a corner outside to do their business. See: San Francisco. When things like open port-a-potties are placed in these areas, the homeless ignore those and continue to do what they do.)
Instead, I imagine that these bathrooms would be placed in generally bougie areas – the article cited public parks, but I imagine a major case would be "near food trucks in business districts." And the group they're trying to restrict access to, are "rich assholes who think society exists to serve them, and they owe nothing back."
Consider, after all, the premise: you scan a QR code on your smartphone in order to get access. Who even has a smartphone with an active data plan? Not homeless people. This service is designed to serve exactly the same target audience as e.g. e-bikes/e-scooter rental services.
You might be surprised.
Alternatively flip it around and the toilet scans your QR - this could even be a bit of paper. Ultra low tech.
I'm good with that. It seems easier, and more important, it would work, and you're just singing Kumbaya.
The very fact that we don’t all live in filth now, means that you have to pay a high premium to get someone to choose to be the person whose job constantly exposes them to it.
See also: the profitability of electronics recycling (i.e. picking through piles of scrap for base metal to melt) in the developing vs. developed world. When people live in areas with mounds of trash piled all around them, they’ll dig through that trash for Pennie’s, because they already do thing like shoveling it out of the way every day. When people live in a nice house in a clean city, though, you’ll have to pay them a lot more to touch a scrap heap.
(Or, to put that another way: it’s “but I might get tetanus!” vs. “My base risk of getting tetanus is so high that this job won’t increase my risk by much in relative terms… so sure, why not.”)
Does SF have only a few dozen "poop disasters" a day? The language in this thread suggests the number is higher and the nature is worse than your language would imply, but I wouldn't know as I've only been a tourist there.
Even if "lots" was enough, how much did you earn doing that job? I don't know American politics beyond Team Red vs. Team Blue, are American cities willing to pay for enough cleaners?
If a law is too expensive to enforce justly, maybe we need to reconsider that law.
The only thing stopping it in first world countries is an aversion of democratic oversight of corporations.
i’ve seen some public bathrooms are so mistreated that i don’t know how you pay anyone to clean them. i’d certainly feel awful asking a janitor to clean them without a hazmat suit, a pressure washer and a bag full of tergazyme.
If the problem of where everyone can go is hard, why not at least try to solve the problem of where people willing to pay a lot can go? Lots of empty storefronts in downtown SF right now. $5 or even $10 a go could be cheaper and quicker than buying something I didn’t really want in some restaurant just so I can use their restroom.
Relying on our schools will educate us out of the problem won’t work. We have too many narcissists and sociopaths in our society, and we spend too much time catering to and rewarding them.
300% public shaming. Japan is an example of this working, to an unbelievably ideal extent even.
Public restrooms in Japan are *clean*, they are spotless and sanitary no matter what time of day you visit one. You can probably eat off of those toilet seats, for all I know.
The reason for this is because individuals who do not clean up after themselves in public spaces are shamed and ridiculed by Japanese society at large with no holds barred. It's "just not how upstanding members of society operate" to make a mess, be it in a public restroom or anywhere else, in Japan.
You might see Japanese people picking up trash and cleaning up after themselves when leaving a public venue like a stadium or theater, probably other peoples' refuse too while they are at it. Frankly bewildering acts from the perspective of most westerners, but it's literally that sort of social attitude to be upstanding individuals that leads to clean public restrooms.
Not being from Japan, I’m curious: how does this work in practice? If I were to go into a bathroom in Japan and smear my own shit all over the walls and leave, 1. how does anyone know I did it, 2. if somehow someone actually knew I did it, how exactly would I be shamed and ridiculed, and 3. how would that negatively affect me if I didn’t care about shame or was incapable of feeling shame.
Japanese are raised from the very beginning to be ashamed of making a mess and not cleaning up, to be ashamed of being irresponsible. Everyone is taught that "the Sun is watching you", that someone (or something!) somewhere is always watching you and judging you for your actions.
A westerner might shit up a public restroom, intentionally or otherwise, and say to himself "I don't care; cleaning this up is the janitor's job."
A Japanese person won't even dare, because they are taught to clean up regardless of a janitor.
It is a common tradition and mandate in Japanese schools for students to clean their classrooms (and every-so-often even restrooms!) themselves at the end of the school day. Yes, the schools have janitors, the students are told to clean up themselves anyway because that's just how good people behave.
This is all a facet of education and parenting, and the result of generations and millenia of such teachings. Their thought processes are fundamentally different from the west: A better society starts by being better individuals themselves first.
Public restrooms in the west being an absolute shit show (pun intended) are a reflection of failed education and parenting in western society. The west can, and should, do better.
Great, but this contradicts your other post that seemed to be claiming that bathroom shaming specifically was the solution the bathroom problem, which the parent was rightly incredulous of as how it actually works in Japan.
This also works for obesity, and I've seen it in action in many nations apart from just Japan. Social pressure works. We've known it works for millennia. I'm not sure why we suddenly started believing that social pressure to not litter and eat less was ineffective and even immoral.
Ultimately the difference is that American society is one in which individualism is prized over all. The greatest evils are those that would in any way infringe on something that could be considered a personal liberty. And it’s only gotten worse in the last 50 years. I can’t imagine modern American society rising to meet any major challenge of the last 100 years the way we have in the past.
You can suppress it though. Public shaming, forced fines, get violent with them... All these things work to certain degree and will get you through the day. But again - you're not solving the problem, you're just suppressing. Stupidity is ultimately unsolvable, because nature; and that is why all those utopic dreams always fail with impressive death counts.
I am glad to see a company trying to do something about this issue. I'm not thrilled with their solution but even if they fail, perhaps it at least gets people to stop accepting that nothing can be done about it.
This is pure fantasy. Society will always need prisons. Sure, there is much that society can and ought to do in order to reduce what may be judged as tragic or unnecessary incarcerations, but the incarceration rate will never be literally zero. Having prisons doesn't make society a "dictatorship".
Not every society has needed prisons, especially smaller, tribal ones. Maybe our complex, global one currently does but I don't think it is a hard requirement.
Prisons are an improvement over that.
Hell, I've seen a university professor walk out of a public bathroom without washing his hands after taking a shit.
To be completely blunt people are fucking animals and many of them do these kinds of disgusting things in private bathrooms because they can do it with impunity. They don't care about other people and they revel in knowing that their disgusting behaviour is detrimental to the rest of us.
Suggesting that we need to raise society up to some post-scarcity Star Trek utopia where all people are paragons of humanity before we can have clean public bathrooms is absurd.
If the offenders thought that the locals might punish them, they would behave better.
Retributive justice is not really effective when the offender’s world view internally justifies their actions.
It’s a common theme that criminals are victims of circumstance to such a degree that the enforcing entity is seen as another arm of the system that caused their criminal behavior in the first place.
Imagine being in a car crash, having difficult pains, getting prescribed oxy- or hydrocodone, and after the script runs out, asking for a refill gets you a stamped as a drug seeker, never to receive another prescription ever again.
But the pain and the withdrawals are still there. This has created an incredible numbed of convicted criminals and homeless people. A Venn diagram of these two populations overlaps with people who spend nights in public toilets.
This is just denying the offenders all agency. If they literally cannot help but commit crime, the response from the society should then be to lock them up, as unfit to live in the society.
I do not in fact believe that to be the case. Criminals have agency, and, as can be readily observed, respond to incentives too.
Some people are influenced by propaganda and the historical connotations associated with the word "dictatorship."
There's nothing inherently bad about the word, it's just the association. If you look at dictatorships objectively there are many successful examples. Here are a few modern ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictatorship
That's just a couple. Your first reaction would be to say that the examples represent a minority. The problem is, though, if you look at ancient history, the most successful civilizations that prospered and succeeded were basically all empires with central rule. It shows that if you were intellectually unbiased, you would not simply dismiss "dictatorship" in a single sentence.
Democracy is a recent phenomenon when viewed in terms of human history and, if anything, still experimental (there are many examples of complete failures of democratic governments).
That being said, to swing it around to your statement. There is no definitive "right" way to solve a problem. Gatekeeping could work, and it could fail. Simply "improving society" can also lead to complete and utter failure. The inputs and various factors influencing the outcomes are so complex we cannot point to one way that works.
So I say give gatekeeping a try. It's not like the government is doing this either... It's a business.
It’s been tried. Many times. Throughout human history. It is littered with stratified societies, where every man had his lessers and betters to kick and cower before, respectively. This did not lead to any good outcomes. I say let equality and mutual respect have a chance.
I'm saying try it with restrooms. Because this hasn't been tried yet at all.
It's of course ideal when everyone is so nice and civilized that you don't need to lock your door. The problem is that such a society is a great hunting ground for a rare breaker, because it does not have a mechanism to resist breaking the rules. Such a breaker can inflict disproportionate damage and ruin things for everyone.
Improving mores and living conditions should go hand in hand with protecting these improved mores and conditions from those who try to push the society back to the savage state for a minor benefit for themselves.
There will always be a small amount of people who don’t obey the social niceties. Some are psychopaths, or have some other mental problems. Some may have extenuating circumstances. But I believe that society can be improved such that these people are rare and far between, and society can invest in picking up the remaining slack.
> Improving mores and living conditions should go hand in hand with protecting these improved mores and conditions from those who try to push the society back to the savage state for a minor benefit for themselves.
Sounds great, except whenever such things are actually implemented, it tends to be a lot of steadily increasing punishment; any improvements, whatever they were initially, will eventually be cut from the budget since they do not give immediate visible results, whereas harsh punishment get great ratings. People love a good public flogging.
This is a problem perpetuating itself. People don’t believe in the public spirit and goodwill of others, so they don’t want to invest in actually improving it, since they think it can’t be done. And so it goes.